DEFINING TEACHER TENURE IN NORTH CAROLINA

I published this article in March and am reposting it here. Much of what I predicted has happened and the situation is getting worse. Thom Tillis, the leader of the senate that is responsible for much of the deterioration in education is now a candidate for the Senate. Everyone who is for advancing public education at the expense of private education has to stop him. Here is what I said then and still believe really matters.  

Conservatives are preparing to attack North Carolina teachers. They want to change the rules of employment including eliminating “tenure”. By misunderstanding “academic tenure”, teachers, and teachers’ union leadership has set the stage for conservatives to attack them and their members and do away with the icon of trust we have in our educators. An inherent part of being a member of a teaching faculty is having academic tenure, a teachers union of sorts; however, having academic tenure is not the same as being in a labor union. Tenure is there to protect your right to do your job while a labor union is there to protect you in your job—there is a huge difference.  

Teachers seem to feel that by virtue of being hired as a teacher, school administrators grant them “academic tenure” from that day forward when in truth they may only have seniority, which is something entirely different. University employees’ handbooks or public school teacher employment contracts contain, or should contain, terms of employment; an agreement between a professor and the educational institutions administration stating the rule of academic tenure: how it is granted, when, and to whom it is granted. Public or private schools, below the university or college level, should have an arrangement similar to that of a university. Unfortunately, if these documents exist, they may not explain what “tenure” means.

Union organizers, by making members believe belonging to a union gives them “tenure”—wrongly interpreted, as “they cannot be fired”—incompetent union leaders have made unions something people hate or at least disrespected. By protecting the lazy and incompetent teacher, unions have done great harm to themselves. When conservatives break teachers union, it means school administrators can fire the teachers for any reason and not just for the reason for which administrators should fire them.

In conjunction with the failure of unions, school faculties appear not to understanding what academic tenure means making it easy for unions to corrupt teacher thinking. They are taught to believe that they have to dutifully pay union dues not only to save their jobs but also to allow them to teach what they want to teach. Conservatives, once elected, innately want and demand that they be at the top of the peck order, hierarchy dominance “no matter where they find it”. (Newly inserted: This is the Tom Tillis and the Gov. McCrory stance.) With that in mind, a major thrust of their politics is to break unions—especially public service unions as we have seen over the past few years. With no unions, teachers believe they are completely at the mercy of school administrators; unfortunately, that is what unions taught them.

Academic tenure is not a frivolous thing. Academic tenure is a faculty matter. Only tenured faculty belongs to the faculty. Academic tenure is not simple time in service or seniority; it guarantees teachers the freedom to teach what ever it is that you want to teach. If a professional teacher has proven to educational administrators and fellow teachers, he or she is dedicated to his or her students and is properly educated and competent. The administrator should recommend and the faculty should grant that teacher the right to teach whatever he or she think their students should learn. The faculty is in charge of enforcing that teacher’s right.

This is not smoke and mirrors. In the two universities where I taught, administrators would oversee faculty who could award tenure but it was a faculty decision. The faculty could award academic tenure early but it usually took six years of evaluation. The shorter time in residence to tenure could reflect merit but it could also reflect experience gained at other institutions. For example, the administration could not hire a full professor without granting tenure first. At the end of six years for a new hire, if the faculty did not award tenure to the teacher, that person had one year to find a new job. The six-year timeframe was there and was as long as it was to establish teaching competence—especially important for a young teacher.

Teachers themselves, school boards, school administrators, and especially teacher unions have corrupted the process. The most vulnerable point of corruption are school boards, which is where conservative politicians in North Carolina are now attacking the system. They do this by controlling elections to school boards—in fact, multimillionaire Art Pope started his nefarious corruption of government with a school board election. They are attacking the system for their own political and social advantage not to benefit the students—call it for what it is: social engineering. Need I remind you that this is Jesse Helm’s home state? In the past race and religion were leading causes of problems in schools: school integration and before that the Scopes trial are cases in point. There is ample evidence that there are those who are trying to bring the “bad old days” back.

Already, school boards and school administrators have done immeasurable amounts of harm, especially across the South, where school boards force teachers to teach creationism and not evolution—biology cannot make sense except in the light of evolution. They teach biblical law and not secular law, which they can do because of tenure; meaning tenure is not always good. The reason this happens is that conservative groups and churches heavily fund campaigns for school board members but also that is what parents want teachers to teach. The result is that these school boards force teaching of Christian values in public schools as if the students were in a church. Of course, some teachers believe what the school boards tell them to teach while others use what they learned in college or adhere to programs such as “Federally suggested” common core; the right way to use tenure.

Academic tenure protects a teacher’s right to teach; nothing more nothing less. A school administrator can fire a teacher with or without academic tenure for workplace infractions such as inappropriate personal or workplace behavior but not for what they teach. For example, a public outcry arose at the U of M some years ago during the rabid anticommunism Joe McCarty years over a tenured political science teacher who was teaching communism, when a rich local business owner publically demanded that the university fire this “commie” professor. Shamefully, the university administrators wanted to comply but the faculty rightfully resisted, and the professor held his job. The administrators were more worried about the universities reputation than about teaching an important subject. If that professor had come to class inebriated, for example, the administrators could and should have fired him and the faculty would have supported the decision. Thus, the rules of tenure intend that the faculty will act as their “own union” in teaching matters. The fact that there is a faculty means there is a union for this purpose even if there is no teacher labor union.

We need rule of tenure but we also need labor unions. Labor unions are in schools to protect a teacher’s working conditions and seniority right, and protect them from unfair dismissal just as unions do in factories, etc. If the union isn’t there, rogue politicians and community leaders will force school administrators to fire teachers who teach evolution, or will not teach unwed mothers, gays, black teacher, any teacher that is not God fearing, or believes in abortion, or teaches workers rights. Our Republican legislature in North Carolina, in the name of progress, is driving us into the distant past.

Conservatives want to break unions for one reason. They want to be the boss—dictator—and allow no one to have the power to prevent them from doing what they want to do—they are the economic elite. As Romney famously said during the presidential campaign, “I like firing people.” I think most Americans would be terrorized when they knew of what Republicans want; if you do not know, all you have to do is read the Republican Party 2012 platform. 

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