Because school administrators may be blocked from outright banning the teaching of evolution/sex education/unpopular-but-actual history/etc, but could simply threaten/actually fire teachers until the entire staff was agreeable to their desired curriculum.
Sounds like there's some balance to be struck here. I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old, or other crap like that (and I'd agree with you). Preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher seems like an over-reaction.
> "I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old"
The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened?
What we actually see, is that people who dedicate themselves to a scientific subject (almost overwhelmingly) accept the current best conclusions of that study and teach it accordingly. And even where those scientific understandings run into non-scientific beliefs, people tend to adapt their thoughts to complement one another. (e.g. "gaps which they fill up with God")
Abject politicization only really comes from the outsiders, who decide they don't like some part of our scientifically formulated understanding of the natural world and attempt to legislate it away.
So you rarely, if ever, see the problem as a teacher refusing to teach the subject they dedicated their lives to, or choosing to do an active disservice to the students that they pledged to serve.
And equating "tenure" with "preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher" is pretty ridiculous and politicized framing. It's more difficult to fire a teacher than a contract plumber, sure. But I don't think it's ever been shown to be more difficult to fire a teacher than a union plumber.
Which makes the gripe about "inability to fire incompetence" just a reframing of the old attack on unions and union contracts -- with little or nothing to do with tenure itself.
>
The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened?
Here's a creationist chemistry teacher, talking to Dawkins.
> The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened?
Don't know, it's just one particular example. It may not happen in this case, but it can in others.
In a parallel comment, someone mentioned Communism/Socialism, and I myself mentioned Nazism in another one. If one teacher wants to teach Capitalism or Democracy, one Communism, one Nazism and one Absolute Monarchy as the one-true-system (let's say they're all History teachers), which one are you going to fire and why?
A friend of mines HS biology teacher taught creationism going so far as to physically remove any mention of evolution from the textbook. It's far more common than you might think.
Wrongful termination only applies if the employment contract, or some statute of employment law, was violated. The law has little-to-nothing to say about this topic, which is why educators fought for these protections in the first place.
And we're talking specifically about what can happen if existing protections are taken out of the employment contract.
In which hypothetical case, suing for "wrongful termination" would seem, to me, to be reduced to fishing for judicial activism.
The problem isn't rogue administrators, it's an abusive majority deciding en masse to harm/under-serve a minority.
You don't get an administrator seeking to ban the teaching of evolution without a majority of voters in the district (or at least political support) who agree with that.
So the ability for an administrator to be fired doesn't enter into it. Even if one were to go "too far", they're just going to be replaced by another who shares the same general values, but perhaps with a more tactful presentation.
On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily? Tenure doesn't help any particular agenda, such as science and evolution; rather it enables all agendas, and teachers can be just as bad as they can be good, like all people. The solution is to make teachers accountable to a curriculum and ensure that the curriculum is teaching evolution, via the courts if necessary.
> "On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily?"
Teaching creationism (as opposed to not teaching evolution) is a funny edge case that runs, pretty quickly, into the establishment clause. So it's perhaps not the best example.
But, sure, tenure protects teachers who refuse to teach evolution just as it protects those who would teach it.
And I see that as a feature as well. It's not there to further any particular ideology. That's rather the point.
And the problem with a federal curriculum as ultimate judge is that such a curriculum is ultimately a political creation. If today's legislature were voting on the NCLB act, the Santorum amendment would very likely have become law. And then we'd have biology teachers forced (via the courts if necessary) to "teach the controversy".
Yes. And then they eventually would get fired for it.
This isn't about protecting a progressive viewpoint against a conservative one. It is about protecting teachers from being forced to service Political Viewpoint X or lose their job immediately.
So teachers will also eventually get fired for teaching Evolution in a Creationist school district. Tenure doesn't seem to actually do anything other than add red tape and drag out the process. Voters, via school boards, get their say either way. Teachers just get fired in two years rather than a month. Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired?
