Firing Teachers: Readers vs. Me

-- Jphubba

Please send me the data supporting this view. I am at mathewsj@washpost.com. The data I have seen show something quite different: School performance, when we are talking about averaging many schools, correlates strongly not with parent choice but with parent income. On average charter schools do NOT perform better than regular public schools if the demographics of the two sets of schools are close. Private schools, the ultimate schools of choice, do NOT perform better than regular public schools if the parents at each set of schools are similarly affluent. But when you look at individual schools, or school networks, a few -- like the KIPP schools -- do remarkably better than schools in general. KIPP schools are charters, but they do much better than many other charters that allegedly attract, as you argue, self-selected students. Why? Because they try much harder to get the best teachers and make sure they have the extra time and administrative support they need to teach.

I would invite you to teach in a DCPS school or any school for that matter before making sweeping assertions about the rights of principals. There is an underlying presupposition in your article that principals are present enough to make judgments about firing a teacher. As a teacher in the DCPS I can tell you that mine certainly isn't. I've seen him half a dozen times in the last month and while he is an incredibly effective manager he cannot be expected to be tuned into the classrooms of 70 teachers. Even my vice-principal, whose duties revolve around a mere 400 students, (how many are enrolled at each of the KIPP campuses?) has to follow procedures of evaluation simply because he is far too busy to keep track of each of his 17 instructors.

-- Jason Mayernick

I have spent a lot of time in D.C. schools and agree entirely with your observation. If I left the impression that I thought D.C. principals were equipped now to make these judgments, again I apologize. I am working on being as clear as possible, but I need more practice. One reason principals don't spend more time in classes is because they know it won't do them much good. They have too little power to mold their staffs, given the culture I described above. I think one way to help them is to make their schools smaller. The best public charters I know rarely have more than 300 students.

You have the facts wrong. In the first two years in DCPS teachers are on probation and are easy to dismiss. Teachers become challenging to fire after they have passed the probation period when they shouldn't have been retained if they weren't performing, that is the current standard. I also notice in your example the principal at Key didn't just let them go after a few days of failure, it took months to find replacements, during which I'm sure they tried to train these teachers up in the meantime. With Rhee's strategy only the charters have this option now. We in DCPS now are starving for teachers. Lots of teachers took the buyout seeing this woman is gunning for them. Now we don't have enough teachers to go around. A DCPS school principal with an incompetent teacher on probation can't let them go, because no competent teacher wants to enter the green tier. Not with the Queen of Hearts who is clear that she doesn't have to justify any firings she makes. I would not take a job anywhere that she had the authority to fire me. Job descriptions and employee evaluations are niceties she has made clear she cannot be bothered with.

There is another big problem with this example. Ms. Rhee is suggesting we hire lots of inexperienced teachers. Most teachers take a few years to learn the ropes, and depend on mentoring from good experienced teachers. A good principal knows new teachers with just a degree in education and a license to teach are a management challenge. They may have the book knowledge on teaching but they haven't learned practical classroom skills. Let alone the Teach for America folk that Rhee is a big booster of, who come with enthusiasm and little training at all. The problem with her model is it takes the teaching team at each school and tells them not to play together. You are in it for your bonus and retention. Time you spend helping your colleagues is time you could be investing just in your classroom making sure you get the big bonus. Good schools are like a sports team: To be successful they need to work together.

Yes, sometimes you have to replace people, but more often you succeed by giving your existing players what they need to succeed. The green tier incentive plan does away with that. You are in it for your bonus, not the school, not your colleagues, and educating kids is not the end, it is a means to gain the end of the big payout. Talk about creating incentives to cheat on tests!

-- qaz2

You make a good point. I was aware that teachers can be dismissed during probation, but as vscribe and I said, very few of the weakest among them are let go, because the standards at the moment are so low. You are also right about the shortage of good teachers. How can we fix that? Notice that the best charter schools, the ones organized to give every teacher the support she needs to raise achievement, have much less trouble finding good people. The best teachers would like more money, to be sure, but the many I have interviewed yearn most for a chance to be effective. If they are being firm on homework and insisting that students pay attention in class, they want the principal and the other teachers to back them in those battles. If they have raised reading achievement for their third-graders significantly, they don't want to turn them over to a fourth-grade teacher who yells at kids and sets very low standards. The more schools we have that back up their teachers this way, the more college grads we will have thinking about teaching careers, because in those school environments, they know they can make a real and lasting difference in kids' lives.

As for the bonuses, I think you have identified a real problem, the subject of next Monday's Metro section column.

It gives me NO confidence in the process when a principal fires one of the best teachers in D.C., and the chancellor refuses to listen to the outcry of hundreds of that teacher's former students and parents. (One of D.C.'s better high schools, a science teacher teaching AP Biology, with three-fourths of the students passing the test at a level making them eligible for college credit, over more than 10-year period.) Those running the schools (principals and chancellor) must demonstrate that their judgment is sound for the teacher screening process to work. Evidence is to the contrary at this point.