“My principal sat me down and said it was out of his hands,” said Sutton, a single mother in her mid-50s who lost her home and health insurance along with her $77,000-a-year job.
Headlines about D.C. school reform efforts have often involved the firing of teachers who scored poorly on the IMPACT evaluation system adopted in 2009 — about 300 in the past two years. But the District has also shed 145 teachers, including counselors, deemed effective or even highly effective. These employees lost their jobs through a process known as “excessing.”
Reasons for excessing vary from school to school, with principals making the final call. They include budget cuts, rising teacher salaries, enrollment declines, changes in academic programs and staff overhauls mandated under federal law.
About 70 percent of the 522 teachers excessed since 2010 found other jobs in the system, school officials report. Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders said schools can ill afford to lose any effective educators. He contends that a push for younger, lower-cost hires — some recruited from programs such as Teach for America and D.C. Teaching Fellows — has wrongfully forced out seasoned practitioners.
“D.C. public schools ought not be firing effective and highly effective teachers,” Saunders said. He has filed a grievance on behalf of Sutton and 20 other educators who scored well on IMPACT twice but lost their jobs anyway.
Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said that although good evaluations are important, many of those let go held specialized positions for which there is less demand.
“The question is not solely about effectiveness,” Henderson said. “If we don’t have specific programs, even for effective teachers, should we employ people we don’t have an express need for?”
Saunders said Henderson’s position would be understandable if the District were not hiring hundreds of teachers every spring and summer, many of them in fields in which the excessed teachers worked. They include math, reading and other core subjects. Payroll records show that the city generally hires 300 to 400 teachers a year, many of them younger and less-costly than the veterans let go.
A recent independent study showed that the proportion of first- and second-year teachers has grown sharply in five years, especially in high-poverty communities east of the Anacostia River.
Patricia Hoyle received an “effective” rating in 2010 as an English teacher at one of the city’s most-challenging schools, Luke C. Moore Academy, a Northeast Washington high school many of whose students have dropped out elsewhere or been incarcerated.
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