And if you're arguing that tenure isn't about protecting radical ideas, but instead about job security regardless of political ideas, why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?
Except a Creationist school district would be a violation of Church/State separation and the trial relating to that would stop the teacher from being fired...
> Why not just mandate that all employees in all businesses can't be fired for two years after being hired?
Last time I checked 'all businesses' did not change ownership on the basis of opinion and did not require the person to speak publicly about sensitive subjects.
> why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?
Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected.
>> why should teachers have more job security than anyone else?
> Because otherwise a number of them would get fired every time someone from the opposing party gets elected.
How would that work, exactly? It seems like on so many levels a bizarre result to expect, and in the rare case where you might expect it seems like it'd be a positive thing more often than not. Or even if it wasn't, there are SO many simpler ways to prevent that outcome than giving EVERY teacher tenure.
Do you expect a republican or democratic political candidate to make firing all the English teachers or PE teachers or music teachers of the other party their first priority when elected to the (nonpartisan) office of Superintendent or to the City Council? Surely not! Does French or Math instruction come in Democrat or Republican flavors? Of course not! You're only really worried about science and history, right? Can you justify offering tenure to ALL teachers on that basis?
On the flip side, what if some teachers are objectively really terrible, a candidate runs on a platform of "I will clean up the schools by getting rid of these bad teachers!", and the candidate gets elected on that platform because the voters agree with it. Why shouldn't those teachers be gotten rid of?
> How would that work, exactly? It seems like on so many levels a bizarre result to expect, and in the rare case where you might expect it seems like it'd be a positive thing more often than not. Or even if it wasn't, there are SO many simpler ways to prevent that outcome than giving EVERY teacher tenure.
Oh? What is this great solution you have? The courts? That takes years, at which point the teacher is unemployed and may years later receive compensation. Good luck expecting that to go well.
> Do you expect a republican or democratic political candidate to make firing all the English teachers or PE teachers or music teachers of the other party their first priority when elected to the (nonpartisan) office of Superintendent or to the City Council? Surely not! Does French or Math instruction come in Democrat or Republican flavors? Of course not! You're only really worried about science and history, right? Can you justify offering tenure to ALL teachers on that basis?
My PE teacher also taught the sex ed class. My English teacher taught a book that was later banned in the School District for a number of years before being unbanned again.
Also? Only 6 of the 12 years is divided up like that.
> On the flip side, what if some teachers are objectively really terrible, a candidate runs on a platform of "I will clean up the schools by getting rid of these bad teachers!", and the candidate gets elected on that platform because the voters agree with it. Why shouldn't those teachers be gotten rid of?
Why do you create arguments that are irrelevant?
The teachers that are terrible can be gotten rid of. If you think it is too hard, then streamline the process so they can be fired in X time period. There is a huge range between "can dismiss for any reason" and "can dismiss for performance".
> Oh? What is this great solution you have? The courts? That takes years, at which point the teacher is unemployed and may years later receive compensation. Good luck expecting that to go well.
Nah, it's an institutional problem; you'd solve it with slightly different rules about how schools are run. For instance, you could give principals more autonomy over hiring/firing teachers but make it harder to fire THEM, thereby reducing the ability of nitwit politicians to exert pressure to fire particular people. You could make more of the relevant intermediary jobs (like state superintendent) nonpartisan, and make being nonpartisan an explicit part of the job. You could add more transparency to hiring/firing decisions and leave it to the voters to punish politicians who do that sort of thing - if regular elections aren't enough disincentive, then add a petition-based recall process.
Or you could recognize that political sea changes at the local level don't happen often enough for this to be a significant problem, so we shouldn't worry about it until and unless it actually happens. Don't institute cures that are worse than the disease. (The fact that some district in Texas has this problem doesn't mean you need tenure everywhere in the country.)
