The Value of Teacher Tenure

Proposals to eliminate teacher tenure are often premised on the assumption that doing so would save money. But a post in a blog cosponsored by the American Statistical Association analyzes the budgetary effect of ending tenure and predicts the opposite.

While acknowledging that a primary reason for states to agree to give teachers tenure rights in the first place was to protect academic freedom, the post’s author, Howard Wainer, speculates that states may also have granted tenure because, unlike other job benefits, tenure has no direct cost to the employer while having considerable value for the teachers. Given this, Wainer thinks that, without tenure, school districts would have to pay significantly higher salaries to employ teachers at a given level of training and experience.

In support, he cites the example of New Jersey, which eliminated tenure for school superintendents in 1991. At the time, the average pay for New Jersey superintendents was twice that of the average teacher. After repeal, superintendents’ pay rose sharply to 2.5 times average teacher pay. In fact, in 2010, two New Jersey legislators introduced a bill to restore tenure for superintendents. Why? To save taxpayers from “bloated salaries and over-inflated, lavish compensation packages,” they said.