The Republican dominated state legislature in my adopted state of Florida has been passing anti-union laws, the latest targeting public unions. The law excludes police and firefighter unions, with some noting that the difference is that these unions tend to support Republicans. As of this writing, I am a member of the United Faculty of Florida, which is a union for faculty. But my chapter of the union might cease to exist under the new law. But this war on educational unions is not new and I am taking this opportunity to look back to 2014 for an earlier battle in this war.
Back in July, 2014 Campbell Brown announced her Partnership for Educational Justice filed a legal complaint in Albany. This complaint aimed at eliminating New York’s teacher tenure laws. It was claimed that the tenure laws interfere with the right of children to a sound education.
This was not Brown’s first rodeo. In 2013 Brown asserted that her Parents’ Transparency Project was aimed at bringing transparency to the negotiation process involving teachers’ unions. During this campaign Brown asserted that the union is “…a system that protects teachers who engage in sexual misconduct.” Brown ran into some conflict of interest issues in regards to this group and there were concerns about the anonymous funding behind it: as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, PTP can legally keep its donors secret and engage in political spending. As should be no surprise, critics saw it as an attempt at union busting. To promote the lawsuit, Brown appeared on the July 31, 2014 episode of the Colbert Report—having faced protestors outside the show.
I did agree with some of Brown’s claims. First, I agree that children are entitled to a sound basic education. Her critics contend that her actual interest was in busting the unions at the behest of those bankrolling her efforts. While Brown’s actual motives are a point of interest, they are logically irrelevant to the merit of her claims and arguments. However, Colbert did raise a relevant criticism: if Brown was concerned that children receive a sound education and for educational equality, then her goals would have been better served by focusing on educational inequality, such as the extreme disparity in education funding. To be fair to Brown, it can be reasonable to focus on one issue and leave other issues to others. For example, it would be unreasonable to attack a person who is focused on fighting lung cancer for not dedicating their time to also fighting breast cancer. That said, this can also be used in bad faith as rhetorical cover. For example, a person who claims to be policing library book “for the children” might deflect a question about why they do not support school lunch programs by saying that their focus in on books. They could, obviously, also speak briefly in favor for school lunch programs even if they are focused on other matters.
Second, I did agree with her view of seniority. Schools sometimes follow a “first in, last out” policy. The problem is that merely being at a school a long time does not mean a person is a good teacher. I believe that employment should be, in general, based on competence and seniority is not a mark of competence, I favor a different approach. That said, experience can improve a teacher’s abilities, and I am a much better professor than I was I was fresh out of graduate school). However, improved abilities should be discernible in job performance and not just by looking at the calendar. Naturally, a rational case can be made for seniority—but I believe that all such cases must rest on the connection between experience and ability.
Third, I had some sympathy for her view that three years is not enough time to earn tenure After all, tenure at the university level requires six years (and, at my university, involves a yearlong review process starting in the department and ending with the university President). The easy and obvious counter is that teaching at a university requires an advanced degree (which requires 5+ years beyond the bachelor’s degree required to teach K-12), so having a shorter tenure period at K-12 schools is reasonable. So, my view is that this can be debated—but this should be done in good faith.
Fourth, I agreed with her view that tenure laws should not make it nearly impossible to fire ineffective or dangerous teachers. Tenure, as I see it, is supposed to ensure that teachers or professors can only be fired for cause and through due process. It is not so that teachers or professors can never be fired. At the college level, this is obviously connected to defending academic freedom. At the K-12 level, academic freedom might not be seen as being as great a concern. But there is a reasonable concern about protecting teachers from the vagaries of ideology, politics and such. To illustrate, tenure can be useful for protecting biology teachers from being fired because some people disbelieve in evolution or believe that vaccines cause autism. In the light of events during the second Trump regime, the need to protect teachers is even more obvious. Being consistent, I also hold that tenured conservative teachers should be protected, should “the left” undertake efforts for ideological purging. But I must note that what counts as ideological purging can be contentious. For example, a biology teacher who taught students that dinosaur bones are fake and that transgender people are possessed by demons would seem to be someone who shouldn’t be teaching. But some might argue that firing them would be a woke purge.
Brown’s view did get some psychological support from the common misconception that tenure means a teacher cannot be fired. However, tenure does not make one immune to being fired, just that due process must be used. It would be hard to defend the view that it is fine for schools to fire a teacher for any reason without any due process. After all, such firings would be (by definition) unjustified. It is, however, easy to defend the view that even a tenured teacher should be fired for being ineffective and certainly for being dangerous.
The problem is not with the general principle of tenure. If there is a problem, it would seem to lie in the process that is used and perhaps any rules that would keep the ineffective or dangerous in their jobs. The fix to this would not be the elimination of tenure, but a change in the process so that teachers are protected from unjustified dismissal and students are protected from ineffective or dangerous teachers. The system will never be perfect—but that is an unreasonable standard.