As a sometimes contributor to the Contrarian Institute of Educators, it seems useful to explore this proposition: All public school teacher (including administrator) contracts should include a sunset or term limit clause.
Contrarianism holds a venerable position in scholarship and entertainment. At its core, it provides scholars with alternative explanations for observations as well as ways to examine relative values of actions before consigning them to empirical tests. Movements such as child advocacy grew out of such thinking. Arguably, virtually all human progress has occurred because someone considered and then offered an alternative to conventional practice and wisdom.
In that spirit, I suggest that educators examine the proposition of requiring term limits for public school teachers. This proposition grew out of my interest in learning efficiency.
I’m not sure what might result from term limits, but several things come to mind promptly. I offer them in the spirit of comity and respect for teachers and conventional schooling, with no hidden agenda.
Given that teachers can only teach what they know, term limits would open teaching to more people who know different skills and information beyond school curricula and pedagogy. Also, curricula and pedagogy hold no mystery that most people do not already know and can instruct others by virtue of having attended schools and worked in groups to earn money.
At the very least, term limits would provide target dates for teachers to live as those we teach live during the next decade or so: changing employment and probably occupations repeatedly as the emerging global economy migrates to an as yet unknown distribution of personal rights and obligations.
By changing employment, teachers would take part in schooling on an equal tenure footing with students: we’re all here temporarily, because life outside schools changes faster than schools keep up. Both teachers and students know when they will likely leave their school role, if they perform as their contracts require.
Term limits would increase teacher turnover by design rather than for other reasons. Designed turnover could result in these kinds of changes: (1) planned use of novel resolves to endemic schooling problems, and (2) reduction of reliance on experience based (some may call it either superstitious or political) behavior about why increased learning cannot occur promptly for all students with whatever resources exist at the instructional moment. I wonder if experience yields more “why not” rather than “how to” procedures for increasing student learning?
Required turnover:
Would provide schools with more personnel with experience in competitive business settings. These experiences could change schooling operating and political ideologies;
Could allow people of all ages to use Tablet PCs, UMPCs, MIDs, and other mobile communication technologies to learn whatever and whenever for whatever reason they want by selecting the style of instruction that fits them best for the moment. Government and private sector projects exist for expansion that make some if not most schooling physical-venue-free;
Could allow teachers to adapt their classroom lessons to electronic media and offer them through competitive business ventures they design and operate for their preferred student aggregates;
Could increase the rate of learning in public schooling and provide new (more globally realistic?) academic standards; and
Could support the proposition that “We the people …” rely on our individual ingenuity and enterprise, not on some group, with whatever noble intent, to decide what and when we should know and do.
Hmm. I’m not sure how much confidence to have in teacher term limits increasing student learning rates. Yet, it seems worthy of exploring further. I’d like to see what others think about it, beyond familiar protectionist rhetoric. Perhaps someone will take this idea of teacher term limits on as a term paper?
There’s a serious fly in your ointment. Every study, not to mention personal experience, shows that it takes teachers roughly 5-10 years to truly become good at what they do and that improving skill set generally maximizes at the 10-15 year mark. After that it’s mainly a question of burnout which will obviously vary from teacher to teacher based on their own personalities and the specific teaching assignments they deal with over their careers.Term limits would literally remove the best teachers from the system, not to mention make it far more difficult to attract good candidates into the system, already a serious problem along with retention of relatively new teachers.We can see from the concept of term limits for politicians that it often blows up in our faces taking away the best politicians and inflicting us with an even lesser group than we’ve ever had before.I think what you’re looking for isn’t a hard term limit but rather contracts of X number of years that can be renewed. You’d lose a lot of potential teachers in the process and it’s a bad idea but at least there’s the chance that those teachers who are first getting competent would continue in their chosen field.
Thanks, Paul, for your comments. Yes, I’d be happy if only one serious fly exists with ideas about teacher term limits. I’m an optimist. That’s one thing that drew me to teaching from business. Like you, I’ve accepted for decades thoughts like you’ve shared about experience leading to best teaching. During the same time, I’ve been in some of the best performing and worst looking schools in the country. I’ve listened to more stories about inadequate learning than good ones. That balance seems unacceptable and unnecessary. And, no, it’s not a PR problem. So, I’ve gone back to thinking about learning basics. In the process, I’m exploring alternatives to learning attributed to teaching and teachers as we exist today. Among other things, that brought me to wondering what certified and experienced good and not as good teachers do not offer learners that others might provide. And, how might these other offerings occur. I think I can connect issues you mentioned more dots reasonably, at least as incomplete thoughts. I’ll post more later, and hope you will encourage others to join you in adding your insights to these posts. I consider each comment. Does any of this make sense, inspite of the fly?