Teacher Tenure Laws

Teacher Tenure Laws

Teacher tenure is a century-old system of education that was originally intended to protect teachers from being fired without cause. It was originally thought of in 1885 when teachers were being fired for personal reasons, such as race, creed, gender, or favoritism. Tenure was formerly established in 1909 in New Jersey. While some believe teacher tenure is unnecessary and perhaps detrimental for the students, others are determined that it should remain, claiming that it is a protection of academic freedom. This debate begs the question, should teacher tenure be eliminated? This question directly impacts teachers, students, the schools and school systems, and lawmakers. The biggest limitation of this debate, is that many court cases and various hypotheses have been created on this debate, but there have been a limited number of debates done. Upon evaluation of this research, the conclusion created is: for schools to be most effective, teacher tenure should remain in place, but tenure laws must be improved, so the school systems can weed out the unsatisfactory teachers, and reward the exemplary ones.

Academic tenure should be improved so that it is easier to fire teachers who shouldn’t deserve it. A study found in the New York Times found, “Only 2.1 percent of all teachers are dismissed for poor performance annually, meaning that tenured teachers in most states enjoy a “job for life,” regardless of their performance in the classroom” (McGuinn). This shows the difficulty of firing unsatisfactory teachers. This is because there are too many tenure laws protecting teachers from being fired, and when an unmotivated teacher receives tenure, they may stop wanting to help the students on the level that they had before. If more