In the 1960s, when teachers’ unions were first gaining in numbers and strength, two areas of concern were under what conditions a teacher should be fired, and who should do the firing.
Until this point, teachers could be fired based on the whims of principals or school board members for reasons that were arbitrary in nature. In response to this, unions fought for and changed teacher evaluations to include a systematic approach that used due process.
It is interesting to note that little focus was put on teacher performance, at least as far as their performance was reflected in the performance of students. Why was this?
At that time the purpose of education was to rank and sort students. The teacher’s main role was to separate the wheat from the chaff, the cream from the milk-in other words to make sure there were winners and losers. This was easy enough to accomplish-the bell curve was applied throughout schools.
Bell curves, regardless of the level of achievement obtained by students, give us winners and losers. So, there was no need to judge teachers based on how all of the students were achieving. Instead teachers were assessed based on teacher behaviors as they related to student achievement.
In other words, student achievement was not assessed, but rather the behavior of teachers was. With the standards movement of the late 1990s came increased expectations for student performance and renewed concern about teacher practice. But teacher evaluation did not adapt to the fundamental change in the purpose of education.
It is clear that fundamental changes need to take place in how we evaluate teachers. So who’s in the way? Is this the union’s fault or the fault of all stakeholders? My brief history of teacher evaluation was spurred on by the recent barrage of complaints about teacher unions and the “difficulty” in getting rid of “bad” teachers posted on this site.
Many on this site have sung the praises of schools that have shrugged off the burden of teacher unions and district oversight, without much evidence to support their praises.
Here’s what I’d like to see: how many “bad” teachers have been fired from charters? Why were they fired? How was student achievement used in the evaluation of these teachers? Was it used? What standards are used in the evaluation of teachers? Who does the firing, a committee of many or a committee of one?
It seems very convenient to bash unions and blame them for the lack of education reform (European schools have very high rates of union membership along with high rates of student achievement. Why is this? As Arizona State University’s Education Policy Research Unit reported “Several studies found math, economics and SAT scores in unionized schools improved more than in non-unionized schools. Increases in state unionization led to increases in state SAT, ACT, and NAEP scores and improved graduation rates. One analysis attributed lower SAT and ACT scores in the South to weaker unionization there.”).
I am not saying unions do not have some role in the lack of “real” reform “real” quick in education. They do. But so do all of the other stakeholders and policy makers. Let’s recognize that the purpose of education has changed. More importantly, let’s recognize what the change means in terms of curriculum, instruction, funding, and policymaking.
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Mark’s post conveniently eclipses that this “union bashing” had a very specific beginning: last year Denver’s district schools did not dismiss a single teacher for performance. To wield the blunt accusation of “union bashing” is not much more helpful than any actual bashing. He makes the point that unions are also associated with positive results — and that is exactly right: it is not just union existence, it is specific policies that are the problem (plenty of non-union schools are bad too). So let’s get back to the specific policies.
Was there not a single district teacher last year who deserved to be released? I have yet to hear anyone say this is either likely or true. If not, the question then is why no one was released? I have yet to year anyone say this was due to anything other than the protections under the DCTA agreement.
Here is a (slightly dated) chart on teacher dismissal in Colorado: http://commongood.org/colorado-dismissal.html
IN the specific case, it took 27 months and over $87,000 to dismiss one teacher. Explain how that system should be immune from criticism. Dismiss that as union bashing (and be assured I’m an equal opportunity basher) if you will, but first try a counter argument on the policy. A link to the DCTA agreement is below.
Can we agree that some teachers should be released for performance reasons? IF so, who should make that decision? In my mind, that is a decision for school leadership – primarily the principal, as well as a department head or others with some supervisory authority. And yes, there should be an appeal process. But currently the school principal has far too little say over their teachers (in fact, under the SLT they are a minority participant). There must be accountability at some point in the supervisory chain (or do you argue that teachers should be unsupervised?). Is there someone else who should have control over who releases a teacher? Again, make a counter argument if you want (and the SLT is not a strong one), but don’t dismiss the criticism.
