The institution of tenure for school teachers is merely the product of our dysfunctional public school system. It is curious that this practice exists almost exclusively in the education industry. Why is this? Why do we think that school teachers are in need of more protection than any other class of workers? If it is important to protect teachers from the whimsical and capricious actions of their supervisors, it must also be important to protect other professionals. In fact, why don’t we make it impossible to fire anyone after a few years on the job?
The very obvious reason that this practice does not exist in any other industry is that it is horribly inefficient. It encourages good behavior and effort only up until the time when tenure is granted. Afterwards, the rational individual will work just hard enough to not be fired (although certainly there are motivated individuals who will always do their best). In most cases (especially in education), that is very little effort indeed. That is why there are so many complaints about ineffective, tenured teachers that do barely enough to scrape by.
If there ever was a problem with teachers being fired for reasons unrelated to performance, it could only happen because consumers (parents and their children) have no other options. When parents can remove their children from a school if the quality suffers, the administrators have a powerful incentive to keep the best teachers, regardless of whether they like them. Once the public school system removed the consumer oversight that only a free market can provide, administrators could play favorites with teachers with no thought towards losing customers.
This is an issue of unions in general, and can be seen in any field that unions dominate (ie, the automobile industry). Tenure is a result of teachers’ unions dominating public schools. Politically cripple the teachers’ unions and tenure won’t make much sense anymore. (If it ever made sense…)