There are so many different types of teachers teaching in our schools today--some are rude, some are lazy, some are careless, but some are some of the most caring people in the world. Throughout all my years as a student, I have sat in classes that consisted of teachers, playing on their phones, screaming at other classmates, or just letting us sit there and do nothing. The classes I took wth these types of teachers I either made straight As because they did not challenge us, or I failed miserable because the teacher was of no help to me. The classes that I took that had exceptional teachers who cared for us and taught us moe than the curriculum asked for are the classes that challengded me but educated me as well. Teachers today are losing their jobs at a drastic rate. Unfortunately, the teachers that are the most caring and helpful to our students today are the ones being unjustfully punished and losing their jobs. Great teachers are beginnig to lose their jobs due to budget cuts, teachers not being needed anymore, and the quality of their teaching. Along with these issues of teachers losing their careers, some poorly qualified teachers are able to keep their jobs due to teacher tenure.
The best teachers out there are losing their jobs to other careless teachers due to teacher tenure. Teacher tenure is the guarantee of protection for a teacher's job. Teacher tenure can be a good thing for teachers who actually care about their job and stdents, but it also protects those teachers who are there really just for the paycheck. ProCon, a government website dedicated to the pros and cons of controversial issues, states their opinion about teacher tenure, "...this job protection makes the removal of poorly performing teachers so difficult and costly that mos schools end up retaining their bad teachers" (ProCon). So, to keep costs down, our schools are keeping the worse tachers--how are students being properly educated that way? Teacher tenure may be good when it comes to greatly qualiied teachers, but when it saves mostly careless teachers, the bad outnumbers the good. Campbell Brown, a former newsanchor woman, is determined to protect the rights of qualified teachers and is against teacher tenure. Brown states that she wants to come up with a system that "supports, protects, and properly pays good teachers and makes it possible to remove teachers judged to be incompetent" (Strauss). Schools need to reevaluate the values they want to instill in their students. Teachers that are in their occupation to help children further in their education and guide their children in the right drection should not be getting their jobs stripped from them. The quality of a teacher should be the main factor in whether a teacher should keep his or her job or not.
The quality of some of the greatest teachers is being undermined by the new way of teaching--standardized tests. Standardized tests are given to students each year to see how advanced their education has gotten over the school year. Standardized tests should not be the reason a teacher is considered qualified or unqualified. Some of these tests consist of unlogical questions and do not have any means of educating our students. Diane Ravitch, an educational policy analyst and historian of education, states, "Our kids are being denied a full education, because so much time is being spent on test prep and on tests that are really not very good." Instead of teaching our students the arts of literature and science and social studies, our teachers are forced to teach students how to strategize, skim though literature, find the answers they need, and move on. Government is striving to have every school excel eith "100 percent proficiency" or teachers are bein punished. Having high proficiency is a great thing, but it is impossible to have 100 percent proficiency. Teaching students how to pass a test is not teaching them anything. According to Ravitch, in order to save a teacher's job, these tests