Evaluations, in and of themselves, mean little without some consequences. For a good evaluation, there should be some positive outcome, and for a poor evaluation there should be some negative outcome. What is the outcome currently for a teacher who receives a poor evaluations? A remediation plan that is constricted to the point where it becomes more difficult to apply than it has use. Data — any data — is useless if it does not shape a different outcome. The evaluations too infrequently lead to different outcomes.
I don’t know the answers to the broad questions about charter schools, but as a single data point, a charter school with which I am associated released two teachers in our first two years (one might be better described as a mutual dismissal). These decisions were based on evaluations which included student performance. The Head of School discussed both dismissals with his leadership team, but it was his decision. District schools over those same two years dismissed 4 teachers, or less than 0.01%. So while I’m pretty confident saying that charters have dismissed more teachers than district schools, that itself is not the point. The point is that charters allow their principals the freedom to hire, to evaluate, and to release teachers, and to do so at the school level. Make a case for a superior system if you want, if you are going to ask “who is in the way,” I’d suggest this as a method to get people out of the way.
There are several DCTA positions I emphatically support, and I don’t know anyone who believes that unions will not continue to be a major part of the dialogue on education reform. I (and I suspect many others) don’t want unions to go away. We want them to change — and to change very specific policies and practices. The banal claim that all stakeholders should share the blame is not as substantive as discussion about how these policies should change.
DPS/DCTA agreement http://www.denverclassroom.org/contract/08_11_Agreement.pdf
[...] teachers unions aren’t the only ones to blame for the backwardness of teacher [...]
AOoms,
It’s amazing how often this faulty line of reasoning is used to blame unions for poor student performance. A school district doesn’t fire any teachers so the unions must be protecting the bad teachers. There are so many other ways for a teacher to leave that don’t involve due process(darn those constitutional rights). None of those teachers are included in your argument. So many teachers quit, move or take early retirement. Some are given administrative assignments that must by law be performed by a teacher.
Secondly, how do you blame the union for the process illustrated on the commongood website? Every step is the consequence of state education law. Most of that law was enacted by state legislature before teachers’ unions had any say at all, and each protection has parallels in laws for all civil servants. If unions were powerful enough to mandate education law, they wouldn’t even need to negotiate contracts.
Thirdly, the $87,000 you mention includes the teacher’s salary during the dismissal process. According to the website, the education department can now ask that the teacher be suspended without pay during this process. Also, I’ll bet that the teacher was probably qualified, but had high enough standards that he refused to use any curriculum but his own. I don’t condone insubordination, but this case is neither a good example of the difficulty involved in getting rid of unqualified teachers, nor does it have anything to do with failing students.
Finally, the teachers dismissed by your charter school could just as easily have been dismissed by a public school, since they were on probationary status. Again I refer to the commonground site. It’s probably easier for the Head of School to fire teachers since he doesn’t seem to be accountable to anyone. I doubt that staff turnover rates matter to him. Why would an SLT keep an unqualified teacher, but a principal wouldn’t? Why is an authoritarian better than a committee when looking out for the best interests of our students? I can’t speak for Denver, but here in NYC my principal hires, evaluates and gets rid of teachers that don’t make the grade. If a principal does their job properly, they don’t grant tenure to poor teachers, and it’s easy to dismiss them. Now with new rules negotiated between the DOE and the UFT, principals can refuse to accept any teacher bumped out of another school. Doesn’t seem like the union is an obstacle.
LSteele,
1. Yes, I think school districts would fire more teachers if the union contracts were less restrictive.
2. No, I don’t believe these are “constitutional” rights (assuming you mean the US constitution and have not elevated the DPS/DCTA agreement to that level). This is a contract, not the 5th Amendment.
3. That teachers may leave for other reasons is not an argument against dismissing them for performance.
4. I blame both the union agreement and the legal system. But the law is concerned with the agreement – it is the contract which frames the legal decision. Without the contract, the law would apply as it does in other dismissals – not perfectly, but very differently.
