Tenure Policies Create Apathetic Teachers by Hanna Fink

You’re sitting in a classroom, watching another video for the third time this week on something that you haven’t even learned yet. You’re now sitting at home, trying to teach yourself difficult material because you hardly learned anything in class. Now, you’re taking a test and thinking to yourself, I know nothing.

You can well assume that your teacher is not worried about complaints because they won’t affect his or her job. You can already picture yourself being unprepared for  next year’s course because of your unmotivated teacher. Does this situation sound familiar?

I’m sure we’ve all had one or two teachers that popped into our mind.  The thing is, what can we do about it?

Out of 132,000 teachers in New York, only 32 were fired between 2006 and 2011, according to the Albany Times. The tenure system causes many more problems than it solves and should be eliminated completely. Although tenure protects the successful and hardworking teachers from losing their jobs, it also benefits the poor, inefficient teachers. Many educators who are assured their jobs are safe lose motivation to work at their optimal level, making it extremely difficult and expensive to fire them. Because tenure restricts districts from firing teachers, school systems tend to shuffle unwanted teachers from school-to-school in a system aptly nicknamed the “dance of the lemons.” This ridiculous tactic unfairly benefits unproductive teachers.

What does tenure do for students?  Nothing.  Tenure does nothing but harm students by making them unprepared for the next level of classes.  Sadly, I have had a tenured teacher who taught us up until the month of November.  November. I don’t know about you guys, but I thought the school year ended in June. For the rest of the year, we watched movies almost every day and excluded the typical learning process we were supposed to go through. We had to rely on ourselves to read the long, boring textbook in order to pass the class.  A fellow classmate explained to me that when she went into the higher-level class the next year, “the topic that everyone else was reviewing was my first time actually learning the information.” This damage to us as students is unacceptable. There are no excuses for teachers to be this way.

Now, let’s think about this for a second. What is a teacher? I thought a teacher is someone who is supposed to teach us. Right? But if there is no teaching being done, why are schools allowing them to have the valuable title of teacher? Is it fair to us as students? Is it fair to parents paying their tax money for lousy teachers? Is it fair to other teachers? We are in school from ages five to 18. Over the course of those 13 years, we spend most of our time in school, and we expect to be taught.  

There is no easy way to determine how we should judge students in order to evaluate a teacher’s performance. However, something must be done. First, South Huntington  could implement a system where salary and job security are based on student test scores. This may not be a perfect system, as it is possible that a teacher could just get a bad batch of students on year. So, the district could take the average scores over a three-to-four-year period, and, depending on the results, would eliminate the low-performing teachers. Under this system, teachers will be more motivated to teach their students.

Another possible solution is requiring teachers to periodically take a recertification exam. This way, our teachers will not slack off and would be forced to actually teach.

Tenure is a flawed system.  We need to implement and introduce these ideas and progressively fix the system. Tenure does nothing but hurt us as students. We don’t gain anything from it. Just settling with a lazy teacher is not okay. And as a junior who is going off to college soon, my last years in high school are a very important stepping stone for my future. We need to get our teachers motivated or get them out.

Full disclosure: I contacted the District Office about their opinion on what can be done about this topic and they failed to respond to my email.