Tenure

The education system in America is praised for being globally competitive, providing students with what they need to succeed domestically and abroad. If this is true, how come our schools continue to employ poor performing, unmotivated teachers? Why is it almost impossible to fire a teacher who has been accused multiple times of inappropriate or unprofessional behavior towards their students. Why have more than half of school administrators never reported these incidents, even though they are fully aware? One word: Tenure. Tenure is a policy that was first implemented in New Jersey in 1910. Tenure was created to protect teachers from unjust firing, such as a female teacher being fired for cutting her hair or wearing pants. Now, almost every…

for becoming pregnant or for wearing pants to work. Tenure also serves to protect professors whose research or teaching practices might ruffle feathers, and to ensure job security for out of the box academic pursuits. Typically, tenure is granted to university professors only after an intensive and protracted process of review. Professors usually do not come under review for tenure until they have spent at least five years working in their position. Primary and secondary school teachers can earn…

The age-old question: How many peer reviewed articles do I need to publish in order to make tenure? The answer is five. You need to publish five articles in order to make tenure. Just kidding! If only things were that simple. Just as PhD students often ask, “How long do you think my dissertation should be?” or “Do you think I have enough articles in my lit review?”, those in the tenure track often seek confirmation of that elusive number -- the quantity of journal articles needed to…

Crowley states in his essay “Expel These Teachers”, “Yet getting rid of the bad ones means battling teachers unions that ferociously defend the lifetime tenure that many instructors get even at a young age.” Phillip K. Howard, a reformist who currently chairs the bipartisan group Common Good, states, “It is notoriously impossible to get rid of a teacher. I think more people are put on death row than lose their tenure as teachers through the legal process.” There was a five year period in the…

contrasts both teaching methods with the motive to describe the purpose of college and its inconsistency. With Utility U, the focus is on value of the education system per dollar. Kwame expresses the purpose is to determine how much human capital can be created from the student consumers. Utility U’s approach is to cut costs to better the “value proposition” within the school. (20) They want to squeeze, as much return as possible out of their investments, one such way is the hiring of…

By ending tenure the current education system would lose nothing but has everything to gain from it. Once a professor reaches tenure there is no incentive to perform well or for him or her to improve there teaching skills. If the author could change one thing this would be first on the list. They also believe everybody should go to college and should be our countries goal. But for this to happen the authors believe professors should be engaged with their students, this is another area the…

of money with regards to security and he began a lifelong pursuit of wealth. “…he would have said that he yearned for a larger tenure than any department could grant; to go with his professional tenure, a sort of life tenure. He wanted simply to stay put. No more scrambling! He wanted to laze away the afternoon at a dumpling house, sip plum juice by a green pond flickering with orange-and-white carp. Or, well, he would have settled for iced tea, anyway, by a crabgrass-free lawn with a sprinkler…

results. This is what happened in Arkansas when a boy was hit by a truck and killed after getting off a school bus. The driver drove off before the boy crossed the street to his home because he went to do something else on the same side of the street. Since the busses stop sign was not out the truck proceeded through, the kid ran out and he was struck. Both sides were found negligent. If a teacher is found negligent tenure become very important. Issues not serious enough to remove the teacher…

tuition prices. Another reason for a dramatic increase in tuition prices is Professor tenure-ship. In their book, Higher Education? Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus suggest, “Thanks to tenure, faculty members can stay on the payroll as long as they like, with no real assessment of their performance. With lifetime assurances, professorships have become multimillion dollar commitments” (118). These authors point out that tenure-ship is expensive and has faults. Millions of dollars is quite a…

Rachel Jones is an Associate professor in the Philosophy Department at George Mason University, who just recently has gained her Tenure. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Oxford and a MA and PhD on Philosophy and Literature from the University of Warwick. Originally from United Kingdom, Rachel Jones is teaching in the US for a little over five years now. The importance of her participation in this paper is the outsider to insider view that she can offer thanks to her transition to an American…