Saturday, December 26, 2009

Tenure: Golden Handcuffs

As you know, I believe that tenure is wrong. Simply said: Why should any employee be assured a job? Worse yet, all you have to do to earn it is behave well during a ~3 year probationary period. I just don't understand how employees stay motivated, highly effective and focused on the School's/Company's goals without both carrots and sticks to guide behavior. This relies too much on intrinsic rewards and people just happening to have "common goals" for my taste.


Now for an interesting spin, as usual... Tenure does have a huge benefit.


For the school districts !!!


Over the past 20 yrs I have often heard teachers say that they are unhappy with their current district or situation. Me being me, I ask them if they will start looking for a new position in a different district. To date, not one teacher has been willing to give up tenure in search of a better environment. Therefore it seems that good teachers are trapped in questionable districts.

I am not sure if this is good or bad... I am guessing the teacher's intrinsic motivation suffers in this case of "feeling trapped". However, maybe the job security offsets it.

Thoughts?

2 comments:

  1. I recall seeing a study showing a significant percentage of teachers' performance drops off within a couple years of reaching tenure. If that's true, why? Boredom? No incentive anymore?

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  2. I would be interested in the study link, if you could find it. How they measured performance would be very interesting.

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