Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Post tenure era?

DrugMonkey has a post today called "A Farewell to Tenure". It's an interesting post in the context of Mark's discussion about the ending of teacher tenure in the K-12 system.

However, I think that the major driver of the reason that tenure can be attacked in the academic world is that there is a dual career track for many academic disciplines. The fields with lots of soft money jobs (employment based 100% on external grant funding) tend to be focused on research topics that are seen as priorities. Here there are specific metrics (such as key scientific papers published and novel ideas proposed) that make it possible to actually hold competitions for funding.

What is the analogous parallel funding track for K-12 teachers?

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