"Tenure" usually refers to job security, particularly in the academic world. Essentially, it's about a senior professor's contractual right to keep from being fired without just cause. Supposedly, tenure helps keep senior professors at a university, so the school isn't always searching for new teachers, but more important, it's a guarantee that a teacher won't be fired for speaking out or teaching controversial ideas. Essentially, the core values of tenure are academic freedom. It's supposed to give teachers an incentive to stretch their thinking. However, we've discovered that without an element of risk, people do exactly the opposite. Instead of pushing the boundaries, many would say that tenured teachers seem more likely to coast or slack off. That seems particularly true when tenure is applied to high schools where the oversight is incredibly lax. California grants tenure after just two years in the classroom. New York waits for a total of three years. That means that after only 2 or 3 years, a teacher essentially has their job for life.

This makes is nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers. LA Weekly reported that in the past decades, LA Unified spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven teachers for poor classroom performance. The sad result was that just two were fired, two others were paid large settlements and one was reinstated. 32 other teachers were paid $50,000 each in secret just to leave without a fight. One administrator told me there are nearly 100 separate steps to complete for the district to fire a single teacher, and it often drags on for years. Sometimes the teacher sits at home for years with full pay waiting for the outcome. With policies like that, is there any wonder California is bankrupt and the schools are shameful?

Human nature being what it is, we tend to rest on our laurels. When the risk is removed, our drive is often removed as well. When it comes to tenure, what started out as well meaning, has gone horribly wrong - to the point that I believe the entire tenure system needs to be yanked.

I love teaching and have many friends who are great professors. Benefits are a wonderful thing, but whatever the job, when you remove all the risk, you also remove the edge that it takes to succeed. Just ask the Winter Olympic athletes. If a Gold Medal was a sure thing, they wouldn't have spent so many years fighting the odds to become the great athletes we see today.