Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam is to be commended for trying to reform the tenure system for public schoolteachers.
Tenure is meant to protect teachers from unfair dismissal. Of course in any line of work, we would hope that dismissals, though always painful, are fair and reasonable. But too often, tenure can protect not only the many teachers who perform well but also those who perform poorly. That is certainly not in the best interests of schoolchildren, and Tennessee’s focus in education should be on students’ academic achievement before anything else.
So the governor reasonably proposes requiring five years of service – rather than the current three years – before a new teacher may be granted tenure. And he wants teachers to maintain high performance to keep tenure once they achieve it.
There are legitimate questions about the evaluation system to be used to make those decisions, and clearly that system should be well defined so the expectations are understood and tenure decisions are not made in a way that seems arbitrary or unfair.
But the governor pointed out that those questions should not derail the overhaul of tenure policies. No evaluation system will be “perfect,” he said, but that is no reason to maintain the status quo.