The Right Way to Oust the Wrong Teachers

'Peer Review' Addresses The Trouble With Tenure

The District's public schools chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee, recently made news [front page, Oct. 13] for suggesting that she wants the authority to fire ineffective teachers. Of course, students deserve good teachers, but any plan to rid the system of bad teachers must be fair or it will be blocked by the teachers union or further demoralize public school teachers in the District.

"We have to be able to remove ineffective teachers from their positions," Rhee has said. The key question, however, is who "we" are.

For many years, particularly before collective bargaining, administrators had the power to fire teachers for any number of reasons. Parents who did not like the failing grade a child received would push for a teacher's dismissal. Teachers who didn't toe the line of the principal or who challenged his faddish educational theories could lose their jobs.

Those who didn't vote for the right politician or who weren't of the right race or who became pregnant could be let go. And in lean times, more highly paid veteran teachers were fired and replaced with younger, cheaper ones.

Over time, to address these abuses, states passed tenure laws for teachers, and unions bargained for "due process" rights: the right to have charges laid out when dismissal was sought and the opportunity to defend oneself against the allegations. This right is at the heart of unionism, and in 1968 teachers in New York City, led by the late Albert Shanker, went on strike for 36 days after a school board in the ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville summarily terminated the employment of several white teachers without due process.

By the 1980s, however, Shanker and other leaders of teachers unions came to acknowledge that in some school districts the right to due process had been taken to an extreme, making it very difficult to fire incompetent teachers. Shanker was willing to admit that there were some lousy teachers, and he backed a compromise plan to weed out the incompetent while preserving the basic idea of tenure: "peer review." Under peer review, which is used in Toledo, Ohio, and other communities, master teachers try to help struggling teachers. But if that doesn't work, the master teachers can recommend dismissal.

In practice, in Toledo and elsewhere, it turns out that teachers are even harder on colleagues than principals are, because a fourth-grade teacher doesn't want to get stuck with kids who haven't learned anything in third grade.

Peer review would not be a cure-all in D.C. schools, where a large number of teachers are seen as lacking. For such a system to work well, only exemplary teachers should be placed on review committees, and peer review programs to rid the District of the very worst teachers must be supplemented by innovative programs to replace them with the very best. But Rhee and Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker should take a close look at the peer review model. Tenure should be mended, not ended.

-- Richard D. Kahlenberg

Washington

The writer is the author of "Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy."