The United States Federal Government ought to ban tenure from all high schools.

To My Future Opponent: Thank you for accepting my challenge. I started this debate to learn the pros and cons of this subject, and I chose the side that is my personal opinion (for now). Please feel free to any styles of debating. However I find it a more constructive debate if you hit each of my points as well as making your own. Hobey ho, lets go! In public high schools, tenure is considered a right for teachers who have passed their (usually) 3 year probationary term. Roughly 2.3 million public school teachers in the U.S. have tenure. (Time) Tenure is job security aimed at impeding wanton firing of "unpopular" teachers. Although noble in theory, tenure is simply wrong. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Point 1) If a teacher deserves to be fired, it is a daunting task for the school district to do so, leading to bad teachers staying in the system. According to a recent article in Time Magazine, "Though tenure doesn't guarantee lifetime employment, it does make firing teachers a difficult and costly process, one that involves the union, the school board, the principal, the judicial system and thousands of dollars in legal fees. In most states, a tenured teacher can't be dismissed until charges are filed and months of evaluations, hearings and appeals have occurred. Meanwhile, school districts must shell out thousands of dollars for paid leave and substitute instructors. The system is deliberately slow and cumbersome, in order to dissuade school boards and parents from ousting a teacher for personal or political motives." As I mentioned before, a noble attempt at stopping corruption, yet it fails to recognize bad teachers in general. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Point 2) There are numerous cases of teachers that deserved to be fired, proved difficult because of tenure. Yet again, from Time, "A Connecticut teacher received a mere 30-day suspension for helping students cheat on a standardized test; one California school board spent $8,000 to fire an instructor who preferred using R-rated movies instead of books; a Florida teacher remained in the classroom for a year despite incidents in which she threw books at her students and demanded they referred to her as ‘Ms. God.'" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Point 3) Tenure can easily lead to teacher complacency. This point is simply logic. If a man or woman has a job they know they won't be fired from (within loose limits), are they really going to work extremely hard to better themselves at their job? In today's world, probably not. The same goes with teachers. Please note, I'm not saying all teachers are lazy scumbags who deserve to be fired, but this is simply a problem with tenure. I'm 100% sure that we've all had a teacher who just didn't care anymore. Mine was in a science class. She never taught a thing. All we did was handouts. Easiest ‘A' I've gotten in my life, but that's not the point of school. Tenure allows for ‘Blow off classes' and ‘easy a's', but is that necessarily a good thing, especially with legislation requiring standardized tests. If students are doing poorly, school districts get less grants, making it even harder to educate new students. It's a slippery slope that many schools are finding themselves in. You may be saying that tenure isn't the only cause of this, but it is a factor. Bad teachers = bad students. Simple. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Possible Solution: Get rid of the tenure system and create a new teacher grading system in which good teachers are kept and bad teachers are fired. I've been thinking about the education system a lot recently, and the only possible alternative I could find in my mind, is a merit based system. It would keep crass politics out of the system by assuring teachers their job (if they are up to it). I propose a three part test. A) Course Knowledge Exam- The teacher ought to know what they are talking about. B) Teacher Improvement Standards- There are numerous workshops and the like that are available to teachers. They should be required to attend a certain amount of such meetings yearly to keep up with the times and teaching styles. C) In Class Examination- Although teachers are often subjected to scheduled "watching" periods in which an official of the school sits in on a lesson, this is not enough. They should have a set number of random sit ins to insure the teacher is actually teaching, instead of simply making a show on that one scheduled day.