California students file suit to nix tenure law

[JDPriestly]

25. Could you explain, please, how tenure deprives someone of a civil right.

Even if a teacher has tenure, he or she can be fired for cause. Please explain.

Tenure just gives a teacher a right to be heard. Any employer can sue an employee for wrongful termination -- breach of contract, discrimination, etc.

Tenured teachers have a contractual right to not be fired without cause. I'm not sure how it is in grades 1-12, but the process to which a tenured faculty member at state universities is entitled for job performance reviews and hiring and firing is codified.

In addition to the likely difficulty attracting good people to teaching if they cannot be assured some opportunity for job security is the need to protect academic freedom in the public schools. This is not as great a problem in grades 1-12, but it is a very big problem in colleges and universities.

And I would say that it is also a big problem in fields like science, language and literature and especially social studies even in the earlier grades. Get a bigoted or anti-science school board somewhere and you will find highly qualified teachers being fired simply for teaching good science or challenging students to think about the meaning of history and government.

So a very good argument can be made that teachers' tenure actually protects the civil rights of students in that it allows more intellectual freedom for the teacher in the classroom.

Personally, I think the biggest problem in our schools is in the homes from which children come.

And our country does nothing to correct the intellectual and social damage that is done to many children in their first years of life by parents who do not know how to prepare their children for life, much less for the classroom. This could be easily changed. The government disseminates health information. Why can't it disseminate information about good parenting?

The best way to improve American education is to go to Austria, Germany and France (maybe other countries too), study their free, public kindergartens for children ages 3-6 and implement a kindergarten system that is free for all children and resembles those European models. Then start children in first grade at the age of 7 (rather than 6) and test them to be sure they are ready to begin school at that age.

My own children went to European kindergarten and elementary school because we lived there. The education was excellent.

And, by the way, in the area in which we lived, the first grade teacher stayed with the same class throughout grade school. That also provided more continuity. The grade school teachers emphasized rote learning (too much in my opinion) and schools were very orderly. Bad behavior was not tolerated by the community or the parents. The schooldays were short. My children came home shortly after noon, ate lunch at home and did homework starting from the first week of school. Most of the parents sat with their children as their children did homework. I did not need to because my children paid attention in school and understood their lessons. Parents made sure their children paid attention and worked hard. That is not the case in many homes in the US. And then those parents in America who have not trained their children to behave blame their children's teachers. But American teachers are far better trained in many respects than the teachers my children had in Europe. (I thought the kindergarten teachers were excellent, but the grade school teachers were not as well trained as ours.) I think it is poor parenting when parents blame the teacher for their child's problems. Instead, parents need to take responsibility for their children's education.

Again, it's the blame the other guy syndrome. No. Take responsibility for the education of your children. My children are bi-lingual. When they started high school, we required them to do extra work to learn English vocabulary and grammar because their English was not as good as that of other children in the school. They caught up. But a lot of American parents would rather watch TV in the evenings than check their children's homework or assign extra work. That is not always the case, but it is often the case with children who are having trouble in school.

Parents need to take more responsibility for their children.