As research shows, 2.3 million teachers in the US have teacher tenure in 2008. Teacher tenure is a very controversial topic because of it's various pros and cons. It can be a form of great protection for well performing teachers but it can also be a corruptive element in teacher's work. (M.J. Stephey, 2008)
More specifically, there are mainly two pros and two cons in this controversial issue. Pros: 1. Tenure can be great protection for teachers so that they are not fired because of non-work related causes or personal even political reasons. Before the tenure policy was created and imposed, teachers could be fired or dismissed simply because they didnt do the principle of the school a favor or when a new political party took power over the old one. They can even be fired because they are married, pregnant. For female teachers, there were extreme cases like they are fired because they are not wearing skirt but pants during work, which is completely ridiculous. (Herbert A. Schaffner, 2003) 2.Tenure prevents the school board from replacing experienced and expensive teachers for new, less expensive teachers who are not as good as the old ones just so that the school can earn more revenue. According to Wanda's article in 2010, we see that a lot of schools are facing budget constrains and a lot of them chose to fire old expensive teacher and hire cheap new teachers so that they can resolve the budget problem and even make more profit out of that. (Wanda Marie Thibodeaux, 2010) A direct quote from Marcia Rothman, a teachers for 14 years illustrates this problem thoroughly, "They don’t want old experienced teachers who are too expensive. It’s a concerted effort to harass older teachers, so they can hire two young teachers." (Ksenia Galouchko, 2010)
Cons: 1.However, teacher tenure can easily make the teacher with tenure complacent and get lazy because they don't have any pressure of getting fired what so ever. Tenure Human beings are naturaly lazy and one of the major reason that is pushing teachers to work hard and perform well is because they may get fired if they don't . And if we remove that major reason with teacher tenure, they can easily get lazy and become complacent with their work. (Wanda Marie Thibodeaux, 2010)
2.Not only does teacher tenure makes teachers complacent, the tenure it self makes the problem even harder to resolve- it takes months of legal wrangling to remove a poor-performing teacher. A study by the New Teacher Project in 2009 shows that 81% of school principles are aware of the poorly performing teachers at their school however, at the same time 86% of them admit that they dont always dismiss those teachers because it is extremely expensive and time consuming to go through the whole process of a dismissal. In Michigan, this problem is the worst- it can take up to 335 days to go through a process of removing a teacher before the courts get involved. (Daniel Weisberg, 2009) (Patrick McGuinn, 2010)