Commentary: It’s time to make revisions to teacher tenure

If you went to Subway, and the person making your sandwich wasn’t wearing gloves as they held your tomatoes with the bare hands they just sneezed on, you might get the manager to urge his employees to be more sanitary.

What if the manager told your sandwich maker is known not to wear gloves, and he’ll talk to her, but she’s covered by the “Sandwich Makers Law” that ties his hands from enforcing the behavior?

Gross, right? The same reaction should be stirred up in the pit of your stomach when you hear “teacher tenure.”

Teacher tenure was designed to protect teachers from being terminated for discriminatory reasons, like for being pregnant or because someone had an ax to grind.

Teachers are life-breathers, education-givers and hope-peddlers. Most teachers spend over six hours a day shaping the young minds of our future leaders and absolutely deserve to be protected. After a few years, a teacher is eligible for tenure.

Tenure states that just cause must be found for a teacher to be terminated. This helps to provide job security and prevents teachers from being fired for personal reasons. The firing process is lengthy and expensive, discouraging firing as an option.

Just like how doctors must follow an ethical code, educators have a code of ethics. Principle one on the code of ethics is to have a commitment to the student. This includes showing respect, protecting the student from harm and striving to help the student live to their potential. The second principle is their commitment to their profession. They encourage other teachers to be professional and to promote trustworthy behavior.

Yet, just like any situation, a few bad apples can ruin things. Some teachers have lost their passion — whether they arrive to work every day forgetting the passion they once had, or punch the clock and lose sight of their commitment to the students.

Some teachers are doing more harm than good. I know this because I have worked with students for over 10 years and hear the word tenure used as an excuse why a teacher wasn’t performing at their best. I hear tenure used as a saying to steer one away from filing a complaint.

As a future social worker, it’s my duty to advocate for children. Children deserve a teacher who will listen when no one else will. They deserve patience, when they probably don’t deserve it. The classroom should be a place where they find their unique strengths.

A teacher should be a positive adult in their life who tells them they can. It’s unnerving to think there are little-to-no consequences for those teachers who don’t honor those things.

This isn’t a new debate. People have been trying to abolish tenure for years. Recently, in California, school districts were sued for failing to use student test scores to evaluate teachers. The ruling showed that “There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms.”

This is a victory. For now, we have open ears and a ball rolling. Now that we proved there are a number of students ineffectively being taught, let’s dig deeper.

Tenure can be a great reward for excellence. Tenure should be tweaked to reflect rigorous evaluations by the staff, the district and students. Teachers should practice what they preach by continuing their education through seminars, learning updated techniques and dealing with behavioral issues.

If teachers agree to be accountable for their conduct in the classroom on a yearly basis, then they may continue having their tenure. Maybe instead of blaming teachers and having a divide, we stand united and refine tenure to honor and protect the hard-working teachers, yet have continued standards of excellence that weed out the ones who don’t deserve to shape our children.

The ball is rolling, and we need to keep it rolling toward amending teacher tenure. Because, just like a sandwich maker holding your tomatoes bare-handed, it is absurd of us to know there are glitches in our children’s education, yet do nothing.

Talk to your local school district about what they are doing to ensure that your kids, your neighbor’s kids or your future dentist is getting the education they deserve from a teacher who still upholds their code of ethics.

JENAE SUITE is a graduate student in social work at USC’s Irvine campus..