Tenure is in the cross hairs of Missouri legislative leaders, who are preparing a bill to phase out teachers' legally protected job security, and of the authors of a statewide ballot initiative, who want to make it easier to fire teachers at will.

It is debatable whether stripping experienced teachers of tenure will (as advocates argue) lead to better-quality teaching, or (as critics maintain) encourage financially motivated purges of the most experienced teachers regardless of ability.

But there can be no debate on how ending tenure will impact the teaching of journalism in public schools. It will effectively end it.

Each year, dozens of America's best journalism teachers are fired, demoted or transferred solely because they refuse to stop their students from pursuing truthful news stories exposing their schools' shortcomings. Many more "voluntarily" leave the profession under the weight of threats and intimidation that make their jobs unbearable.

It is only because of tenure that many of these victims have jobs at all, though they often are punitively reassigned to the least-desired classes and locations. That is how a high school in Madison, Va., ran off an exemplary journalism teacher, Katherine LaRoue, last year — because her students truthfully reported the findings of county inspection reports exposing extensive health and safety defects in their decrepit school.

Fifteen courageous teachers whose careers were sidetracked or ended by retaliation came forward in 2008 to tell their stories to the California legislature. Teachers like Darryl Adams, who was stripped of his journalism duties after his principal questioned his loyalty for refusing to censor an editorial critical of the school's random student searches. Teachers like Teri Hu, who was reassigned — and whose students were threatened with discipline — after the newspaper accurately revealed that the school was out of compliance with district regulations on the use of teaching assistants.

The weight of these stories was so overpowering that even school administrators' special-interest lobbyists were unable to stop California from enacting the nation's best statute protecting teachers who refuse to participate in unlawful censorship. But California remains one of only two states, joining Kansas, that expressly outlaw such retaliation.

There is room for legitimate disagreement over whether tenure makes it too difficult to remove incompetent teachers. But there can be no disagreement that holding good teachers hostage to deter students from criticizing the school is wrong.

If teachers are stripped entirely of legally protected job security, then journalism education in the public schools is effectively dead, and so is the public's best tool for holding schools accountable. Only the most daring — or financially secure — journalism teachers would encourage their students to pursue candid stories about unsafe or ineffective schools if they know that one phone call can end their careers. The losers will be not just the teachers, but also the parents and taxpayers who need vigilant students to serve as their eyes and ears, "embedded journalists" in the spaces where professional reporters cannot or will not go.

If tenure is to be abolished, it cannot be replaced with nothing. It must be replaced with retaliation protection that insulates teachers who refuse to take part in censoring their students' lawful expression.

Retaliation protection can be the "way forward" through the polarizing tenure debate, outlawing the most indefensible personnel actions that everyone can agree are illegitimate. Because retaliation invariably targets the journalism teachers who are the most capable and the most effective, this is where the objectives of job security and of educational quality are, indisputably, in perfect alignment.

Attorney Frank D. LoMonte is executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a nationwide legal services and advocacy group based in Arlington, Va.