The Myth of Teacher Tenure
by Diana D'Amico — July 23, 2014
In the stories of exorbitant costs and incompetence, teacher tenure laws have achieved mythic proportions. Judge Rolf Treu’s tentative decision in Vergara v. California may be the death knell for teacher tenure. But what will change as a result? A look to the past reveals that teacher tenure never really protected teachers and nor was it supposed to. Using history as a lens, this commentary explores the origination of tenure policies and the debates that surrounded them. This commentary argues that embedded in the tenure debates is a much larger problem that should concern us all.
In 1917, the president of New York City’s Board of Education told a reporter that the schools are “burdened and clogged with many teachers who are unfit” because of their “permanent tenure.”1 For nearly a century, critics have blasted tenure for putting the needs of adults above those of children. In the stories of exorbitant costs and incompetence, teacher tenure laws have achieved mythic proportions. Judge Rolf Treu’s tentative decision in Vergara v. Californiamay be the death knell for teacher tenure. But what will change as a result? A look to the past reveals that teacher tenure never really protected teachers and nor was it supposed to.
State teacher tenure legislation emerged in the 1910s and early 1920s. Supported by both teachers and school leaders, these groups envisioned the function of tenure privileges in discrepant ways. Faced with massive immigration, public school leaders responded to both increasing demands for services and unprecedented diversity. In 1918, New York City’s school superintendent called on every teacher in the system to “be aggressively patriotic in word and deed.”2 But a research brief from the National Education Association pointed out that growing numbers of teachers were immigrants and thus “not prepared to transmit the best American political and cultural ideals to the children under their care.”3 For school leaders, tenure represented a way to stabilize the teaching population and to preserve school systems’ financial investment in induction programs.
For teachers, tenure was a pathway to professionalism that established their expertise. In 1919, the New York City Teachers Union called for “the cessation of all interference on the part of the principal” in the teacher’s work.4 Though they received tenure privileges, teachers never received the rights they imagined and continued to be dismissed during these years for holding subversive views, getting married, and having children.
The myth of teacher tenure hinges on images of slothful ineptitude. But sinecure had nothing to do with the historic framing of these laws. On June 3, 1921, California legislators approved their first teacher tenure law. After two years of successful service, teachers could earn “permanent” classification meaning that they would not have to apply for reappointment each year. According to the legislation, a teacher could be dismissed for “immoral or unprofessional conduct, incompetence, evident unfitness, [or] insubordination.” The New York state policy carved out additional space for dismissal on the grounds of “other sufficient reasons” or “treasonable or seditious utterances.”5 Though the myth of teacher tenure has grown overtime, in most states, these laws remain fundamentally unchanged.
In reality, tenure policies were designed to achieve two modest goals. As school systems grew in size, rehiring the existing pool of teachers on a year-to-year basis quickly became an unwieldy and unproductive task. Tenure policies would reduce unnecessary paperwork and entice the “right” sort of teachers to stay in the system longer. In early Choosing Democracy: The Myth of Teacher Tenure: