Why Is it so Hard to Fire Bad Teachers?
Teaching is often viewed as a noble profession. Almost everyone in society has a strong connection to a teacher: Either their mom or other family member has been in the classroom for an entire career, their sixth-grade teacher changed the course of their life, or they realize the value of education in the workplace that follows. Many of the posts online about the nobility of teaching come from those in the profession themselves, who attest to the ways in which teaching has changed their lives for the better.
These are the reasons why talking about bad teachers, and how to replace them, becomes so difficult. It’s not easy to talk about a group of people who are disparaging the nobility built up around a profession, because too often it seems like an attack on the rest of the teachers, too. But teachers, and the unions that represent them, know there are a few among them who aren’t performing to par. Who, in fact, are doing the profession an injustice.
“No one wants bad teachers in classrooms,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in a discussion about education policies with the Aspen Institute. The AFT is the second largest teachers union in the country, and in this past year opposed a lawsuit that claimed the number of unsuitable teachers in California created an unequal learning environment for the state’s students. The AFT’s opposition wasn’t because the lawsuit sought to change tenure practices or fire the bad apples. Instead, Weingarten said she and the union opposed the court proceedings because the legal action pitted students against teachers.
The heart of the issue for firing bad teachers most recently was the focus of a court case in California, brought by nine students within the state and backed by Students Matter, a coalition of Silicon Valley businessmen led by entrepreneur David Welch. Though some of the articles to follow, including Time’s coverage in its November issue, garnered fierce criticism by the teaching community, it did point out that it was the first case to link the quality of a teacher with a student’s right to an education.
According to the decision in Vergara v. California, Judge Rolf M. Treu found that the effect of “grossly ineffective” teachers have adverse affects on the education students receive. “The evidence is compelling,” Treu wrote in his decision. “Indeed, it shocks the conscience.” Treu cites findings from experts who testified in the case: One ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings within a single year. Based on a four-year study, students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) who were taught by a teacher in the bottom 5% of competence lost 9.54 months of learning in a single year, compared to students with average teachers.
Teacher tenure
One of the main contentions within the court case, and the larger discussion of firing underperforming teachers, is that tenure often protects the people who are making egregious errors in the classroom. LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy testified in the case on behalf of the students, saying that the tenure laws in California as they stood were “patently problematic.”
In practice, lifelong tenure in the state is determined in 14-16 months of a teacher beginning his or her career in any public school, Deasy called this a “ridiculous” short amount of time that doesn’t accurately reflect the teacher’s abilities or means of evaluating whether they are deserving of such status. Plus, the overwhelming majority of teachers receive tenure without incident. In the L.A. district for example, the rate of teachers denied tenure in years past has been as low as 2%. Deasy and Weingarten discuss the court case in depth in the video posted above.Why Is it so Hard to Fire Bad Teachers?:
