The $900,000 Man

Ohio legislators don’t need to look to New Jersey Governor Christie to get excited about eliminating teacher tenure. A case right here in Ohio where a district incurred legal fees topping $900,000 to terminate a tenured teacher has them fired up.

A report Thursday, about the more than $900,000 in costs one Ohio school district paid to defend its firing of a tenured teacher who taught creationism, may be the opening some state lawmakers have been looking for to revisit – maybe even terminate – a 1941 law that created how teacher tenure works in the Buckeye State.


The case of John Freshwater, an eighth-grade science teacher in Mount Vernon, a small city about 40 miles northeast of the capital city Columbus, has ignited reaction from Republican members of the Ohio House and Senate, who may seize on it as the call to arms to either reform or revoke the 70-year-old law that established the due process procedure to take on a teachers and their union.


“I’m sure we will address this issue this term,” Rep. Gerald L. Stebelton said, as reported by The Columbus Dispatch. The Lancaster Republican is the incoming chairman of the Education Committee. “It is so difficult for school districts and superintendents to terminate a teacher for cause because of the cost. A lot of time, they just are not willing to face it and incur those costs with the risk of losing,” the Dispatch reported.


State Sen. Gary Cates, a Republican from West Chester, located in the southern part of U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s 8th District, chaired the Senate Education Committee in the 111th General Assembly. “It may be a situation where it’s time to make this law obsolete, get rid of it,” he told Dispatch reporters Bill Bush and Dean Narciso. “Now is the time to re-examine this and find out what needs to be changed in this statute. We can’t have school districts being put in this position.”

Should it be this hard to terminate a teacher? Aren’t existing laws against discrimination sufficient to protect teachers against wrongful termination?

If tenure is significantly altered or eliminated, I agree that Ohio must make major changes to hiring and evaluation practices. Right now most school districts and administrators do a less than stellar job evaluating teachers.

I remember a teacher in my district who was terrible. He actually would dare parents at the annual open house to complain and try to get him fired. He knew the complaints would go nowhere and he had twenty plus years of satisfactory evaluations to prove his point.

Do teachers need extraordinary protection in the workforce? Why?

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