NC’s veteran teachers keep career status

The law striking teacher tenure was aimed at incompetent teachers. Instead, it exposed incompetent lawmakers.

Acting on little more than anecdote, Senate leader Phil Berger backed legislation to strip veteran teachers of their “career status,” often misleadingly called tenure. Career status does not provide the heavy protections from dismissal that tenure provides university professors. It merely means that a teacher is protected from arbitrary dismissal and entitled to a hearing.

But even that thin protection in this right-to-work state was too much for Republican lawmakers. In 2013, the legislature passed and Gov. Pat McCrory signed a budget plan that included an end to career status for teachers hired that year and beyond and phased it out for all teachers by 2018.

Six teachers and the N.C. Association of Educators sued, and Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood ruled in 2014 that taking tenure from teachers was an unlawful taking of property, though tenure could be denied to teachers who had not earned it. GOP lawmakers pressed an appeal to the N.C. Court of Appeals where the decision was upheld. They went to the state Supreme Court, which upheld the decision unanimously last week.

With that, the tenure ban joined a long list of laws passed by this legislature that failed to pass legal muster. Beyond its weak legal footing, the law was poorly aimed. Incompetent teachers are no more a problem for public schools than incompetent workers in any organization. And poor teachers are regularly weeded out by pressure from principals, their peers, parents and their own lack of dedication.

Justice Bob Edmunds, who wrote the decision, said testimony in the case showed there wasn’t a need for the law because schools were having no problem dismissing teachers who did not meet standards.

Unfortunately, the law’s elimination of career status for teachers hired since its passage remains. It’s hard to see what good it will do. Tenure is a tool for attracting and retaining good teachers. Taking it away may expedite the removal of some bad teachers, but it could also dissuade many more good teachers from coming.

As the legislature considers raises that will lift the state’s average teacher pay from its lowly 42nd rank in the nation, it would also be wise to repeal the tenure ban. It’s a change that won’t cost the state while making teaching in North Carolina more attractive.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 7:42 PM with the headline "NC’s veteran teachers keep career status."