Donna Brazile Quotes

Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for bad reasons.

Due process gives teachers the latitude to use their professional judgment in their classrooms, to advocate for their students, and to not fear retribution for speaking the truth or teaching controversial subjects like evolution. As political winds shift in school districts, due process also wards off patronage or nepotism.

Put together, what we want is a system that supports, protects, and properly pays good teachers and makes it possible in a responsible and fair way to remove teachers judged to be incompetent or abusive - that's it.

When school officials want to get a teacher out of the classroom, they have to go through an arduous and multi-year process involving hearings and appeals and lawyers and more hearings. All the while, the teacher draws full pay.

Historically, professors have defended tenure as a way to protect their individualistic thought. But tenure can also be used as a club to wield against the powerless.

I knew in my gut that there was something wrong with a system that couldn't fire its incompetents, and I had my share of incompetent college teachers.

I'm a tenured professor. But I'd get rid of tenure.

In the rest of the industrialized world, your boss can't fire you unless he or she can give a good reason. In America, with certain exceptions, your boss can fire you for any reason at all or for no reason at all.

Tenure is an artificial protection for a job regardless of performance.

While I agree completely that attracting good teachers is difficult, and we need to spend more time doing that - in part by paying them more money - I don't think there's any evidence for the idea that somehow tenure attracts good teachers. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary.

This is a tough business, and you're asked to do a job. And part of doing that job is to rate and to do well and to perform, and at certain points, when people are unable to do the job they're hired to do, what happens is people are let go. Their contract is not renewed.

I hate tenure. Tenure allows teachers to put their feet up on the desk and possibly have a job forever. That's why I got turned on to charter schools. It's a business model. Every employee and every teacher will be monitored by performance.

Everyone acknowledges that there is a political part to tenure, but no one likes to admit it.

Public school teachers enjoy a huge amount of job security, thanks to their powerful unions and inflexible work rules.

It's the way tenure works, together with dismissal protections that tenured teachers have, that no other public employee has, which makes it almost impossible to remove a grossly ineffective and incompetent teacher or, in some cases, even an abusive teacher.

If I got sacked because my results weren't good enough at Everton, I accept it, but getting sacked when they finish eighth, it is ridiculous. In fact, it is ludicrous.

I propose that a teacher's pay be tied to merit, not tenure. And I propose that a teacher's employment be tied to performance, not just showing up.

The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engages in gestures of superficial equality.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another.

We have to stop our jobs from being stolen from us.

I'd require that every university, public or private, be governed by the constitutional standards regarding freedom of expression and due process. There is no reason for treating adult college students any differently in the university setting than in the outside world.

We are going to do everything that we can to protect working families in this country.

Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law.

The real test of one's belief in the doctrine of Habeas Corpus is not when one demands its application on behalf of one's friends but of one's enemies.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.