Laying Siege to Seniority

Tenure for 2.3 million public school teachers, one of the sacred cows in American education, is under attack. For decades, thanks to strong union contracts and ingrained notions of academic freedom, underpaid schoolteachers ! could at least console themselves with the fact that they were pretty well assured of job security for life. But after years of dismal school performance, and under the strictures of shrinking budgets, legislators are suddenly reneging on the deal. "Professionalism and tenure are antithetical," says Chester Finn Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Education and a proponent of free-market solutions to educational problems. "Teachers can't have it both ways."

In Massachusetts first-term Republican Governor William Weld and Democrats in the state legislature are mounting a frontal assault against tenure. Weld wants to allow school principals free rein to make hiring and firing decisions without reference to tenure or job seniority. Weld is also calling for teachers to be recertified every five years after taking competency tests. "This isn't anti-teacher," says Weld. "It's anti-slob teacher."

Kentucky has already moved against tenure as part of sweeping school-reform legislation enacted there last year. Individual schools are held accountable for improving student performance. If an institution fails to achieve results over a two-year period, a team of educators will be able to lift tenure and fire anyone on the school staff regardless of previous job guarantees.

The anti-tenure drive has inspired fierce opposition from the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. "I don't ever want it to be cheap to lay off an incompetent teacher," says N.E.A. president Keith Geiger. "But I don't want it to be impossible, either." He stresses that tenure was never meant to be a lifetime sinecure but was intended as a guarantee against dismissal without just cause. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: "An elected politician can't say, 'I'm going to fire you because you didn't support me in the last election.' "

Teachers call tenure a red herring raised by politicians to avoid dealing with the real problems plaguing American public education, like poor curriculums and overcrowded classrooms. Shanker argues that tenure is strongly rooted in countries routinely cited for their superior educational systems, like Japan and Germany. The issue, says Shanker, is not job security but the ethos in countries that prize educational achievement. "Mothers and fathers in those societies know there are serious consequences for not doing well at school," he says. "In Germany, if a student doesn't pass a national exam, he can't go to college. Not here."