WASHINGTON D.C. – The nation’s largest teachers union will soon have a new leader, and one of her first missions will be to strike the word “tenure” from the nation’s vocabulary.

When National Education Association met for their annual convention last week, one of the things they decided was that Lily Eskelsen Garcia will be the next president of the 3.2 million-member union.

Eskelsen Garcia is currently the NEA’s vice president; she will succeed current NEA President Dennis Van Roekel on Sept. 1.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

In a puff interview with POLITICO.com, Eskelsen Garcia effectively admits that teacher unions have lost the public debate about whether or not teacher tenure is a good idea.

“Tenure” is a job protection given to teachers in most states that makes it very difficult for school administrators to get rid of ineffective educators.Tenure was at the heart of last month’s Vergara v. California ruling in which Judge Rolf Treu determined that teacher job protection laws don’t trump a student’s constitutional right to a quality education.

Eskelsen Garcia says her union needs to stop using the loaded term (“tenure”) and reframe the debate as about a teacher’s right to due process, instead of a right to permanent employment.

“Too many people have been told that it’s impossible to fire a teacher,” she tells POLITICO.com. “We want to stand for a reasonable due process when someone is about to lose their job. They should know why, they should be able to defend themselves … part of the bully pulpit that I have is to at least explain to the public that we’re talking about due process for educators.”

The NEA members who  elected Eskelsen Garcia better hope she’s as good at leading the union as she is at parsing words.

No credible teacher union critic would ever argue that tenure makes it “impossible” for a school district to sack an inept or immoral educator.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

However, it’s perfectly accurate to say that tenure makes it “virtually impossible” for administrators to fire a bad apple teacher. The reason is simple: In states with generous tenure laws, school district leaders have to jump through numerous legal hoops before ending a teacher’s employment. It can takes months – if not years – and a small fortune in attorney fees before a district can remove a teacher from its payroll.

It’s an arduous and expensive process that dissuades most school leaders from attempting to get rid of all but the worst offenders.

Even if a district initially succeeds in firing an undesirable teacher, there’s no guarantee they’ll stay fired. In numerous states, unions have secured laws that allow teachers to appeal their firing to a third-party arbitrator. And since these arbitrators only stay employed at the mutual consent of both the school district and the local teachers union, they typically split their rulings down the middle – 50-50 – to keep both sides happy.

So no, tenure doesn’t make it “impossible” to fire a teacher, but it certainly makes removing bad teachers an excruciating, expensive and exceedingly rare occurrence. Eskelsen Garcia can focus on the “due process” aspect of tenure all she wants, but many Americans will continue to view the practice as de facto lifetime job guarantees for all but the worst of the worst.