Firing Teachers: Readers vs. Me

-- citizenw

I agree entirely. I am familiar with the case you cite, and have passed on messages the past several weeks to the teacher asking for an interview. I don't think I can assess the situation accurately without his input, so I hope he will eventually have time to see me. In the meantime, it looks like a bad decision to me, although fortunately he has moved to another D.C. school where he will find many students who need him.

As a former teacher, I had the opportunity to teach in situations where students were able to self-select (like an "honors" course). I also taught in situations where students were not selected in any way (e.g., general education courses). As any teacher can tell you, motivated students who self-select for a challenging curriculum are more likely to be attentive in class, complete their class work and homework to the best of their ability, and obey behavior rules and norms. I'm sure that the students who remained at KIPP were able to benefit from instruction at a school with other motivated students and lack of disruptive behaviors on the part of their classmates. This does not change my point that public schools are very different from private or charter schools in their ability to serve motivated students who self-selected for a rigorous learning environment. My main point is that teachers (good or bad) should not be blamed or lauded for educational differences between charter and traditional schools without controlling for these other factors. Test: If you took the teachers from KIPP and placed them in an inner city public school, do you think their students would start performing that much better?

-- AttorneyDC

One of the many myths about the KIPP schools are that they benefit from self-selected students who arrive the first day of fifth grade (most KIPP schools are middle schools with grades 5-8) full of love of learning and perfectly behaved in class. It is completely untrue. Forgive me for focusing on KIPP, but I have just finished a book about the program, now in 66 schools in 19 states and the District. It comes out in January. There are other charter school networks that operate the same way, but I can only comment with confidence about the KIPP schools, which I have studied closely.

All of the available data show that those new KIPP fifth-graders are roughly the same as the children in their neighborhoods that go off to regular fifth grades. In some schools their fourth grade test scores are slightly above those of the neighboring schools. In a larger number of cases they are below those of students in the regular schools. About 80 percent are low-income, and 95 percent are black or Hispanic. KIPP students are, as you say, "more likely to be attentive in class, complete their class work and homework to the best of their ability, and obey behavior rules and norms." But they are not like that at the beginning, and their parents do not appear to be any smarter or ambitious than the parents who do not choose to send their children to KIPP. Recruiters for new KIPP schools often have to beg parents to give them a try. How do these kids become such attentive students? It happens through good teaching, which begins with a three-week summer school for those new fifth-graders before the regular school year even begins.

Allowing principals a free hand to remove anyone they judge to be problematic, without principals being schooled in what good teaching is and how to observe and analyze it, without teachers being part of defining what good teaching is and without the school system devoting one ounce of effort to definitions, criteria, process, or interest in standards of teaching and learning is a recipe for disaster. It will, in my opinion, create a corrosive, non-professional culture, and conflict between those with the relatively unchecked power and those with the talent.

-- Mark Simon, D.C. public school parent and national coordinator for the Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership

I agree entirely. That is why the selection of the principal is so important, and the support for every teacher vital. But once we have that, those good principals have to be able to create the team that will work best for them.

Rewarding teachers on the basis of performance would be fine, if there were some certain measure by which teaching performance could, rigidly, be evaluated. Would a teacher with a class of 25 students be a good teacher, if there are five A's in the course, as well as five F's, with the other 15 spread over the range of B's, C's and D's? Or would the teacher be a bad teacher because of the five F's? Unless there were some way to predict the outcomes of individual students in classes with good teachers, how do you truly determine which teachers are performing to a set standard? When schools focus on productivity, sometimes the effort to raise the standards of poor students impacts the teacher effort to get the best out of the better students. If a student receives an A grade with a mark of 86 percent, but that student with good teaching could have achieved a grade mark of 95 percent, then that student could be the teacher's failure despite the A-grade mark. On the other hand, a student fails with a grade mark of 48 percent, but because of poor preparation and problems at home and in the community, that student would only have been expected to achieve a grade mark of 45 percent; then, despite the failing grade, that teacher would have succeeded with the particular student.

-- CalP

Grades are often a bad measure. Some kind of testing, independent of the teacher, is much better. We are not looking for how many top students a teacher has, but how many of that teacher's students have improved significantly over the year. There are many independent ways to assess that. One of my favorite principals, Deb Meier, treated her East Harlem high school students like graduate students. She brought in experts to give them oral exams.