Let's just dive right in and look at the two sides of the debate.

• Teacher tenure is absolutely necessary. It ensures that teachers have adequate job protections in place, preventing experienced teachers from losing their jobs to less experienced—and therefore less expensive—ones, and also protecting all teachers from being fired for personal or political reasons.

• Teacher tenure should be eliminated. It is a barrier to ensuring that our schools are staffed with the best teachers possible. Tenure makes it nearly impossible to fire incompetent teachers, which in turn slows down progress and innovation in the field of education and dooms our students to a never-ending stream of substandard instruction.

It's pretty high on the likely scale that you agree (at least "ish") with one of the above statements. And that makes you part of the problem.

Wait, come back.

But really, there's just not a lot of middle ground in this debate. People are either for teacher tenure or against it, and thanks to other educational issues—unwieldy budgets, the school choice debate, and the generally poor performance of U.S. students in comparison to their foreign counterparts—it has become an increasingly polarizing issue over the past 30 years.

So what's the solution?

Whoa, don't get ahead of yourself. First, let's get into a little background.

A Little Background

Initially—way back in 1886—tenure was instituted as a protection for teachers against political favoritism or gender bias. And those were things that weren't exactly idle threats back when labor wasn't unionized and women couldn't vote.

Thanks to the eventual unionization of teachers (the AFT formed in 1916), more than 80% of teachers had job protection in the form of tenure by the mid-1950s (source). And that was a good thing, considering a fair number of them were accused of being subversive during the McCarthy era and may have been fired otherwise.

Everything was pretty good until 1983 when Ronald Reagan's A Nation at Risk report suggested that the state of American education was, at best, mediocre. Then, just two years later, the Illinois Board of Education released a report illustrating just how hard it was to fire tenured teachers.

Since then, teacher tenure has been more or less under continual attack. Let's get some bullet points for the bullets that were fired at it (metaphorically, we mean).

• In 1997, the Illinois Board of Education extended the number of years it would take teachers to earn tenure from two to four, and other states began working to change their laws as well.
• According to PBS News Hour, "The Education Commission of the States found that as of 2011, 18 state legislatures had modified their tenure laws" (source), while "Florida and North Carolina sought to eliminate tenure entirely" (source). And North Carolina, by the way, did do away with tenure in 2014.
• The AFT website states that "in June 2014, in the case of Vergara v. California, a state court judge struck down teacher tenure and seniority laws as a violation of the state's constitution" (source).

Those are some hefty bullets. So what is it that people hate so much about tenure?

The Anti-Tenure Stance

As critics of tenure believe, tenure makes it hard to fire bad teachers, and so, the "bad apples" remain in the barrel, ultimately compromising the quality of students' educations.

And that's a batch of cider that's hard to stomach.

The other side might say, come on. A student might occasionally get a bad teacher yeah. What's the big deal?

Then the anti-side comes back with, well, according to a study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, "a bad teacher, as measured by his or her students' test scores, could set a student's educational progress back by 9.54 months" (source). And another study, this one released in December of 2011 from Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University, suggested that replacing a poor quality teacher with an average one "would increase the present value of students' lifetime income by more than $250,000 for the average classroom in our sample" (source).

Nothing like putting a price tag on these things to bring the issue to life.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the stats.

Although…do they ever? After all, these are bold claims, and they have their detractors. The Value-Added Measure utilized in the second study (the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff one) is considered somewhat controversial, and has been disputed by Moshe Adler of Columbia University, among others.

And of course, the stat about the 9.54-month setback (how can you really get 9.54 months?) and other claims made in the Gates-funded study are being debated as well—by bloggers, more bloggers, professors, and Stanford educated research assistants.

…to name a few.

So those are some points against, but now let's get into the whole other side.

The Pro-Tenure Stance

Those who favor teacher tenure point out that as teachers gain in experience, they also gain in salary. This makes teachers who have been in the game longer more expensive for school districts to keep on board, and therefore potentially at risk. Why? Because if not for tenure (they argue), teachers with years of experience under their belts might be jettisoned for younger, less experienced teachers—ones who happen to come with a smaller price tag.

So that's one big argument on the "pro" side. Further, advocates of tenure argue that the institution as a whole is being misrepresented. Instead of "making it impossible to fire a bad teacher," all tenure does is guarantee that a teacher receive due process. According to Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, "Typically, tenure guarantees that teachers must be given reason, documentation, and a hearing prior to being fired" (source).

And while some critics have claimed that "due process" translates into lengthy, expensive, and resource-consuming litigation that most administrators would be loath to pursue, some data disagrees. Dana Goldstein (author of The Teacher Wars) reports "that in 2007, 2.1 percent of American public school teachers, including tenured teachers, were fired for cause. She notes there are no comparable data for the private sector, but in 2012, private sector companies lost less than 2 percent of their workforce through firings and layoffs combined" (source).

And that's not to be scoffed at.

Food for Thought

If you're hungry for more information and opinions on teacher tenure, a quick online search will keep you fed for years—and it doesn't appear to be a debate that's going away anytime soon.

To keep yourself in the loop on tenure trends across the nation, we recommend visiting the Teacher Tenure/Continuing Contract page at the Education Commission of the States, where you can find the tenure requirements and policies in your state and learn about new developments nationwide. Because as long as the debate's going on, you might as stay firmly convinced of your side's correctness—whichever side you happen to fall on.