Though the real solution is more student autonomy. Let parents decide which schools to send their kids to rather than arbitrarily assigning them to a specific one and the whole issue basically goes away. If parents don't like what's being taught to their kids, make it easy for them to go elsewhere or teach the kids at home and they don't NEED to get rid of bad teachers. (When people don't like what's served at a restaurant, they don't typically lobby to fire the cook, they just eat somewhere else! Because they CAN.)
Fundamentally, the purpose of a school system is to benefit the students, not the teachers. If you want to convince people tenure is a good idea, you need to make the case from that perspective - why it helps the students. Otherwise it just sounds like special pleading.
> Nah, it's an institutional problem; you'd solve it with slightly different rules about how schools are run. For instance, you could give principals more autonomy over hiring/firing teachers but make it harder to fire THEM, thereby reducing the ability of nitwit politicians to exert pressure to fire particular people. You could make more of the relevant intermediary jobs (like state superintendent) nonpartisan, and make being nonpartisan an explicit part of the job. You could add more transparency to hiring/firing decisions and leave it to the voters to punish politicians who do that sort of thing - if regular elections aren't enough disincentive, then add a petition-based recall process.
The voters vote these people in intentionally. They campaign on it.
> Or you could recognize that political sea changes at the local level don't happen often enough for this to be a significant problem, so we shouldn't worry about it until and unless it actually happens. Don't institute cures that are worse than the disease. (The fact that some district in Texas has this problem doesn't mean you need tenure everywhere in the country.)
I suggest you employ Google. Its a frequent problem in the South, not just Texas.
> Though the real solution is more student autonomy. Let parents decide which schools to send their kids to rather than arbitrarily assigning them to a specific one and the whole issue basically goes away. If parents don't like what's being taught to their kids, make it easy for them to go elsewhere or teach the kids at home and they don't NEED to get rid of bad teachers. (When people don't like what's served at a restaurant, they don't typically lobby to fire the cook, they just eat somewhere else! Because they CAN.)
Fundamentally, the purpose of a school system is to benefit the students, not the teachers. If you want to convince people tenure is a good idea, you need to make the case from that perspective - why it helps the students. Otherwise it just sounds like special pleading.
And when people like you are willing to pay the full cost, including an externalities beyond just the price of tuition on everyone involved, sure.
Strangely, people seem to pretend that they don't exist and/or balk at the full price tag.
It is alot like the USPS. Even UPS and Fedex don't want its unprofitable routes in rural areas because they can't be made profitable. The problem is, when you rip away the profitable portion of the process, it ends up costing the taxpayer just as much when the bill comes due.
If you want vouchers, you need to fund every child equally...including the fact they may live in the wrong neighborhood. You don't get to say "Too bad, kid, you live in Compton. No one can get you to a good school on time unless we gave you more than every other kid."
> The voters vote these people in intentionally. They campaign on it.
Great, then let them! What's the matter, don't you believe in democracy? :-)
> And when people like you are willing to pay the full cost, including an externalities beyond just the price of tuition on everyone involved, sure.
What externalities? Private schools don't have tenure and cost on average about half as much per student as public schools do.
> It is alot like the USPS. Even UPS and Fedex don't want its unprofitable routes in rural areas because they can't be made profitable. The problem is, when you rip away the profitable portion of the process, it ends up costing the taxpayer just as much when the bill comes due.
UPS and Fedex aren't legally allowed to charge less than the post office does to deliver mail nor are they allowed to carry non-urgent mail or packages. The fact that they focus on high-priced delivery options is NOT because they're cherrypicking, it's because that's the only niche they've been able to wrest legal access to. (And they were able to do that because the post office was at the time losing money on package delivery - it was only seen as a valuable market niche after Fedex showed that it could be done at a profit!)
Get rid of the laws prohibiting competition with the post office, let the post office go broke if need be, and the private carriers would make money in rural areas too. Mail delivery would likely cost half as much if the private sector did it.