5. Yes, I think the cost of paying someone not to work when the salary is paid by taxpayer dollars is fairly counted in the calculation, but no, my point was more on the process than on the dollars. Since you are from NYC, you have ample display of teachers not being paid to teach – I believe to the tune of $30+ million a year in the rubber rooms.
6. The charter’s HOS is fully accountable to the school’s Board, although your reference to the SLT is timely (see my new post) since there is virtually no accountability in the SLT structure. What matters to him (and the Board) is having good teachers who improve student achievement.
7. Why would an SLT keep a unqualified teacher? Partly because they SLT does not have the authority to fire a teacher. Partly because it is a group of teachers who (understandably) don’t relish firing their peers. Partly because the evaluation process (once every three years) and procedures give them little leeway. And we are not talking dismissal based on qualifications, we are talking dismissal based on performance.
8. I’m intrigued by the contention that NYC principals have considerable hiring, evaluation, and firing authority. I also don’t believe it to be true, unless you interpret the UFT contract far differently than everyone else. New York compared to Denver seems to be not much better:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/05272008/news/regionalnews/253g_to_fire_one_teacher_112703.htm
9. While I think it is admirable that principals are no longer forced to accept teachers no other school wants (Denver has done similar), that is not the same as the authority to either release, or not to hire for the following year.
10. If the union’s rules (not the union per say) are not “an obstacle”, would you favor the elimination of the specific dismissal policy?
There are some good reasons to have union and specific protections for teachers. The dismissal policy — in Denver and NYC — is not among them.
One of my points is that we need to focus on how we evaluate teachers, that is what standards we use to assess the teacher’s effectiveness. We can argue all we want about what to do when a teacher has not met those standards, but this will not increase teacher quality.
The March 1st issue of Education Week has an intersting article on the Teacher Achievement Program (TAP). This program uses mentor teachers in the evaluation process. More importantly it gives specifics standards that teachers need to meet. It’s worth a look. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/04/01/27tap_ep.h28.html
Releasing teachers who do not meet minimum standards is — happy hugs or not — a surefire way to increase overall quality. In fact, it is probably the fastest and easiest way.
AOoms
You seem to prefer teaching in a charter school. Keep doing what you believe in. We face different challenges in public schools, and I often disagree with my union, but the ed laws and union contracts are there for good reasons. Changing the dismissal rules will lead to more teachers in the firing statistics, but my original point was that the total numbers of tenured teachers who leave will be the same. Due process is a fair and just employment practice, and all government employees have it. Forgive my hyperbole.
Apparently SLTs in Denver aren’t the same as in NYC. Here they are a committee of parents, admins, teachers, building staff and sometimes students. At one time they had some importance, but Klein has stripped them of any authority.
If the HOS can hire and fire at his whim, but keeps his job as long as the stats look good, that’s not really accountability.
The rubber room in NYC is full of teachers who were bumped because their schools were closed. Due to budget cuts at the school level, principals can’t afford to hire them, so the DOE picks up the tab. No one, including Klein, has called these teachers incompetent. They are just in administrative limbo. Maybe if our schools were operating at 150% capacity instead of 225%, these teachers would have classes.
Neither of your examples in Denver and NYC are applicable to your argument. The teacher in Denver wasn’t being dismissed for performance, but for insubordination. The contract doesn’t supersede ed law. Those rules apply to all govt employees, which I am and you aren’t. Mr. Salkin in NYC could have been dismissed years before if the admin had done their job properly and not granted him tenure in the first place. Maybe if the legal team at the DOE spent less time at meetings, luncheons and press conferences, they might have taken less than 2.5 years to get the job done. When a former colleague of mine was sent to the rubber room, the DOE lost his papers twice in three months, and didn’t schedule his first hearing until 6 months after he was transferred out of our school.
