Originally Posted by cabo35

The issue of tenure in the teaching profession and/or any civil service positions is significantly more complex than it appears on the surface. A fellow named Charles Guiteau arguably had more to do with the concept of "tenure" than any person or institution on earth. He was the assassin who shot President McKinley. The spoils system was in full bloom in 1881. All public employees served at the pleasure of incumbents and when leadership changed they were all swept out of office, "new broom clean sweep", regardless of talent, performance or qualifications. Guiteau had an overestimated opinion of some speeches he wrote for McKinley and largely credited himself with McKinley's election. He demanded an ambassadorship in Paris as a reward of the spoils and patronage system. When he was denied, he shot McKinley who ultimately died of his wounds and poor medical care.

Public outcries about patronage and the spoils system were ignited by the assassination. As an aside, interesting on its own merit, but, not relevant to your post is that up until this point in our history, political funding was largely dependant on patronage. As civil service materialized and expanded, funding shifted to business interests. Alas, the roots of campaign funding abuse.

While Guiteau's violent act was the catalyst for reform, it was the Pendleton Act specifically that started civil service and protective tenure laws that insulated public employees from dismissal without cause. Originally the law applied to only a limited number of federal employees but morphed over many years to what we have today including tenure in the teaching profession.

I probably lost most TOTV players with this boring, long of wind and possibly irrelevant background information so .......to the point.

I believe you have to understand the history of the past to understand and act on contemporary issues. I am not a fan of the status quo that protects lazy, incompetent teachers who game the system. However, I do not want to risk exposing the overwhelming number of dedicated professionals who could be unfairly targeted by a reversal of the system. Such a reversal may lead to manipulation of the system to the extent that it reverts back or exposes it to increased patronage consideration instead of performance. I do not believe an intelligent, definitive legislative action can be considered without factoring historical considerations into the equation less we resurrect the ghosts and mistakes of the past. To this end, the arbitrary "annual contract" clause in your post is troublesome and suspicious. If the issue is lazy incompetent teachers, I believe we are astute enough to target and evaluate them on a case by case basis without changing the way we hire them and by affording them reasonable job security.

To answer your question, I suspect whatever materializes in Florida will be a compromise of tenure protection and performance. I hope so anyway.

As a footnote for those have suffered this tedious posting effort to this point, there are considerable parallels with the development of Civil Service, the protections it offers and the development of unions. Abuses by business and industry in our early history, provided the spark that ignited the union movement in this country. I will spare you the details for now.

Have a great evening in The Villages.