Tenure was originally designed to protect the best teachers from wrongful termination, says the reform-minded Frank Brogan, Florida s first Republican education commissioner. Today it protects the worst teachers from rightful termination. And teachers can expect their unions almost always to back them up, no matter what they have done. As Kathleen Winter, copresident of the Scituate Teachers Association in Rhode Island, admitted to the Providence Journal-Bulletin, Teachers pay substantial amounts of money to the union. The problem teacher gets quietly passed along to someone else.
Administrators call it the dance of the lemons.
In 1994 a teacher in Florida was in just such a jam. When confronted with the evidence, the teacher resigned. But he insisted on keeping his teacher s license so that he could work in a classroom somewhere else. So the FDOE pushed to have his license permanently revoked. But the local NEA affiliate supported the teacher.