At the end of last school year my principal took out ads in several newspapers and on the internet. She received dozens of resumes, interviewed candidates and hired 8 new teachers. In September our union rep met them, took down their information and sent it to the local union office. Before that time the UFT had no knowledge of the process. If she wants to dismiss any of the new hires, she can do so with a modest excuse and a small amount of paperwork. In the 7 years I’ve been at this school we’ve replaced 6-8 teachers out of 50 each year. I’m sure that 25% of them have been due to poor performance. She hasn’t had to fire them. It has been a mutually agreed upon voluntary transfer or leave of absence.
The most important thing about evaluations is that they be conducted in the first place.
If I gave you the historic numbers on this insofar as the classified workers, I imagine you would not be pleased and might even be a little surprised. As in: “None” Evaluations for extended periods of time.
“The contract doesn’t supersede ed law. Those rules apply to all govt employees, which I am and you aren’t.”
I just noticed this quotation from Loren’s post above and would like to respond to it: there are no rules applying “to all govt employees” in the context of public school districts since this is a local as opposed to national issue.
Teachers in Colorado are protected by legislation but all other employees of school districts in the state of Colorado are at-will except to the extent they are under contract with their districts, such as superintendents and probably some administrative workers such as attorneys. These people are not part of municipal or state civil service. The non-administrators are “exclusively represented” by “bargaining associations” and that is their only conduit of connection with the districts, the advancement of a “grievance” as a breach of an existing labor contract being their sole method of resolving a dispute. The bargaining associations are recognized, in the districts where recognition occurs, under a purely voluntary resolution adopted several years ago, and in the absence of these labor contracts there would be no “rules” at all. Meanwhile, school district workers in this state do not contribute to social security and in Denver, their pension benefits are currently not portable. It must seem from New York as though we are crazy here, but all these dynamics have turned out to be a nightmare and untangling them is not as easy as it may appear to those whose districts were closer together and not located in our good old Wild Wild West.
LSteele
We can differ on a few points of opinion, but there is a difference between hyperbole and accuracy that you are not recognizing.
1. “We face different challenges in public schools”
The charter on whose Board I sit (I don’t teach) is a public school (as are all Colorado and NYC charters). We are 90% FRL, all our students are from our local community, and we operate on PPOR (excepting our facility and performance bonus plan, the former since we are not in a public facility, the latter because we are not permitted to participate in Denver’s ProComp). How are our challenges different from those of a “public” school?
2. “Changing the dismissal rules will lead to more teachers in the firing statistics, but my original point was that the total numbers of tenured teachers who leave will be the same.”
No. The total number of tenured teachers who leave will increase by the number of teachers who are fired, less those who would have left of their own volition. This may be a small or large increase, but it will not be the same.
3. “The rubber room in NYC is full of teachers who were bumped because their schools were closed.”
The idea that the rubber rooms house teachers primarily who are competent but have been misplaced is rubbish. And, any of these teachers can resign and get off of NYC’s payroll at any time (by accepting another job, for example). Which they choose not to do. And lots of people have called them incompetent.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2008/05/04/2008-05-04_teachers_in_trouble_spending_years_in_ru.html
http://www.openeducation.net/2008/02/28/in-the-news-the-infamous-rubber-room/
4. “The teacher in Denver wasn’t being dismissed for performance, but for insubordination.”
The Denver teacher refused to teach a prescribed curriculum. That is primarily performance-related. If s/he was doing a great job in the classroom while fighting with the administration and was fired, it would be primarily insubordination. If, instead of teaching, one yells at the top of one’s lungs, one is dismissed for not teaching, not for yelling. In either case, you are not refuting the argument that firing teachers for performance under union contracts is very difficult.
5. “The contract doesn’t supersede ed law.”
I presume you mean Federal law? And if you would cite a federal statute for “insubordination” or something else where you see Federal law being violated, maybe we would have something to talk about, but otherwise this makes no sense.
I’m pleased to see the reforms occurring in NYC, less so for your principal’s ability to find creative solutions so taxpayers can continue to fund teacher salaries that she apparently believes are not good enough to teach in her school while she pawns them off on someone else.