Incidentally, it has long been the case that in some rural areas the Post Office would deliver mail to the nearest "mail stop" (which could be miles away from a home) while UPS and FedEx would drive right up to the door.
>If you want vouchers, you need to fund every child equally...including the fact they may live in the wrong neighborhood. You don't get to say "Too bad, kid, you live in Compton. No one can get you to a good school on time unless we gave you more than every other kid."
Why would you expect there not to be good schools in bad neighborhoods? Absent the political incentive to centralize and bureaucratize you'd have lots of tiny schools all over the place meeting local needs rather than huge monolithic schools that folks have to be bussed over to.
That is a popular story, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Do you have a source?
I suspect you're thinking of the sort of elite academy type schools that have tough entrance exams - but those are a very tiny fraction of private schools. There also exist private schools that that take anyone who applies and even private schools that specialize in special-needs students.
Also: in several parts of the US (including all of Florida, Ohio, Georgia and Utah as well as various municipal districts), special-needs students actually have their own separate voucher system which parents can use to attend private schools because the public schools aren't good at educating those kids.
> Great, then let them! What's the matter, don't you believe in democracy? :-)
It elects people who believe delusional things that are not grounded in reality sometimes, doubly so at the local level. I believe in checks and balances. There are no real checks and balances at the local level except in a timespan measured in years which isn't 'acceptable'.
> What externalities? Private schools don't have tenure and cost on average about half as much per student as public schools do.
Providing transportation with adult supervision for single parents who need to work and don't have a car to drop the kid off with. Providing food for those that can't afford to at lunch. Etc.
Things like that are part of the $13k figure. So, unless you are planning to drop all of that?
> Why would you expect there not to be good schools in bad neighborhoods? Absent the political incentive to centralize and bureaucratize you'd have lots of tiny schools all over the place meeting local needs rather than huge monolithic schools that folks have to be bussed over to.
1) Economies of Scale
2) People in wealthier areas can pay more and schools are partially funded through property tax...drum roll please...this means schools in richer neighborhoods have more money.
> (And they were able to do that because the post office was at the time losing money on package delivery - it was only seen as a valuable market niche after Fedex showed that it could be done at a profit!)
LOL.
http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/readers/2014/05/13/pos...
"Rising online shopping has sparked a jump in package revenue, while a gradually rebounding economy has stabilized mail revenue. That’s why the USPS forecasts a $1.1 billion operating profit this year. Quite simply, the package business is booming for the Postal Service."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fix-for-a-profita...
"In 2006, lawmakers mandated that the Postal Service do something that no other public or private entity is required to do — pre-fund future retiree health benefits. That $5.6 billion annual chargeaccounts for 100 percent of the red ink."
That is simply was never true and has never been true. I'm not going to even bother reading the rest of your rant.
> Providing transportation with adult supervision for single parents who need to work and don't have a car to drop the kid off with.
Is this really necessary? Surely a substantial fraction of kids could walk, bike, and/or take a public transit bus to the nearest school like I did. Or if driving has to be involved (why?) they could organize/join an informal neighborhood carpool.
Anyway yeah, I'd probably drop most of that. Or pay for it out of a very small fraction of the money saved.
> People in wealthier areas can pay more and schools are partially funded through property tax...drum roll please...this means schools in richer neighborhoods have more money.
That would have been a fine argument to make in, say, 1970. Nowadays, not so much. Though it might depend on what state you're talking about. Today there is in most states quite a lot of redistribution of state funds to make up for local variation. And many of the worst schools and school districts spend the most money - they just spend it badly.
>> the post office was at the time losing money on package delivery - it was only seen as a valuable market niche after Fedex showed that it could be done at a profit!)
> LOL. [random links]
Your two articles are completely irrelevant to whether package delivery and urgent message delivery were profitable for the post office in the 1970s, which was when Federal Express (now FedEx) got started. (The "urgent letters" exemption to the postal monopoly was made official in 1979.)
