Teachers involved in Policy and Eliminate Tenure
Education is essential for the progression of society. Right now in the US, we have shown that we care about the importance or our education system by implementing a plan called No Child Left Behind. While this plan had good intentions, it has not seemed to have the effect people would have hoped. One of the reasons behind this is that the policy was made by many people who were not teachers. One thing that I suggest for President Obama is to include teachers in the policy making for schools. Teachers are the people who the policies directly affect, so why not have them help make the policies? With teachers aiding in the policy-making process, there will be a better chance that the policies made will be designed in a way that are actually feasible for schools. This will hopefully produce more success with school policy.
Charter schools have been a major buzzword in the education world lately. Although the idea behind them is good, I am not so sure this is the answer. Charter schools do create competition in a sense allowing for growth and change, much like having many different phone companies offers the consumer a wide variety of phone packages rather than the one package a monopoly might offer. However, the US is so great because it enforces that every child has an opportunity for education. If there was this type of competition, it would not be helping all students in the US have the best education and it would be more like European countries where mainly good students go to the good schools and poor students don’t. Rural communities would most likely not have the same opportunities as the urban areas as well. Although not all students are getting an “equal” education right now, I think that we need to focus on improving the public schools we have. One way that we could do this is to eliminate tenure. Even though this is part of the Union protection teachers have, I strongly think that it should be eliminated. Tenure has some benefits, but often it keeps bad teachers in the teaching profession, and it allows teachers to become lazy because they have security. In most other professions, if you don’t do a good job, you will be fired and if you do a good job you will be rewarded. It is very hard to assess teachers, but I think that teachers should be observed more frequently by supervisors. Performance should be based on observations of the teacher, not on student achievement. Teachers should be fired if they are not doing a good job and given incentives for doing a good job. I think this will help the quality of schools everywhere. As a future educator, I am saying that I do not believe in tenure; I plan to keep my job because I am good at it.
This post was submitted by Mackenzie.
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The problem with letting teachers set policy is TEACHER UNIONS.
The main goals of teacher unions are to raise money and power, and protect incompetent teachers.
Tenure should never have been put in place, because, as you point out, it protects incompetent teachers and promotes good teachers to become “lazy”. Tenure is the crown jewel of teacher union protection and ridding our system of this scourge will prove difficult at best, but the most effective way to do so at the moment is charter schools.
Competition has always been a driving force to seek out the best among us and to inspire others to accomplish similar standards, but it also illuminates the worst among us and eliminating that exposure has always been the driving force behind the socialist teacher union policy; tenure being the best example and opposition to teacher evaluation a very close second.
Charter schools provide badly needed competition in our educational system which provides parents with a guideline to know which school will best serve their children, but teacher unions have opposed parental choice for years and that is exactly why they fight so hard against charter schools.
As with ALL government programs, incompetence and politics play too big a part. Decade after decade public schools have been “looked at” to make needed improvements in the system. The most consistent results have been a worsening of the status quo. Year after year teacher union policy further corrupts the system, government fails to do the “right thing”, and the educational levels of our students decline. It is well past time to try a different approach and charter schools, parental choice, and vouchers, which have shown greater strides toward improvement than ANYTHING the teacher unions have proposed, should be given a greater and more fair chance to prove their worth.
When teachers can begin to do what is best for the future of this country, providing our children with the best education possible, without the self-serving policies of teacher unions, so corruptly engrained into Federal and State legislation and so thoroughly laced with a socialist agenda, the public should CONTINUE their distrust of the “fox guarding the henhouse”.