Nobody wants to fire teachers. But that does not mean it should never happen.
AO,
The hyperbole was referring to due process in general as an inconvenience for those authoritarians who like to get things done quickly. My introduction was meant to be polite. I’m sorry you didn’t take it that way.
Charters are notorious for setting up strict criteria for application before the “fair lottery,” then quietly coming to mutual understanding with the parents of troubled students that another venue might be better for them. Before long the 3rd grade has half the student population it had in first grade. Charters are generally not held to the same accountability regarding special needs children and English Language Learners. Neither of the charters in my neighborhood have either of those populations. Public schools deal with multitudes of kids whose guardians would never take the time to enter the lottery, and who only attend school because the city forces them. If you knew what it was like to be a public school teacher perhaps you wouldn’t attempt to lecture me on accuracy.
Regarding ed law, do you actually read what I write? If you don’t like the firing process, lobby to change state educational law. In NYC any part of the teachers’ contract is rendered void if it violates the educational laws of NYC, NY State or Chancellor’s regulations. There are state legal definitions of insubordination, unprofessional behavior or corporal punishment. The contract refers to these laws, and generally defines the consequences for violating them. If you want any credibility, stop using The Daily News as a source. And read the whole article. Why is the teacher’s fault when the DOE only devotes 5 days a month to dealing with teachers under disciplinary review? Furthermore, many of them are there because the DOE couldn’t prove their case. Why should they quit? If your employer signs a contract, they should uphold their end. If they don’t have just cause to fire you, why should you let them off of their responsibility? These people are showing up for work.
My principal isn’t pawning them off. If they are on probation, they go no where unless someone actually wants them. In addition, I’ve seen quite a few teachers that went on to new schools where they did exceptionally well. Most of the time, the second school is just a better fit.
Apparently YOU want to fire teachers.
LS,
Well, I probably err in not trying to be polite enough. But then again, you have talents I don’t, including a clairvoyant certainty about what I want, for which my own expressed desires are apparently no match.
I continue to believe your disinterest in accuracy is because it does not benefit your argument. To wit:
1. “Charters are notorious for…”
I know of no charters who practice the standards you list in Denver; nor do the organizations I know which operate in New York (KIPP, Uncommon Schools, etc) meet those criteria. Were anyone to tar district schools with such a wide, ambiguous brush I expect you would rightly complain. Please either name schools, or school operators, or cite some shred of evidence that this bait-and-switch occurs, or that charters suffer more (or different) attrition that other urban schools. Otherwise your certainty rings more like unfounded opinion.
2″Charters are generally not held to the same accountability regarding special needs children and English Language Learners”
I don’t need to know NYC law to believe this is patently false. Are you saying that NYC charters receive some special exemption from SPED and ELL requirements (and if so, that should be easy to cite)? Or is this a deep conspiracy between charters and the city that remains hidden?
3. “If you want any credibility, stop using The Daily News as a source.”
Far better to attack the source than the facts. Stories on the Rubber Rooms proliferate, and the responsibility of their insane creation lies with both the city and union. But as you wish, here is an excerpt from the New York Times (10/2007):
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Throughout New York City, the Department of Education operates 12 reassignment centers, populated at any one time by about 760 teachers from a total work force of 80,000. And, let’s face it, they can be a hard bunch to defend. During my own 20 years of observing and writing about public education in New York, I’ve seen firsthand how exasperatingly difficult it has been for principals to oust abusive, incapable or negligent teachers who are protected by a powerful union. Instead, some principals would privately agree to swap problem teachers in a process known as “trading turkeys.” Others would offer such teachers a positive rating if they used their seniority to transfer to a different school.
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4. But praise where it is deserved: Your novel suggestion that the best way to change a contract between two parties (unions, school districts) is to bypass both and get state lawmakers to overturn it is bureaucratically untouchable. I’ll leave this topic at that.