Tenure-busting law won't give us better teachers
Published February 17, 2016
Editorial by Fayetteville Observer, February 17, 2016.
The battle over tenure for North Carolina teachers reached the state Supreme Court this week. We hope the justices will put this misbegotten piece of punitive legislation out of its misery.
The law, passed by the General Assembly in 2013, stripped teachers' ability to earn "career status" after four years of satisfactory performance. Lawmakers mischaracterized it as tenure, saying it prevented school districts from firing incompetent teachers.
The truth is, if school districts use it as an excuse to keep lousy teachers in the classroom, it's their own fault. The law specifically empowers administrators to fire bad teachers for reasons including poor performance, insubordination and immorality.
Lawmakers instead wanted to force teachers to renegotiate contracts every few years, so the schools could get rid of the incompetent ones. But since schools already can do that, what the new law really means is teachers have no protection against getting fired on administrators' whims. Keeping a teaching job can become an exercise in politics and teachers can spend a career looking over their shoulders in fear that they'll be sacked if they look cross-eyed at a hostile principal.
Surprisingly, Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper, who's running for governor, sent his top appeals lawyer to court Monday to argue in favor of the Republican-backed legislation. Lawyer John Maddrey repeated the legislative nonsense about the "career status" system amounting to "permanent employment."
As the teachers' association lawyer responded, if lawmakers really wanted to improve the quality of teaching in the state's classrooms, they could have raised the performance criteria teachers must meet to keep their jobs.
We'd like to see the General Assembly do just that, instead of simply attacking anything that looks remotely like a union - a theme that has run through a considerable body of legislation for the past three years.
That, in truth, is what the tenure battle is about. Even though there are no public-employee unions in North Carolina - they're already banned by law - lawmakers appear determined to rid the state of any protection that looks even remotely union-ish. Hence a war on a tenure status that doesn't exist.
Teachers have earned what little job protection they do have. In fact, it was promised to them as a benefit of their employment. That's why the court should strike down this law.
February 17, 2016 at 10:34 am
Richard L Bunce says:
Traditional government schools and all their government education industrial complex nonsense will not give us better education results. Ya'll keep focusing on how the teachers are doing and ignore how poorly the students are doing.
