counterseven

Tenure as traditionally understood is already on the way out in a lot of places, and it's happening without eliminating unions.

If the unions are crushed, K-12 teaching becomes a low wage shit job that recent college grads hold for a few years and then abandon.

And don't fucking tell me competent teachers would make good money without unions. We don't need to look any further than what has happened in higher education. Adjuncts now teach a majority of college courses, and they generally make shit wages and zero benefits. Many of them qualify for food stamps. The only people making decent money teaching college are tenured professors.

Sure, a few well-funded private and charter K-12 schools pay well. But once there's no competition from a unionized workforce those wages will drop. If colleges can get competent PhDs without paying a living wage, why couldn't K-12?

Fixing tenure does not require some kind of bullshit free-market "reform" that destroys yet another middle class profession.

edits: typos edit: Teachers are currently paid reasonably well. If unions are busted this will change. I'm adding this edit because some comments below indicate that several people missed this point.

I said if unions are busted they will become low-paid. The current low-paid sad-sacks are non-tenure college instructors. Right now teaching is a reasonably well-paid middle-class job, as it damn well should be.

They're trying a new system in Colorado. Once you achieve tenure, you have to maintain it by getting sufficiently good ratings on your annual evaluation. Two years of bad reviews and you lose tenure. You are also observed much more frequently during the year.

This beats the old once-every-three-years evaluation based on two or three observations. The downside is that 50% of your evaluation is based on your students' test scores, so it's teach to the test or else you're out of a job.

According to this anti-union website, there are both unions and tenure in Texas. Maybe not as many people are unionized, but it looks like the unions have a presence there. So I don't think Texas is a counter-example to my claim.