The teaching profession is one riddled with controversy, new theories, new practices, and some whacky rules, and they just keep on coming. Perhaps one of the most hot-topic issues is teacher tenure, a system which largely restricts teachers from being fired. While this might seem like a good idea, it has become very problematic in recent years.

1. While it protects the good teachers, it secures the bad ones as well. The idea of tenure originally came into existence to protect teachers from losing their jobs when they exercised their freedom of speech. However, it has morphed into an enabling system; it's nearly impossible to fire teachers who aren't doing their job simply because they have tenure.

2. Firing teachers with tenure sucks resources. When a teacher has been proven to have terrible teaching practices and clearly cannot continue teaching, the state has to figure out how to get around tenure laws to fire him or her. The firing of tenured teachers causes the state to lose hundreds of thousands of tax dollars every year. For example, one man fed his students semen-laced cookies, and the state ended up paying him $40,000 to resign instead of firing him, simply because it was less expensive.

3. Many tenured teachers get shuffled off to low-performance districts. Though a teacher can't be fired, they can be relocated. They're normally put in schools where the parents are uninvolved and the students are unmotivated, which just continue the cycle of lack of improvement.

4. Tenured teachers get lazy. When you know your job is secure unless you display a serious "moral misconduct," you have almost no incentive to improve your teaching methods. While that is a blanket statement and there are plenty of good teachers on tenure, it would help to weed out the bad ones if we just let good teachers keep on teaching and kicked the bad ones to the curb.

5. Tenures can be granted far too quickly. California is one of five states to offer tenure in as little as 1.5 years of teaching. There's no way to tell if a teacher should be granted a lifetime of employment within three semesters of teaching.

6. It's more important to be experienced than to be qualified. When a school has to let teachers go, they normally target the ones who have been there the least amount of time instead of the ones who aren't doing their jobs correctly.

7. Education should be about the student, not the parent. Most of us care about how teacher tenure is affecting the teaching instead of the learning aspect of our schools. Why would we support a program that essentially deprives our kids of the best education they can get?

There have been some solutions proposed, most of which have been shot down in some way or another. Schwarzenegger tried to pass a bill that changed tenure to be granted after five years of teaching rather than two, but it wasn't passed. Some experts have suggested having a "renewable tenure," or a tenure that needs to be revisited every five years. Others have suggested we offer an incentive to send capable tenured teachers to poverty districts to improve their performance rather than aid in its decline. What we need to consider most when we form opinions about tenure, however, is the question: how will this affect our students?