As for time-sensitive delivery today, FedEx is so much better at it than the Post Office that by 2000 the Post Office entirely gave up on providing that service themselves; they now subcontract to FedEx and UPS to carry most of the post office-branded urgent mail and packages.
(They don't do this just because they were terrible at delivering stuff quickly and reliably, but also due to a boneheaded post-9/11 rule change about carrying packages on commercial flights that broke their previous business model.)
(the post office also now subcontracts a lot of local rural delivery, fwiw.)
> Is this really necessary? Surely a substantial fraction of kids could walk, bike, and/or take a public transit bus to the nearest school like I did. Or if driving has to be involved (why?) they could organize/join an informal neighborhood carpool.
Did you do this when you were 5 and the nearest good school is 5+ miles away? No?
> Anyway yeah, I'd probably drop most of that. Or pay for it out of a very small fraction of the money saved.
At which point you aren't talking about school choice, but cutting the safety net for poor children.
Kay, well I'm dropping this since you seem to think "separate but equal" on a class basis is acceptable. We won't agree on anything.
Look, you can't say "Oh, private schools are cheaper because we can throw the poor kids under the bus by cutting their safety net". That isn't an acceptable solution.
The poor kids are the ones getting shafted by the status quo! They get "assigned" to schools that are terrible and don't even have the option to go somewhere better, even if it's just as convenient to get the kids there. School choice is a safety net for poor children.
Having more but smaller schools with more choice means shorter commutes and a better school experience for everyone, but most of all for the poor. (The rich can afford to either move to a better public school district or pay twice, once for a public school option they're not using and a second time for a private school option they are, so they're fine either way.)
So from my perspective you're the one throwing the poor kids under the bus. You're saying the poor kids assigned to terrible, unsafe schools should just suck it up and tolerate it (and hope that maybe the political system fixes it sometime far in the distant future) rather than just pick (or create!) a better option right now.
I agree that we're probably not going to agree. But to tie up one last loose end:
> Did you do this [travel alone] when you were 5 and the nearest good school is 5+ miles away? No?
When I was 5 I walked to a public grade school that was less than a mile away - one of 2 or 3 in the area that met that criteria. In middle school (grades 7-8) my morning bike commute was 4.5 miles - though another option was to walk or bike 1.5 miles a different direction and take a public bus the rest of the way.
> If you want vouchers, you need to fund every child equally...including the fact they may live in the wrong neighborhood. You don't get to say "Too bad, kid, you live in Compton. No one can get you to a good school on time unless we gave you more than every other kid."
I'm not sure if your didn't understand that bit or what the issue is. I'm fine with vouchers as long as they actually cover what is currently provided.
And you are assuming they all live in major cities [hint: 20% of the population is rural/small town america].
Look, your plan requires:
1) Preventing poor kids from eating lunch [because they have no money]
2) Preventing poor kids from having sufficient transportation to get to school in all areas of this country, not just major cities.
2b) You want kids to walk unescorted in terrible, unsafe [your words, not mine] neighborhoods to make it to "better schools".
In reality, my objection is the fact you won't pay for the above which you conveniently and consistently ignore. Instead, you claim you are trying to "help them" while simultaneously starving them and increasing the economic burden on their family to get all students to a good school.
The reality is you cannot magically cut spending and rely on the free market to fix things. If you want services to remain roughly the same, you have to spend roughly the same amount of money regardless of if it is the government spending it in the form of public education or vouchers.
Personally, I think vouchers that provide the same level of service as currently exists in an apples-to-apples way is perfectly fine. The problem is, people like you pretend these services are somehow a complete waste of money servicing an imaginary need. They aren't an imaginary need.
I know poor people who live in a rural area that literally have to cross a lake that is more than a mile across to get to a school that teaches K-12 because it is the only school in the area for about 50 miles in any direction. You pretend such people are imaginary and do not exist to come to your "solution".
