Hot for the Wrong TeachersWhy are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?
Posted Friday, July 11, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponWhich leaves school officials in the position of having to find a way to get rid of the inevitable bad hires. Anthony Lombardi's approach at PS 49 put him at the top of the teachers-union hit list. (The union head refers to Lombardi as a "tyrant.") Lombardi placed higher demands on his teachers, requiring, for example, detailed and cogent lesson plans. (He recalls that some teachers had one-word class outlines before the new rules were put in place.) He also started showing up in class to keep tabs on what was going on. While he may not have been able to discern teaching quality from a résumé, he knew effective teaching when he saw it in the classroom. Teachers who either couldn't or wouldn't perform up to his standards were given an ultimatum: Request a transfer or get saddled with an unsatisfactory rating, leading to an onerous (for all concerned) two-year review. Since his arrival, a third of PS 49's teachers have been squeezed out through Lombardi's efforts.
Of course, this just meant they were moved to another classroom in another school, lowering the test scores of someone else's children. So while this might be a way of cleaning up PS 49, it's not much use in reforming an entire school system. New York's school chancellor, Joel Klein, has gotten rid of some teachers through a program that effectively gives them a golden parachute out of teaching—they aren't allowed into the classroom, though they stay on the payroll. But this is a very expensive Band-Aid.
What if there were a way to screen out the bad teachers before they get entrenched? Currently, New York City teachers get their union cards their first day on the job. In theory they're on probation for three years after that, but in practice very few are forced out. Lombardi suggests replacing this system with an apprenticeship program. Rather than requiring teaching degrees (which don't seem to improve value-added all that much), new recruits would have a couple of years of in-school training. There would then come a day of reckoning, when teachers-to-be would face a serious evaluation before securing union membership and a job for life.
Lombardi's proposal isn't without its problems and complications: What would the effect be on the morale of older teachers? Would the teachers unions ever agree to such a system? But none seems insurmountable. Researchers Kane and Staiger, together with coauthor Robert Gordon, have also suggested an apprenticelike system and have put forth a detailed proposal on how to implement it.
We live in an age of increasing inequality. While it's not fair to park the problem of global inequities at the doorstep of teachers unions, the continued floundering of public education in America is at least partly to blame: Education is an awfully good predictor of future earnings, and keeping bad teachers in classrooms filled with kids from poor families certainly helps to reinforce the cycle of poverty. The difference between a teacher in the 25th percentile (a very good teacher) and one at the 75th percentile (a not very good teacher) translates into a 10 percentile point difference in their students' test scores. (As a frame of reference, on the SAT, 10 percentile points translates into an 80 or so point difference in raw test score.) After a string of good teachers or bad teachers, it's easy to see how you can end up with very wide gaps in student achievement. And this is all the more tragic since at least part of the answer—doing a better job of evaluating and selecting teachers—is readily at hand.
Is Hasan a Terrorist? And Other Great Stories From Slate This Week.
How Sarah Palin Is Dividing the Republican Party
Can We Apply the Lessons of Y2K to Swine Flu?
They Made a Movie About the Wrong Aviatrix
Jamie Foxx's New Single Is Extremely Lewd
The Week's Best Editorial Cartoons
Notes from the Fray Editor
This was an excellent, full Fray with many many great posts and arguments. Although people disagreed with one another and with the article, often very strongly, the threads mostly stayed calm and polite: an object lesson in online posting. Almost everyone wanted to contribute to the discussion, to make useful points, to make suggestions or to relate personal experiences – to the benefit of anyone reading. Posts below are just to whet the appetite: read the full Fray to get the full experience.
Comments from the Fray
I have been a public school educator for 13 years. Firing bad teachers would improve my morale immensely. It's very frustrating to know that the lazy/racist/apathetic/clueless idiot down the hall is getting paid to be a marginal-at-best babysitter. Bad teachers do inordinate damage to our profession as well as students and make everyone's job even more difficult. To paraphrase something I read in Harper's many years ago, no one works harder than a good, conscientious, caring teacher, but there's no one lazier than a bad one. (This is probably true in many other fields as well.)
I would love it if good principals with common sense (another kettle of fish) spent more time in all of our classrooms. Many do not out of a fear of being accused of micro-managing, time constraints, and/or an "ignorance is bliss" mentality. Conscientious teachers welcome observation, professional guidance, and constructive criticism if they know they are truly valued for their hard work, being treated fairly, and given real power to do what is best for their students and their school. Under these more ideal conditions, average teachers also become better, and ambivalent or stumbling teachers emerge from the gray areas with the skill and motivation they need to continually improve their classrooms.
--herdbird
(To reply, click here)
The obvious, sensible, tried-and-true method of educating pupils and students well is to provide a wide variety of subjects, from rigorously academic to useful trade to the esoteric and artistic, taught in a variety of styles and methods, in small classes, in secure schools without distractions and have the students live in stable, economically secure households. Doing that would require considerably more money than we want to spend and demand a restructuring of our economy to provide the stable and economically secure homes. I don't see us willing to do that for our children…
The canard about the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher was once again repeated. Any principal who can't successfully go through the steps to fire a truly bad teacher should themselves be fired. It is neither that onerous, nor particularly lengthy. It happens every year in most school districts in the land. I've seen several fired over the years, more often for teaching in a way that annoyed the principal than actual bad teaching, but fired nonetheless. Firing does involve more than at private industry, but that protection is well-founded and ever more necessary. Often, the teachers principals want to fire the most are the ones the school and the students need most for those teachers are the one asking questions instead merely following orders, the ones trying new ways and ideas, instead of trodden the well-travelled path.
We can fiddle with details, but until the military is holding bake sales to buy needed battle ships and schools are funded enough that underpaid teachers aren't buying pencils and paper, we aren't really committed.
--MacAdviser
(To reply, click here)
(7/11)