Kudos to the Post’s Jeremy P. Meyer for his Sunday story on the challenge direct teacher placements pose for schools districts, and how this widespread practice has a dispoportionate impact on high-poverty schools. These are the schools that can least afford ineffective teachers. The issue has become especially challenging in Denver, for a couple of reasons.
First, as Jeremy points out, more vacancies occur in higher-poverty schools because “fewer people want to teach there.” Second, Denver has now granted autonomy and “innovation” status to four higher-poverty schools. In each case, a ban on direct placements has been an essential component of the innovation/autonomy plan. This means the pool of schools available to take direct placements has shrunk, placing an undue burden on those remaining schools.
This is either an unintended consequence of autonomy, or a clever strategy to make direct placement so burdensome to the remaining schools that a revolt occurs within the ranks and forces a change to the teacher contract.
To the credit of Denver Public Schools, the number of direct placements has dropped by exactly half (from 214 to 107) over the past couple of years, according to the Post. This should alleviate the situation a bit.
It’s important to point out that not all direct placements are part of the “dance of the lemons,” in which teachers no one wants are shuttled from school to school like an unwanted holiday fruitcake between relatives. I’d like to see a study that puts hard numbers to the percentages of direct placements who are subpar versus those who are placed for other reasons. According to the Post story, “in Denver, 117 teachers were repeat direct placements over two years. And 22 teachers were repeat direct placements three years in a row.”
Those repeaters would be a good place to start an examination of ineffective teachers.
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I’d loudly echo appreciation to Jeremy for that fine piece of reporting, and found it interesting that one of the commenting “warehoused” former teachers expressed an apparently legitimate reason for being in that status, along with a comment that she’d been ignored in attempts to clear the record. However these issues are approached, they must at least be attended by some good-faith attempt to reveal the facts as opposed to the politics of the transaction.
As a lady, I’m chagrined to have noticed long ago that “squabbles” between ladies in particular, is prevalent in some (fortunately, not all) work places, and can rarely be resolved until the staffing changes. When someone complains they’re being victimized by divisive “personality clashes” and other euphemisms for “squabbles” between people who haven’t enough better things to do, those concerns should be closely examined before permanent decisions are made.
I’d hate for any district to lose good teachers simply because they didn’t play the Personality game well, at some school that historically has invited or allowed those sorts of politics to guide staffing decisions. In fact (gasp!) I might go the exact other direction, and do a full-scale reassignment of all teachers — split up the teams, the cliques, the cultures, and everything else in every school that isn’t doing great. I’d probably ask the great schools to contribute the best of their teachers for awhile, and since there’d be no established culture at these restaffed schools, would expect their contributions to have a stronger effect. That would, I’d think, be lots more rewarding than any amount of increased $$.
Indeed, much of the teacher-incentive dialogue seems pretty shallow to me, considering there are many cheap but more creative ways of rewarding good employees that private enterprise adopted long ago, including Employees of the Month and other acknowledgments of achievement (that we are smart enough to give the kids), and the all-important Thank You which is given in sincere respect and appreciation. The word is Dignity.
As a lifelong private-sector worker, I’ve been surprised to find there is not more simple Honor involved in career service for the public — such that workers have unionized and lobbied for what I’d have hoped the populace would have been willing to support more voluntarily. Apparently not.