Royal Decree #1: The Trouble with Tenure

Tenure, essentially, is the permanence of a Teacher or Professor's job security, or simply the near inability of an educator to lose their job. Tenure, of course, is not granted immediately upon receiving a job (in most cases), but is typically granted or earned after a few years within a school system. In Tennessee, for instance, every teacher hired post-2011 must do five years of teaching (no less than 45 months) and be evaluated and judged favorably during the last 1-2 of those years. While tenure is nice for teachers, in such that having job security can help them focus more on improving their instruction styles and results, it can (and has) led to cases of teachers lowering themselves to a sub-par standard of teaching without much worry of being fired; these reasons are why some teachers, as mentioned earlier, must go through observations and multiple years of experience before being granted tenure.

A teacher being actively involved
 with their students, as opposed to  
assigning a packet of work

Personally, as a college student, I have yet to have any experience with tenure outside of learning and researching it. My mother was a teacher and thus benefitted from tenure, as did many of the teachers I encountered throughout my primary and secondary education. I had always wondered why some of the more notorious and ineffective teachers were never fired, and it was not until I took a course in State Politics my Junior year of college did I learn of the complexities of tenure and teacher job security. I will not claim to be an expert, but after this exposure to the difficult process schools have when firing their teachers who are on tenure, the problems with modern American education have made me passionate about constantly improving myself as an educator, tenure or not.