Isn't this basically a tenure thing? AFAIK public unions make firing a First-In-Last-Out operation, which means the senior teacher you hired 10 years ago is there to stay until every single other teacher that came after is gone.
In my completely non-expert opinion, tenure seems to be a multiplier. From a students' standpoint: A good teacher with tenure is a godsend, because they feel comfortable challenging the system to make sure their job (educating the kids) gets done. Conversely, a bad teacher with tenure is a cataclysm, because they don't really want to be there, the kids don't really want them to be there, and the school administration doesn't really want them to be there, but by God, they're staying, because it's easier to collect a paycheck and hate your job than change your situation. To use a metaphor from Kevin Smith's Clerks, tenured crappy teachers are perennially shitting their pants instead of lifting the lid on the toilet seat.
perhaps, since you're suggesting it's useful, you can tell me what subjects taught in a K-12 education necessitate the teachers challenging the system?
i'd consider perhaps high school literature and history teachers, but beyond that?
Math? Instead of teaching kids to memorize formulas and just apply to them to contrived examples, teach kids how match actually works in the real world and its applications. Great TED talk on this very matter:
- Civics/Politics
- Science (especially in districts that don't want to teach students about the theory of evolution)
- "Technology" (I had a computer teacher in HS who said F it and let us play around with hacking our test routers)
So we have math, literature, social studies, and science.
In my completely non-expert opinion, tenure seems to be a multiplier. From a students' standpoint: A good teacher with tenure is a godsend, because they feel comfortable challenging the system to make sure their job (educating the kids) gets done. Conversely, a bad teacher with tenure is a cataclysm, because they don't really want to be there, the kids don't really want them to be there, and the school administration doesn't really want them to be there, but by God, they're staying, because it's easier to collect a paycheck and hate your job than change your situation. To use a metaphor from Kevin Smith's Clerks, tenured crappy teachers are perennially shitting their pants instead of lifting the lid on the toilet seat.