Teacher Tenure Essay

Education has been one problem to plague our nation for centuries. There have been many disagreements, first about who should be educated, and then what type of education they should receive. Once the foundations of formal education were laid and it was decided every child should be given an education, it came time to find teachers for these schools and students. Teachers have always been an essential part of education, being as they are the ones providing said education. Even with that being said, there have been many cases of teachers being mistreated. There have been so many reported and unreported incidences of this happening that teachers felt compelled to try and do something to combat this problem. Throughout the years teacher unions …show more content…
People became concerned with tenure after a report, A Nation at Risk, was published (ProCon 1). The report came from President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education and essentially stated that educator tenure was “eroding the educational foundations of our society.” The report went on to insinuate that tenure has caused a level of mediocrity to arise in the educational field. It was then that states across the nation began evaluating their tenure laws. Some claimed tenure made it impossible to fire an unsatisfactory teacher while some claimed tenure was still very much needed to protect …show more content…
This idea was very popular yet no one had any idea on how to enforce it. It seemed there was no feasible way to evaluate student learning in classrooms, tenured or not. This changed with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and again with the Race to the Top Act of 2009. These acts held states and schools accountable for making sure each child enrolled there received the best possible education. The Race to the Top Act also offered an unprecedented challenge for public schools throughout the nation. This act was designed to spur innovation and reform in the education field. During the time of the No Child Left Behind Act, standardized testing became a prevalent way to determine how students were learning and how well the teachers were providing education. Educators were outraged saying standardized test scores are not a very accurate measure of how well the teachers are teaching, but how well the students absorb the information. During this whole ordeal, educators were still pointing out reasons they needed tenure with the most prevalent being job protection. Whereas the passing of the Race to the Top Act awarded points to each school district in the nation that started implementing teacher evaluations and innovative teaching methods (Race to the Top 1). As a reward for making progress and reform in the education field, these