In a university at least, the road to tenure is a long and difficult one, or it's supposed to be. I have a professor right now who is working on tenure, and he has had other professors from the department sitting in on his class, a process meant to ensure his quality of instruction etc. At the same time, it seems like some people manage to get in who aren't really all that good at teaching. Or perhaps they've become not all that good at teaching because they're resting on their laurels since they don't need to really do anything to maintain their tenure status. What I'd say towards tenure is this: It's important to have tenure, as it is a sign of utmost respect and confidence in a teacher. On the other hand, I do not think that tenure should stand regardless of performance. That would be like the military saying they can't relieve an officer who isn't doing his duty towards his unit simply because he's an officer. Tenure should have a review process at set times during which what the professor has done and continues to do is looked at. If you know you're going to be under review at some point, you have motivation to continue doing whatever it is you have been doing to get tenure in the first place. I want to make clear that the review should be up to peers who are actually teachers not administrators who've never been in front of a class.
Which brings me to my second point. I have always been terribly confused why teachers have unions that seem to follow the labor union's organizational methods and ethos. I think that is foolish. There are very few lawyers unions. I did a little looking into it, and essentially unions are only allowed for big practice firms, incorporated law firms. But in general, the other learned professions, which are as white collar as it gets, are not really unionized. And yet teaching, which is just a white collar, seems to be under the impression that it's a labor profession, which is simply not the case.
It also struck me in my reading that the advent of lawyers and doctors unions seems to have been relatively recent compared to that of the labor unions. Teachers were not always unionized either. The only answer that I can come up with for this phenomenon is something that I get a feel for from my dad. In his company, increasingly, "Business" people are in charge. Business people who don't know very much about the actual process of law, and who put the bottom line before the actual proper conduct of title law. If I want to get my dad riled up, I'll just ask him about salespeople and realtors in his line of work. Similarly, hospitals are increasingly incorporated into national hospital chains. And similarly, in education, frequently there are administrators in charge of the business aspects of schools, who are the head entity in their schools. The common trend here being that increasingly, MBA's and other generalized "Business" degree holders are in charge of organizations that did not spawn them, and which they do not understand. The reason my dad hates the salespeople is that they do not understand or care that doing proper title searches etc. takes time, so they make impossible promises to their customers which the lawyers must then do their best to meet, which ends up putting more and more claims against the company in dad's box. So he's stuck trying to fight to protect his company's interests when it's own mistakes are the reason it's in trouble. I have talked to a number of business majors since I came here, and they are literally taught that with the economic strategies etc that they learn they are capable of going to any business, no matte what it is, and running it successfully. So the administration of law corporations is not left to lawyers, the administration of hospitals not left to doctors and the administration of schools not left to teachers. (in an interesting side note, spellcheck wanted to capitalize realtors, but hasn't wanted to capitalize lawyers, doctors or anything else)
In all of these professions, the principles, ethics, and excellence of each is being subsumed to the gods of business. If teachers were not being treated like simple cubicle sitters by their administrators, they'd have no need whatsoever for unions for the preservation of their standing. The problem is, as I see it, the nation as a whole has put teaching, and other professions into the same relationship that the factory workers who first started unionizing have with their corporations, precisely by trying to make everything into a corporation.
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