This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, August 11, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Lawsuits challenging teacher tenure are gaining traction, opening up a new channel for challenging the

controversial institution of virtually guaranteed lifetime employment.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom offers his assessment.

This discussion has come about, I think, a kind of a surprising way.

You have people suing over teacher tenure because teachers that have been in the

classroom perhaps ineffective or worthless or less than worthless actively

damaging and then Whoopi Goldberg comes in and offers her comments saying of course something I think basically everybody agrees on that

Terrible counter-productive teachers should not be paid to be in a classroom.

Things are looking bad for the teachers unions who at this point are about the only people

who defend teacher tenure that is very broadly given and very difficult to take away for almost

any teacher.

So you even have now celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg saying it you just can't you can't justify anymore policies that make

it nearly impossible to get rid of teachers who are doing a demonstrably horrible job.

Now it's probably not most teachers, but we have plenty of examples of teachers who've

done really egregiously bad things, or at the very least,

and you know, have been accused of it. In many case we find out they

did, who have to be kept on, even if they're not in a classroom, they have to be kept on, they

have to be kept, they paid, and they have multi-year very complicated very expensive sort of litigation

you have to go through to get rid of them and so whoopi Goldberg now Campbell

Brown reporter on television for a long time.

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