For those who want to get rid of teacher tenure

[dsc]

Would you want to be a gay teacher in rural Texas without tenure? How about a Muslim teacher in Tennessee? Maybe you want to be an atheist teacher in Utah? The simple fact is that without teacher tenure you won't have those teachers. While I came out without tenure, I knew I would get tenure in time. I honestly don't know if I would have come out but for that fact. I would like to think I would have had the courage to do so but I don't know for sure.

On edit:

Here is a link to a wikipedia map showing where gays can and can't be fired for being gay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_LGBT_civil_rights_January_2011.svg

[HEyHEY]

1. Shouldn't the constitution, not tenure protect hose people?

[dsc]

2. certainly not the gay one

[HEyHEY]

3. Really?

Can you fire someone for being gay down there?

[dsc]

5. most certainly

in over half the states including such large ones as Florida, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, gays can be fired for being gay.

[Ohio Joe]

8. Thats true

A good friend of mine was fired from Nationwide and the specific reason given was that she was gay.

[HEyHEY]

9. then how could tenure help that?

[dsc]

10. because you have to have a teaching related reason to fire the person

which being gay isn't.

[ZombieHorde]

7. Yes, but if people don't like you, they will find a reason. nt

[Luminous Animal]

12. That takes a willing litigator, cash, and a few years.

[Hannah Bell]

24. hose people? a new minority?

[dkf]

4. You can be fired for being gay?

Wow I didn't know that.

[dsc]

6. yep

[Smarmie Doofus]

13. ? NT

[dkf]

16. Well when is the last time you heard of that happening?

It seems odd there are few reports of these incidences here.

[dsc]

17. A student teacher in Oregon got removed from his placement

for replying to the question "Why aren't you married" with " I can't get married because I want to marry another man". After parent complaints over his treatment the school backed down but bottom line he was fired. That happened about a month into the school year.

[dkf]

19. That seems so antiquated to me.

I guess things haven't moved as far as I thought.

[Smarmie Doofus]

18. I've seen it happen. Plus....

I just googled " fired for being gay" and got 14,500 hits.

Including:



http://www.suite101.com/content/fired-for-being-gay-still-legit-in-28-states-a153800


No offense.... but are you pulling my leggings... as it were?

[dkf]

20. So it is illegal in a bunch of states. Good.

Still it seems odd it's not a big topic here as far as I can remember. Why would everyone be so hot on marriage before job discrimination? Very odd.

[dsc]

21. actually many people find it hard to believe a person can be fired for being gay

When I was teaching in MS, I was doing so under a special program that had people from top ranked colleges teaching in the Delta. When I told them I could be fired for being gay in MS nearly all of those people were surprised. My own sister had no clue gays could get fired since she had worked for large corporations for her working life.

[Smarmie Doofus]

22. Scary terrain. Even where it's technically illegal to fire ....

... glbts it happens all the time. In my first public school job a guy who had been let go just prior to my being hired filed a suit with eeoc ( or the local equivalent) charging that he'd been fired because of discrimination.

I found this out 'cause my supervisor... the one who did the firing... approached me and tried to sign me on a witness that the complaintant had been incompetent, malfeasant, etc, forgetting the fact that I arrived AFTER the guy had been let go. Supervisor... in trying to jog my memory described the guy as having been "effeminate"... and other thinly disguised euphemisms. He dropped it when I convinced the jerk that i wasn't there when the other guy was and therefore could not possibly serve as any kind of witness to anything.

That the guy ( almost certainly NOT tenured, BTW) was fired for being gay was subsequently made plain... as the supervisor revealed himself over time to be one of the most odious and malevolent fag-bashers i have ever seen. It was the Rock Hudson/AIDS era. Jokes, etc.; depraved stuff. He retired a couple years later, but there's plenty like him... though they tend to be quieter about it now.


Liberals who say they don't "get" tenure and/or don't "get" the need for anti-discrimination laws never fail to amaze me.

