{"id":1235,"date":"2009-05-10T08:05:28","date_gmt":"2009-05-10T15:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1235"},"modified":"2017-12-18T08:23:45","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T15:23:45","slug":"firing-bad-teachers-just-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1235","title":{"rendered":"Firing Bad Teachers, Just Try"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sound you hear is the lid being pried off Pandora\u2019s Box.\u00a0\u00a0Jason Song\u2019s\u00a0Los Angeles Times\u00a0<\/i>investigation of efforts to dismiss teachers in California makes public what practicing educators have known for decades: that it is almost impossible to fire a tenured public school faculty member for teaching badly.\u00a0\u00a0Song\u2019s articles are the most viewed on the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/i>web site in the past week; they induced more than 1,200 comments from readers.\u00a0\u00a0The second installment about \u201choused\u201d teachers, who have been removed from the classroom but get full pay for sitting at home, is just as dramatic.\u00a0\u00a0The third installment is about teachers and administrators accused of abuse, some of whom are still on the payroll.\u00a0\u00a0And more is on the way<\/p>\n

While the set of practices involving layers of procedural due process make some sense to people inside of the educational bureaucracy, they reveal a public education to be an institution badly out of touch with reality and at odds with its central mission.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll not try to retell Song\u2019s story.\u00a0\u00a0I encourage you to\u00a0read for yourself\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>and come to your own conclusions.<\/p>\n

Song\u2019s reporting shows the system\u2019s deficiencies in the most extreme cases where teachers accused of gross misconduct are either returned to the classroom or put on paid leave, but it says almost nothing about its failure to either remediate bad teaching or remove those who simply cannot or will not teach effectively.\u00a0\u00a0The whole system needs an overhaul, not just altering due process for the most egregious cases, although that would be a start.\u00a0\u00a0Here are half a dozen points to consider:<\/p>\n

First, it is important to think in terms of a coherent system of human resources programs: recruitment and initial training, close monitoring of novices, professional development built into the job, and intervention for veterans whose teaching has deteriorated or whose behaviors are unacceptable. Good recruitment and training make discipline and discharge more defensible and less necessary. Not having a coherent system in place creates unintentional cruelty. The existing system requires a highly adversarial procedure to remove a teacher. As one educator commented, “if you weren’t crazy when the process started, you certainly will be by the time it ends.” Song’s article illustrates this process in the extreme, and the naming of the teachers involved adds an additional layer of cruelty.<\/p>\n

Second, all of these elements of a coherent system are part of what is, or should be, negotiated with the teacher\u2019s union.\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0United Mind Workers<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0<\/i>we describe how to organize around quality teaching, and there are good examples from around the country.<\/p>\n

Third, insuring quality teaching\u00a0is\u00a0<\/i>union work, or ought to be.\u00a0\u00a0The American Federation of Teachers pronounced itself in the teacher quality business a decade or more ago.\u00a0\u00a0While a flood emails in response to Song\u2019s stories rightly pointed the finger at the LAUSD administration for not moving to dismiss bad teachers, in a profession cleaning house is a responsibility of the profession.\u00a0\u00a0If UTLA wants to represent professionals, it needs to represent teaching as well as represent teachers.\u00a0\u00a0A. J. Duffy\u2019s comment that there are no bad teachers, only incompetent administrators, won\u2019t wash, nor will the notion that all that needs be done is to better train administrators.<\/p>\n

Fourth, there are proven ways for unions to engage teacher quality without giving up due process protections for teachers who have been unfairly accused of misconduct, or hounded by mean-spirited or incompetent administrators.\u00a0\u00a0And the union is right; LAUSD has its share of these, maybe more.\u00a0\u00a0Tough minded\u00a0peer review\u00a0programs work in scores of unionized school districts around the country.\u00a0\u00a0LAUSD and UTLA have negotiated a peer review system in its contract, but it goes largely unused, I suspect because neither party trusts the other sufficiently to make it work.\u00a0\u00a0On Patt Morrison\u2019s show on KPCC last Thursday (May 7),\u00a0\u00a0Duffy said that UTLA had urged the school board to expand peer review.\u00a0\u00a0It should.\u00a0\u00a0If only the board and union would learn, there are good examples from Toledo and Columbus in Ohio, Rochester, New York, and Poway, California.<\/p>\n

Fifth, to move teaching quality front and center in how teachers are evaluated, data on student performance needs to be linked to teachers.\u00a0\u00a0The California Teachers Association continues to fight a data system that would allow school systems to link student results with individual teachers.\u00a0\u00a0However, any individual school district could construct such a system tomorrow with existing district rosters.\u00a0\u00a0None have.\u00a0\u00a0While there are good reasons for teachers to fear simple-minded test score accountability, outcome accountability is inevitable, and it is a serious strategic error for the CTA to stonewall.<\/p>\n

Sixth, this does not mean that we should pay teachers according to test scores.\u00a0\u00a0There are huge practical barriers to a linking teacher salaries and student test scores, not the least of which is that schools, teachers, and parents want a broader range of outcomes.\u00a0\u00a0But to ignore student results when evaluating teachers is dereliction of duty.\u00a0\u00a0If teaching is \u201cwhat matters most\u201d to student success, then schools and the teaching profession must evaluate teacher effectiveness.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ctk<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

May 10, 2009<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sound you hear is the lid being pried off Pandora\u2019s Box.\u00a0\u00a0Jason Song\u2019s\u00a0Los Angeles Times\u00a0investigation of efforts to dismiss teachers in California makes public what practicing educators have known for decades: that it is almost impossible to fire a tenured public school faculty member for teaching badly.\u00a0\u00a0Song\u2019s articles are the most viewed on the\u00a0Times\u00a0web site […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[185],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1237,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions\/1237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}