The Politics of Teacher Tenure Laws, 1900-1950

• In Event: Teachers and Education Politics

Abstract

During the first half of the 20th century, most American states enacted teacher tenure laws. These laws varied across a series of criteria, including the scope of education personnel covered by the law, the length of probationary period prior to tenure accrual, the extent of due process rights, termination criteria, and so forth. This paper documents the extent of this variation during these years, before offering an explanation for differences among state laws. Situating the politics of teacher tenure in broader debates about civil service professionalization, the paper argues that, while support for teacher tenure came to be broadly shared across state political parties during this era, states in which organized teachers put pressure on state legislatures tended to enact more far-reaching tenure laws. Such pressure could not be taken for granted, however, given the dominance of Progressive-era understandings of hierarchy in public education that discouraged the participation of classroom teachers in collective public politics. The New Deal, this paper demonstrates, propelled the most profound changes in the politics of teacher tenure, as state-level labor unions came to understand teachers’ occupational well-being as a matter of workers’ rights, well before most states had strong teachers’ unions. The paper examines the origins of the first American tenure law, in New Jersey in 1910, before looking three other states that enacted tenure laws of varying breadth and scope in the decades that followed: New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida, each of which, between 1935 and 1937, either enacted tenure laws for the first time or radically reformed extant tenure laws. Drawing on archival data and newspaper accounts, the paper traces the way that state-level changes in party politics and labor union militancy impacted the breadth of the coalitions that fought for expansive tenure laws. It shows how cleavages within state affiliates of the relatively conservative National Education Association (NEA), along with the moderate-radical split in labor movements, precipitated conflicts that made teacher tenure a political battleground connecting disputes over civil service reform with disputes over workers’ rights. It concludes with a discussion of how teacher tenure laws came to be understood as proper civil service policy during the pre-collective bargaining era, along with some suggestions for thinking about why popular understandings of teacher tenure have changed in the past half-century.

Author

• Nicholas Toloudis, The College of New Jersey