Firing Teachers and Imprisoning Terrorists

Chad Orzel writes at Uncertain Principles:

"The argument that we must make it easy to fire teachers to improve education is essentially identical to the argument that we must deny due process rights to accused terrorists to win the 'War on Terror.'"

I strongly disagree. No one has a right to teach at a public school. So when we fire a teacher we don't really deprive this teacher of any fundamental rights. Imagine a small school has a need for only one calculus teacher. The current calculus teacher has done a wonderful job. But the school has found someone else willing to work at the school who would do an even better job. If the purpose of education is to help students rather than teachers then the school should fire its old calculus teacher to hire the new one.

A school should continually try to get the best possible teachers. A "bad" teacher, therefore, is a teacher who is not as good as someone else who is willing to take his job. A teacher, therefore, might have done nothing wrong and yet still deserve to be fired.

Because we need only a certain number of teachers, many people will be denied the ability to be a teacher. Even if you were to define having a teaching job as a "right" many, many people must be denied this right. Some of these people will be those who used to teach and others those who can't get their first teaching job. When you increase the "rights" of old teachers to keep their jobs you necessarily reduce the "rights" of perspective teachers to enter the profession. No such analogous zero-sum rights logic applies to terrorist suspects because the freeing of one accused terrorist does not force the government to imprison another accused terrorist.