Teacher Tenure?

Let me start this by saying that at the time of this writing I am a first year teacher. I currently teach in a private school where tenure doesn't really exist. So the comments I make here are simply me thinking (and typing) out loud. In no way should my musings be mistaken for professional political discourse.  Thank You.

 Not to long ago I got into a pretty heated debate with my then fiancée (now wife) about tenured teachers. My wife was a teacher at the time of this debate and she stood on the pro tenure side. I myself represented tenure reform side of the debate. We eventually had to stop the discussion because our food arrived and the subject mostly slipped from my mind, until I came across this article. NJ Governor Chris Christie is calling for an end to teacher tenure. Suddenly the memory of that argument came rushing back.

Before I was a teacher I worked in small design shop. I knew that if I did not do my job than I would face being fired. This was known and understood by everyone in my place of employment and nobody really thought anything of it. We did our job, got our paycheck and went home. At that time I thought that the school system should work the same way. Successful Teacher = Learned Student; if that simple equation was not fulfilled than the teacher was not doing their job and should risk being fired. As I began studying to be a teacher however I realized that the equation may be much more complicated than that. I'm no math professor but I think it could look a little more like this: where t=teacher, s=student, p=parent, m=available materials, x=student performance, e=environment; (t+(s*p^2))/-m = x/e. Correct me if I'm wrong but that is to many variables to put on the shoulders of a teacher alone. I do however still believe that the tenure process is too protective in many ways. Check out this chart below to see what a worst case scenario looks like for a tenured teacher who is not doing their job (click image for a larger version);

This is a problem

A teacher that is blatantly not doing their job does not deserve 2-5 years to continue not doing that job. Very few (if any) jobs offer that kind of protection.

One of my professors related a story to me from when he was a principal. He had a tenured teacher who would literally clip his nails during class while the students copied from the text book. My professor (we will call him Mr. A) attempted to start the process of getting this teacher fired. He was unable to get sufficient evidence that he was not doing his job and therefore was unable to proceed. Eventually Mr. A witnessed this teacher push a student into the lockers and Mr. A was finally able to move forward with the process of firing the teacher. Because the accusation involved physical student contact the teacher was suspended with pay while the process began. It took 2 years for the evidence to be gathered, and all the paper to be signed and verified. After all of this, the day before the hearing the teacher's lawyer called the school district and said the teacher would be willing to tender his resignation if the school would simply pay one more year of salary. The school was forced to accept the offer seeing as if the trial went to court the teacher could have appealed and cost the school much more than that one year of salary.

The above story is a worst case scenario, however the opposite can be true as well. Teachers must be protected from arbitrary action against them. One of my excellent friends is a very capable teacher in the public school system and facing the possibility of being fired by the new principal of her school. The principal does not get along with my friend and because she is not tenured she has little protection from an arbitrary dismissal. Without tenure our students face a possible problem with schools attempting to slash budgets and do so by releasing their highest paid (and commonly most effective) teachers. 

As I said above I am a first year teacher in a school that does not have to worry about tenure. I am unsure of where I stand on the line. I find myself however balanced very precariously. If someone was able to present a viable option of tenure that did not protect the teachers that were simply incompetent  I would probably fall on the side of tenure reform.

Where do you fall on this issue? Do you think that teachers should be protected just as they are? Do you think that there should be a little wiggle room for principals to purge teachers that are under-performing or even prove to be making the school worse?