Everybody has encountered a bad teacher at least once. It makes us wonder, how does this person even stay employed? The amount of complaints they receive must warrant some kind of action, yet many of these teachers keep their jobs for years upon years. So why are teachers exempt from the same penalties as most other jobs? The answer: tenure.
After a teacher has spent their two year trial period, most get their contract extended and are hence handed tenure. This gives them almost complete immunity from losing their jobs, as no matter how many complaints a teacher gets, as long as it is not violating any laws or providing the school with “just cause”, they can almost never be fired. That means they can’t fire a teacher for simply being bad at their job. In fact, according to a study by Teachers Union Exposed, while one in every fifty seven doctors lose their license to practice, and one in every ninety seven lawyers are disbarred, only one in every thousand teachers is fired for performance related issues. This is the reason students end up with so many sub-par teachers. Even if the administration knows their poor quality, tenure protects them from being fired.
“Tenure limits our education because it allows unqualified teachers to keep their jobs,” said junior Sean Keane. This particularly affects the students having to endure these poor teachers. Aside from a schedule change, which most counselors won’t give you for simply saying you have a bad teacher, there is almost nothing a student can do to change this inevitability. That is a trimester of wasted time that could have been spent doing actual learning. Tenure not only limits how much students enjoy school, but also the actual material we are supposed to know. I myself have had many teachers who did not teach practically anything, and when the students didn’t know the answers to the test questions, they would complain about our education and how we should have been able to learn this ourselves.
This isn’t saying that all teachers are bad. Tenure was created to assist good teachers and prevent removal from a job because of teaching a potentially controversial subject. This is the upside to tenure, but I would say it is much less common a good teacher gets a complaint over their method than a bad one. These tenure laws make the many bad ones able to keep misinforming today’s youth, and the days of terrible miseducation must come to an end.
