TEACHER TENURE - keep it or lose it pre-reading activitty. The Truth About Tenure in Higher Education. Published by the Higher Education Departments of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. You may well have heard about attacks on tenure and college faculty. After all, people write books and get quoted in the press grinding this ax.
The argument is not hard to believe, either; we've all seen people in authority, private and public, who care more about protecting themselves than serving their customers. You may have memories of a teacher who didn't seem to keep up with his or her subject or care very much about his or her students. But there's a big problem with the negative polemics about tenure: They are not true. Tenure is a lifetime job guarantee. Tenure is simply a right to due process; it means that a college or university cannot fire a tenured professor without presenting evidence that the professor is incompetent or behaves unprofessionally or that an academic department needs to be closed or the school is in serious financial difficulty. A Brief History of Tenure. It's been called the holy grail of the teaching profession — academic freedom plus job security all rolled nicely into a union contract.
But to Michelle Rhee, superintendent of Washington D.C. schools, tenure just means trouble. Roughly 2.3 million public school teachers in the U.S. have tenure — a perk reserved for the noblest of professions (professors and judges also enjoy such rights). The problem with tenure, Rhee and other critics say, is that it inadvertently protects incompetent teachers from being fired.
The Teach for America alumna, who oversees some 50,000 students and 5,000 teachers, has sparked controversy in the capital by proposing a new contract allowing teachers to earn as much as $130,000 a year if they forgo their tenure rights (a teacher's salary, on average, is less than $48,000; most start out making $32,000). (Click here to read TIME's cover story on how to make better teachers). But the system also makes it extremely difficult to flunk a bad teacher. Dean of Faculty - Tenure and Promotion Guidelines. Tenure: Perspectives and Challenges (2002) By Donna R. Euben, AAUP Counsel October 2002 I. What Is Tenure, Anyway? "The exact meaning and intent of this so-called tenure policy eludes us. Its vaporous objectives, purposes, and procedures are lost in a fog of nebulous verbiage. " Worzella v. Board of Regents, 77 S.D. 447, 93 N.W.2d 411, 412 (S.D. "[T]he concept [of tenure] is the product of historical experience and long debate.
The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and other AAUP policy recommendations speak to tenure, and the Recommended Institutional Regulations (RIR) speak to the termination of tenured appointments. As Professor William Van Alstyne wrote: Tenure, accurately and unequivocally defined, lays no claim whatever to a guarantee of lifetime employment. W. According to 1998 figures from the U.S. Faculty tenure in higher education is, in its essence, a presumption of competence and continuing service that can be overcome only if specified conditions are met. Tenure is usually provided for in: II. Should teachers get tenure?