We won't have reasonable parents any time soon (unless of course we start with reasonable kids and wait 20 years). Now reasonable administrators might work but where do we find the? It is not exactly a position that is coveted by reasonable people, it would guess it would attract and inordinate number of bureaucrats and authoritarians.
Think of it from a teacher's perspective: you do your job, when out of nowhere some nutcase or religious zealot comes out of the woodwork and tries to get you arrested, and failing that, pressures the school board to have you dismissed.
Right or wrong, this teacher will be tainted and have his or her career ruined, over the use of a book in the classroom. Ender's Game is a book that has been widely used in high schools for at least 15 years.
Agreed, but improving the quality of administrators is incredibly difficult to do and forcing parents to be rational about their children is pretty much impossible.
So we're left with tenure as an imperfect but practical way to limit the damage that can be done by bad administrators and crazed parents. Which is why tenure is important.
Tenure is meant to protect controversial research, not controversial teaching. Somewhere, we decided that researchers should also be teachers and now the two have been conflated.
