Firing Teachers: Readers vs. Me

By Jay Mathews
Friday, October 3, 2008 6:15 AM

The Internet arrived late in my career. Its annoyances are far outweighed by its joys. One of the best things about the new era is that I can converse with far more readers and at much greater depth than I ever could with just a phone and a typewriter.

One example is the energetic response to my column Monday on the second page of The Post's Metro section. The headline summed it up well: "For Kids' Sake, Power to Fire Teachers Crucial."

I explained why I thought D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee was right to try to find the best possible principals, who understand great teaching because they were once great teachers themselves, and give them the power to hire and fire the people who work for them. My prime example was the success of the KIPP DC: KEY Academy, a public charter school in the District. I described how that school's principal, Sarah Hayes, removed quickly two teachers who failed to respond to her efforts to train them, and how that saved their students from months, and perhaps years, of mediocre teaching.

Here is a sample of online comments on the column, identified by their sign-on names, and also e-mails to me, with my thoughts on each. I plan to do more columns like this. I think conversations with smart readers are essential in helping us all understand what we are talking about:

* * *

Mr. Mathews' article is purposely misleading, revealing a level of professional dishonesty that is troubling. As informed as he purports to be, I am certain that Mr. Mathews is familiar with the 90-day plan that has existed in the Washington Teachers' Union contract for the last four years. Teachers can be placed on a 90-day plan after an observation, several of which may occur prior to the winter break, and can be out of a DCPS school within the school year. The reason why this plan has been miserably underutilized is because principals and assistant principals have failed in their professional responsibility to conduct evaluations. Therefore, they could not place anyone on a 90-day plan, not because the union was preventing it, but because they as administrators were not doing their jobs. Mr. Mathews knows this. If he doesn't, he isn't the expert he claims to be. If he does know it, and is perpetuating the falsehood that the WTU protects bad teachers, then his journalistic license should be revoked. The WTU doesn't protect bad teachers. Bad administrators do and always have.

-- vscribe

I was aware of it and would have mentioned it if I had more space. Your analysis is exactly right. As I said in the column, "Staffing rules, tenure agreements and low expectations tend to favor weak teachers unless they do something awful." If I left the impression that I am blaming just the union, forgive me. This is a cultural problem that affects everyone -- unions, school boards, superintendents, principals and even us media types. There is a widespread feeling of hopelessness and apathy that tends to keep us from doing more to get the best possible teachers in the classroom in urban and rural schools.

You said: "Unless principals are given the power to hire and fire teachers based on demonstrated skill and improved learning in class." And what demonstrates "improved learning"? A single class's score on standardized tests, so a particularly trying year could spell dismissal for a teacher? Value added scoring tracking students through the grades, though how do we know if a good or bad year is because of foundational teaching the student received years before? Would we want to use standardized test scores at all, which may result in teachers teaching to the test and focusing on test-taking skills rather than critical thinking skills that are harder to measure in Scantron format? This article wisely sidesteps what those standards would be because it is very difficult to set up standards that would be reliable and verifiable, and fair to students and teachers. Accountability is well and good, but you cannot divorce that from the test writing and tutoring industries. Heck, you'd think math never changes, but it undergoes a new curriculum revolution every year. How can we all agree on reasonable standards in that environment? Until there is more transparency and more planning, I'm not willing to set up firing (or refusing graduation/promotion for students) standards. Let's talk about the building blocks, first.

-- potmeetkettle

This is an excellent point. I think standardized tests are one good measure, as long as we are looking not at how good the scores are, but how much each child improves during the school year. Even more important is having a principal who was a successful teacher and knows other good teachers when she sees them. I cannot emphasize too much the importance of having the right person in that job before we grant principals the power to hire and fire. And as an ultimate assessment, we have to make clear to those principals that they will be fired if their schools do not show improvement. I would not do this for all schools. Middle-class schools in the suburbs are doing fine because the parents make sure their children are on course, and politically the way KIPP runs its schools would never fly with those parents. But schools full of impoverished children need something more, a system that is absolutely focused on raising student achievement.

Common sense and all the available data demonstrate that schools that try to serve all students are equally effective as schools that seek to serve only some students. Whatever differences exist in school results between charter schools (privately operated) and public schools (and overall they are not significant) can be explained by self-selection. That is, the more committed, more interested parents tend to send their children to charter schools. There is no real evidence that the methods, organization, hiring methods or whatever of charter schools are significantly superior to those of public schools.

-- 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.

-- 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.

Merely repeating the tired assertion that KIPP and other charter schools are self-selective in a way that changes the characteristics of their student body simply does not make it true. As Jay says, there exist no data to confirm that accusation, and the data that do exist, like the recent SRI study, show that KIPP schools specifically are NOT selective; that is, they are not getting more educated students. Furthermore, you assert that the gains KIPP schools get are illusory, because their low-performing students leave. If you actually read the study, though, they tested the students who stayed, to see if they made unusual gains in their time at KIPP. And they did.

-- Socrates11

You are very wise, Socrates11.

I understand your point -- that according to socioeconomic data and test scores, many charter schools have similar student compositions to those in the public schools. However, my point is that these comparisons do not measure critical student attributes like family support, motivation, and student behavior and discipline problems. I've also read that many charter schools do not accept students with learning disabilities (who are often mainstreamed into general education classes in public schools, and can make teaching more challenging). For example, I've read that KIPP requires parents to attend pre-enrollment seminars at the school. Parents who are not able to attend cannot enroll their students in the school.

