Making teaching jobs crappier and less secure is not likely to get people to stick around.
By Peter Greene
To hear some folks talk about tenure, you would think that one of the biggest issues facing education is a glut of teachers, a veritable mountain of wrinkled old classroom geezers blocking the career paths of a million Bright Young Things who are itching to get into the classroom. Oh, if only tenure and FILO didn’t allow them to sit there in lumpen uselessness while hot young blood congeals somewhere else, unused potential unrealized.
All the way back to education serial failure Michelle Rhee’s Time cover appearance, broom in hand, the prevailing image has been of the need to sweep away the tenure-protected deadwood. It’s a compelling image — it’s just not closely related to reality.
The Economic Policy Institute thinks we don’t even have enough teaching jobs. By their count, we should have 377,000 more job openings, which I’m pretty sure would take care of every enthusiastic twenty-something who’s allegedly languishing somewhere.
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