Hot off the press
Here’s some provocative reading to ruin – no, enrich – your long weekend in between watching the Nordic combined and the biathlon.
Texas rules: Size matters when it comes to textbooks. I’m talking about the population of states that buy them, not the tonnage of the tomes that middle schoolers carry on their backs.
California is big enough to push its weight around with textbook publishers and control its autonomy. But pity small states that are prey to the looney dictates of the self-righteous majority on the Texas State Board of Education.
In “How Christian Were the Founders?” New York Times Magazine writer Russell Shorto details how a fundamentalist Christian bloc on the 15-member board has put its ideological stamp on science, language arts and history textbooks that end up in circulation around the nation. That explains why Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority and the NRA get inserted into the history of the ‘80s, while Ted Kennedy gets rubbed out, and why conservative views get inserted into standards texts.
There’s a larger agenda: In the candid words of Cynthia Dunbar, a Christian activist on the Texas board, “The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Tales from the crypt: If you’re not yet convinced that the state’s teacher tenure laws need changing, check out the exhaustive piece “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons” in the latest LA Weekly. The subtitle, “why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible,” says it all.
The Los Angeles Times did a good article in December on the district’s Sisyphean efforts to fire a handful of teachers charged with misconduct. The LA Weekly goes a step further and looks at attempts to dismiss for poor performance. It is, to no surprise, expensive and frustrating.
Among the findings in the five-month investigation:
- “Principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing” even the worst performers. The district spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance. Four were fired after legal battles that averaged five years. Two were paid large settlements, and one teacher was reinstated. The average cost of case: $500,000.
- The district paid 32 tenured teachers more than $1.5 million to quit. All were allowed to leave with clean records, with no indication, to the next district that employs them, that they exited under pressure.
- Teachers with negative reviews must be offered mentor training to improve, under the Peer Assistance and Review training. Sometimes teachers respond well; for others – the “frequent fliers” – it’s futile. Three district teachers have taken the retraining five times in the past three years, 18 have taken it four times, and 45 three times.
United Teachers Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy dismissed claims that it’s difficult to identify and fire bad teachers as an “urban legend,” according to the paper.
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I’m in my fifth year (second kid) as a parent at an urban high school. Among many fine teachers, the school had been saddled with a few problematic teachers, including one egregious case. The previous principal — engaging, warm and welcoming — would privately cite the difficulty of firing teachers.
Then that principal moved on and a new one came in (fresh from turning around a once-struggling nearby school). Well, gosh — a number of teachers “decided to leave” after the current principal’s first year, including the one that the previous principal “couldn’t fire.” So did two secretaries who were always on their coffee breaks at any given time.
To be clear, the current principal is quite well-liked too — he’s no bully or hatchet-wielding madman. It’s called competent management.
Ironically, the previous principal now has a high-profile job in the charter school world.
John F., I worked at the Mercury News for 12 years before you arrived there, and I could also regale you with stories about erroneous management judgment and wimpiness involving problem employees there too. (The old “refuse-to-listen-to-your-underlings-and-keep-the-new-hire-past-the-probationary-period” error came back to bite a number of times.)
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Caroline: We certainly have found an area of agreement: bad decision-making by management at our previous employer.
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True enough, John!
One other comment. An influential parent leader in SF whose child is in my daughter’s class commented publicly that it’s impossible to fire bad teachers. (I’m much more present at the school site than he is.) I pointed out to him privately the problematic teachers who were quietly no longer at our children’s school when it opened this fall. The entire situation had escaped it — he honestly had failed to recognize what had happened. I think there are two reasons for that: It happened quietly and discreetly, as it should — and also, there’s such a drumbeat of teacher-bashing propaganda about how it’s impossible to fire deadwood (”why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible”) that he couldn’t see it happening in front of his eyes.
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Was it so discreet that these teachers are now working in other schools in the district — another round in the “dance of the lemons”?
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I still have trouble understanding why states don’t pay the best teachers, scholars and curriculum developers in the country to create open textbooks and give laptops and/or PDAs to students to access the books 24×7x365…
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John, the parent leader I refer to asked me that same question — are the departed employees still working in the district, or anywhere else?
Well, I’m not privy to that information — even the worst teacher-haters have to acknowledge that teachers’ personnel issues deserve a LITTLE privacy, don’t they? Or do you really think that every detail should be fully publicly aired, with no privacy or protection whatsoever? Now that’ll attract more great people to the teaching profession, won’t it?
I submit that it’s not reasonable to expect the principal to drive the problem teacher out of the profession entirely or call the principal a management failure, which is where you (and the parent leader I mention) are going with this.
Does that standard/expectation exist in any other field? One could make the case that it’s much more important to keep problem teachers out of the class room than it is to make sure, way, bad newspaper copy editors never work again. But what about, say, people in areas of health (from doctors/nurses/techs to sanitation inspectors)? Or any other number of key personnel anyone could mention — public safety, people who build cars, whatever? If a competent manager moves a problem employee out, is the manager’s job considered incomplete until the world is assured that the employee will never work again?
To answer the question directly, I don’t know where any of the problem employees who left the school are working. But in my view it’s not a reasonable expectation to consider the job undone until the individual’s career is destroyed forever.
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Caroline,
The issue is not privacy of the teachers; it is a system so dense with due-process rights that the only plausible way to get rid of truly bad teachers — a small percentage of the total — is to foist them on to some other principal, usually in a low-performing school desperate to fill a vacancy. You refuse to acknowledge what administrators and superintendents in California acknowledge in every study I have seen.
I wonder how safe you’d feel flying if Boeing transferred incompetent mechanics from an assembly line in Seattle to St. Louis.
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I’m in my 25th kid-year as an involved urban public-school parent (which means I have vastly more contact than most of the commentators pronouncing solutions) — and I’m not blind to the problems. … But I’m saying that it’s applying an impossible standard to expect a school administrator to ensure that a problem teacher never works again, ever, anywhere. It would be like expecting Boeing to ensure that McDonnell Douglas never hired its problem former employees. … And the beating the concept of teachers’ seniority rights is taking in the press and public opinion? (Google Overton Window.) I was present at the union meeting where S.F. Chronicle editorial staffers, some weeping, voted to eliminate their own seniority rights. It’s far less simple than you make it out to be.
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This is a quote from Sharon Higgins, who runs the Perimeter Primate blog and is a veteran Oakland public school parent and staffer:
“The voices aired most often by the media these days are those of the teacher-haters and clueless idealists who believe the fundamental reason for low academic achievement in our cities is because every urban public school teacher is incompetent and lazy. This is the sour attitude behind the dominant education reform movement and it is just plain wrong.”
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I’d say that’s wildly exaggerated, defensive reaction to “the media” – whoever they are. It’s certainly an unfair characterization of me.
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A sentence like this, promoting a snarky, contemptuous headline like this, has destructive power: “The subtitle, “why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible,” says it all.” The headline, and the sentence endorsing it, promote the notion that the teaching profession (the public-school teaching profession, that is) is riddled with impossible-to-fire desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and failures. Which is, needless to say, not true.
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