When it comes to teach­ers’ right to job secu­ri­ty, you have to look at why man­age­ment wants to get rid of it — if you want to tell fact from fic­tion. A few com­mon myths:

So it always sur­pris­es me to hear reg­u­lar peo­ple repeat the smears against teach­ers’ job secu­ri­ty. They’re par­rot­ing the mes­sage of those try­ing to weak­en one of the largest remain­ing sec­tors of union­ized work­ers in this country.

Fir­ings were arbi­trary, they said. Eval­u­a­tions were based on favoritism. Expe­ri­enced employ­ees were fired just because they were more expensive.

In my five years orga­niz­ing with non-union health care work­ers who want­ed to join the union, job secu­ri­ty was always one of their top issues.

Myth #1: Teacher tenure means a job for life.

Teacher tenure is not like aca­d­e­m­ic tenure, which is set up through each uni­ver­si­ty. Fac­ul­ty mem­bers jump through many hoops before becom­ing tenured.

But maybe the dif­fer­ences are beside the point. Both sys­tems lay out clear grounds for dis­missal. A teacher or pro­fes­sor can be fired — for cause.

K‑12 teach­ers first won tenure rights over 100 years ago, but it wasn’t through col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments. The push for tenure sys­tems came out of the desire to pro­tect teach­ers and dis­tricts from the polit­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed fir­ings that came with patron­age politics.

It became a way to pro­tect women, preg­nant teach­ers, and peo­ple of col­or from dis­crim­i­na­tion. Also teach­ers with con­tro­ver­sial views — read, ​“pro-union.”

In fact, today char­ter school teach­ers are orga­niz­ing unions so they too can bar­gain for, you guessed it, job security.

Myth #2: It’s impos­si­ble to fire a tenured teacher.

Research shows teach­ers are fired more often than fed­er­al work­ers — above 2 per­cent, com­pared to .02 per­cent a year. These fig­ures come from Dana Goldstein’s new book, The Teacher Wars: A His­to­ry of America’s Most Embat­tled Profession.

Gold­stein also looked at com­pa­ra­ble pri­vate sec­tor data. These jobs too were more secure than teaching.

If teach­ers vio­late pol­i­cy or can’t do their jobs, it’s up to admin­is­tra­tors to make a case to remove them. That’s what due process means.

Myth #3: Teacher tenure is too pro­tec­tive — unlike oth­er sec­tors’ union protections.

Sure, the process could be tweaked — for instance, expe­dit­ed, so it doesn’t pun­ish the unfair­ly tar­get­ed and doesn’t draw out the appeals of those not equipped to do the job. (See Union Fights Teacher Jail to read how Los Ange­les teach­ers get caught in a legal limbo.)

But that’s not what they want, the peo­ple push­ing to get rid of due process.

Look at Chica­go, where the union­ized teach­ing force has shrunk by 20 per­cent, and black teach­ers dwin­dled from 45 to 29 per­cent. Teach­ers are fac­ing lay­offs year after year, while non-union char­ters grow.

Hard to make the case that teach­ers have too much job secu­ri­ty, isn’t it?

Embold­ened by anti-tenure rhetoric, Philadel­phia, Chica­go, and L.A. have been bypass­ing senior­i­ty pro­vi­sions in dis­trict poli­cies and in union con­tracts. When bud­gets are squeezed, dis­tricts push to replace vet­er­an teach­ers with inex­pe­ri­enced hires at the bot­tom of the pay scale — or not replace them at all, and make remain­ing teach­ers do more.

That’s not about what’s best for stu­dents. It’s what boss­es do, when they can get away with it, in any industry.

When peo­ple say, ​“Teach­ers may have need­ed tenure back then, but now things are dif­fer­ent and they have it too good,” remem­ber: you could eas­i­ly replace the word ​“tenure” with ​“union.”

First post­ed at Labor Notes.