-- AttorneyDC

Those are two more myths. Thanks for giving me a chance to address them. Charter schools must take anyone who applies. It is in the laws that govern charters. If they have too many applicants they must select from a random lottery, and cannot exclude students with disabilities. If you spend some time talking to the most successful charter school educators, you will find them eager to teach kids who have been written off elsewhere as un-teachable. Please tell me where you read about these alleged KIPP pre-enrollment seminars. I have never encountered them. I don't think they exist. Such a method is anathema to the desires that brought the KIPP educators I know into teaching.

Though the concept with such freedoms worked at KEY, due to their principal's good judgment and teaching experience, this plan will be doomed to fail to create a better school system unless certain flaws and loopholes are addressed. One is the possibility of corrupt principals creating a 'boy's club' out of their teaching staff, firing those who are not sycophants and keeping those who are. The way to remedy this is to create a new position at each school that is hired directly by the city who is an experienced teacher who can genuinely assess each teacher and relay the information to the principal. Along with this new position, create a new standard for hiring principals, which requires a moderate degree of teaching experience (and this is not limited to grade school), to make sure the principal, along with the evaluator, can give a fair judgment. The ruling if the teacher is fired will result from multiple genuine discussions about the teacher in question and when it is confirmed the teacher is not teaching, they are promptly fired. This process should take one to two months of arduous consideration, and involve at least one conference with the teacher about his/her performance, but this system is much faster than the one currently employed by many cities/counties and will be much more effective. Of course, problems will never be completely remedied in every school, but this should destroy most kinks in the system.

-- John Parks

I have a much simpler idea. It will save a lot of red tape. Hire a principal in whom you have confidence and see how well the students do. You may decide a school is full of sycophants, but if it gets its kids above grade level on independently applied assessments that the staff can't corrupt, I would say please send me more of those sycophants. If the students don't improve, even if the principal is on the shortlist for sainthood I would get rid of him.

As you noted, many of the students who left KIPP did so because they were in danger of failing. KIPP has the option of requiring students who do not achieve the required level of academic success to leave the school. Hence, a whittled-down pool of students remain by eighth grade.

-- AttorneyDC

You are really helping me here. This is sort of a mini-myth, a half truth. KIPP retention rates appear in many cases to be higher than those of regular schools, who have all kinds of methods of getting rid of kids they don't want. It is true that some KIPP parents withdraw their children because they think the work is too hard, and their child will get better grades at the local regular public school. If you find even one KIPP school that has required a student to leave because the student failed to achieve the required level of success, let me know and I will write a column about it. The data show that KIPP schools on average appear to expel one or two kids a year, much lower than the expulsion rates in their neighborhoods. The reasons always have to do with behavior, and only extreme circumstances -- such as refusal to pay any attention and do any work, repeated harm done to other children -- bring expulsion in the KIPP schools I have studied, and only after months, and sometimes years, of trying to help the child learn.

Teachers must be able to control and hold order in their classrooms. As a veteran educator of 28 years, I have been in classrooms where the teacher is "teaching" and no one is paying attention . . . notes are being passed, conversation is being shouted across the room, students are playing with toys in their desk, etc. I compare these classrooms to the Titanic, and just as the band continued to "play on" while the ship sank; these teachers continue to "drone on" in their sinking classrooms. Only occasionally do they stop to yell for order, in that pathetic, "I've completely lost control" voice that signals, to students, defeat.

-- ilvmyguys

I have seen the same, particularly in urban schools where too many people have given up. That is what Rhee clearly wants to change.

We don't really need research on KIPP schools to know that the student body in a selective school (whether the school selects the students or the parents select the school or some combination of the two) will be different from the student body in a school that takes in every student in its attendance area. There is all sorts of data, both quantitative and anecdotal, to demonstrate this. Anyone familiar with an area (New York, Boston, Philadelphia) that has a significant number of selective schools (mostly private) can attest to the differences.

-- Jphubba

I would love to see that data. If you have numbers showing the selective schools doing better than non-selective schools with the same demographics, I will do a column about it. The only schools I know that have found a way to violate significantly the iron rule of parental incomes are the KIPP schools and a few other schools and networks that devote the same attention to longer days and good teaching.

There is simply no comparison between the teaching staffs at private schools and public, and those at private schools are sometimes paid much less than their public counterparts!

-- trace1

The data I have seen, and my experiences with my kids attending both public and private schools, do not back you up.

Two points jumped out at me in your Sept. 29 article. First, new teachers at KEY who were performing poorly could be fired by Christmas, unlike most systems where it would take two years. Second, charter schools have "proven teachers" sitting around twiddling their thumbs who could be reassigned to replace the teachers who needed to be fired.

I don't know where you are getting your information about firing new teachers "in most systems," but in Illinois poorly performing new teachers are routinely released easily after completion of their first contract year. A principal in Illinois for nearly 30 years, I released many new teachers at the end of their first year not because they were awful, but because they weren't excellent. I find it difficult to believe that the laws regarding teacher dismissal are that different in D.C. And the teacher unions in Illinois are no different than those in other states.

-- George Peternel, associate director, Center for Talent Development, School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University

The two fired teachers at KIPP were replaced by teachers already at the school who were not twiddling anything. One was replaced in another class she had been teaching by a new hire. The other was a special education coach whose duties could be taken over by other staffers. I found your information about Illinois fascinating and e-mailed you back. You said you were not sure whether there were data showing how many teachers were released early this way, but I hope to find out more about that.