What planet are they on? It sure ain't this one.

[dsc]

23. no kidding

It is getting better overall but the betterness isn't equally distributed.

[SheilaT]

11. What needs to be changed is that someone

can be fired for being gay. In any job.

Only teachers have tenure. No one else does. It's not such a terrible thing to fire someone who is incompetent.

I've been let go from a job because I was incompetent at it.

[dsc]

14. and so are teachers

tenure merely means that they have to show the teachers are incompetent.

[Smarmie Doofus]

15. To get tenure, you have to establish competency.

At least in any system I've ever hear of.


Tenure makes it harder for someone ... again, someone who's ALREADY ESTABLISHED COMPETENCY.... to get fired 'cause the boss doesn't like his/her politics, sexual orientation, perceived lack of due deference, ethnicity, face, clothes, etc. In other words....characteristics *unrelated* to competency.

[SheilaT]

25. My point is, that there are no other jobs

that I know of that have tenure, where the job is protected no matter what. The stories about being unable to fire incompetent tenured teachers are legion. BUT, that is not the point of this thread. My point is that teachers and only teachers seem to have such protections, and everyone else out there is an "at-will" employee, and can be fired for any reason or no reason. THAT'S what needs to be changed, along with the being able to fire someone just over sexual orientation.

[dsc]

26. that is just baldly false

I am sorry but that is total bull shit. I know of no union contracts that don't have protections from arbitrary firing, which is all tenure is. Heck it is vastly harder to fire state workers here than it is teachers. Now, I do agree that at will employment is a problem which is why I favor unionized workforces. But, the simple fact is that teachers are not unique in having those protections, far from it.

[Smarmie Doofus]

27. The reasons for tenure are well established and there is no mystery involved.

wiki:
>>>>>Academic tenure is primarily intended to guarantee the right to academic freedom: it protects teachers and researchers when they dissent from prevailing opinion, openly disagree with authorities of any sort, or spend time on unfashionable topics. Thus academic tenure is similar to the lifetime tenure that protects some judges from external pressure. Without job security, the scholarly community as a whole might favor "safe" lines of inquiry. The intent of tenure is to allow original ideas to be more likely to arise, by giving scholars the intellectual autonomy to investigate the problems and solutions about which they are most passionate, and to report their honest conclusions. In economies where higher education is provided by the private sector, tenure also has the effect of helping to ensure the integrity of the grading system. Without tenure, professors could be pressured by administrators to issue higher grades for attracting and keeping a greater number of students.>>>

Education is... bottom line... about the expression of ideas. Tenure helps to protect and promote expression. That's why it has a particular application and relevance to academic environments.

Pay particular attention to the last sentence:

>>>Without tenure, professors could be pressured by administrators to issue higher grades for attracting and keeping a greater number of students.>>>

This happens all the time in public schools all over the country. People are told to change the grade. The school/district needs higher test scores.To get $$$. To stay open. Even WITH tenure, many teachers succumb and play ball. Do you see why ... with RTTP... that assorted related pressure tactics to get scores up would serve to EXACERBATE this problem? Ask yourself: do we want *accurate* scores or do we want *high* scores. There is all the difference in the world between the two.Take tenure away completely, and you have a complete catastrophe, as far as the reliability of the data that self-styled school "reformers" are endlessly trumpeting. This, i.e. junk data, or whatever else you want to call it, is not a "reform".

The business about teachers with tenure being impossible to fire is nonsense. I personally know teachers who have been fired and I personally know administrators who were able to fire teachers. The fact that Bloomberg or Duncan trot out stats that shows it's impossible to fire teachers proves nothing other than that they are capable of producing stats. The firings are represented statistically as something other than firing.

They do this all the time in NYC with all the stats... school crime, attendance, grades and teacher firings. It's less than meaningless. It's a game they play. They're pretty good at it.... but it's getting a little old by now. I think lay people should be beginning to catch on.