Are there adjustments needed in the way unions roll out tenure or react to teacher evaluations?
Unions don’t write the rules. Wherever you have a contract, it’s signed by both parties. Management and unions sit together and negotiate the contract. If management doesn’t like the contract, it should insist on changing the rules. Tenure doesn’t mean you have lifetime employment. Tenure means after you’ve taught for a certain number of years—in most places it’s three years and in some it’s four—someone in management decides that you’re good enough that you get due process rights. Teachers don’t give themselves tenure. Management gives them tenure. Management has three to four years to say, you’re not a good teacher; you’re fired. That’s not what they do in other countries. What they do in other countries is they get teachers help, they get support, they get mentored. We have a problem in this country. We have 3.5 million teachers and about 300,000 leave the teaching profession every year. Some of them retire, some of them are fired, some of them leave voluntarily because they think i
