Struggling new teachers pose dilemma for schools - San Francisco Chronicle:
Struggling new teachers pose dilemma for schools
Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Cleveland Elementary school teacher Fernando Che (center) teaches English to third-graders Alan (left) and Christopher (right) in San Francisco.
Principal Susan Ritter agonized over the decision she had to make: Should she keep four struggling new teachers on staff at San Francisco’s Balboa High School, or get rid of them at the end of the school year?
The choice was difficult.
If she let the probationary teachers remain, it would mean leaving the four floundering in classrooms while they headed for tenure, making it harder to remove them later if they didn’t improve. If she let them go, she would have to search for replacements amid a broad teacher shortage and probably end up with equally inexperienced educators when school started in the fall.
Principals face this dilemma across the state every year, with hundreds of new teachers — often those working with the neediest students — losing their jobs less than two years after starting their careers.
They are called non-reelects, and they cost districts millions of dollars annually to remove and replace while exacerbating high teacher turnover in the state’s most challenging schools. Already, principals are evaluating who will stay and who will go at the end of this school year. They have to decide before March.
Education leaders blame a range of factors for the problem, including insufficient preparation in college credentialing programs, a lack of support for new teachers in schools, and California’s two-year probation period, one of the shortest tenure tracks in the country.
At the core is the desire to weed out ineffective teachers. Yet when pressed, education officials, labor unions, teachers and principals question how many of these rejected teachers could have succeeded with more time and training and additional classroom support — perhaps even a transfer to a different school.
At Balboa High earlier this year, Ritter made her choice. All four would have to go.
“I think people go into this because they truly want to be teachers,” she said. “It’s a shame. In a lot of these cases, if you just had another year.”
Over the last five years, San Francisco public schools have hired 1,400 teachers, while 330 new teachers were told to leave, though some chose to resign rather than put “non-reelected” on their resume, according to data reviewed by The Chronicle.
