October 1, 2008

Power to Fire = Power to Fix?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 6:23PM

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The Washington Post's Jay Matthews made a bold statement in his most recent column touting the vital importance of firing bad teachers as a step to improving schools. His argument--an increasingly common one in light of proposals made by DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee--is that school children in low-income, chronically low-performing schools will not experience significant achievement gains until administrators have the power to fire the manifold bad teachers who disproportionately work in such environments.

Mathews's inspiration for writing the article is the experience of a principal at a DC charter school called KIPP DC:KEY Academy, where two low-performing teachers were fired before Christmas and replaced with what Mathews describes as, "proven talents" who turned around their classrooms to the benefit of students. In ordinary public schools, because of union protections for teachers, principals do not have the freedom to act this quickly and unilaterally. Instead, in traditional public schools the principal would likely only have the power to authorize mentorship and professional development for the struggling teacher, make negative comments on evaluations, and then recommend not rehiring the teacher at year's end (or in some cases, after a period of years of probation).

Mathews is right to point out the powerful lever that charter school principals have to weed out hopeless teachers, but he misses an equally important, if not more important issue: what good is it to be able to fire teachers if there aren't higher quality alternatives to replace them? In the DC KIPP academy example that Mathews cites, it only helps that the principal can fire the two bad teachers because she has access to two better teachers who can replace them!

The problem is, most schools don't have a deep reserve pool of high quality job-seeking teachers waiting in line should their initial staff members prove ineffective. Indeed, from my own teaching experience, where our school was able to fire three teachers mid-year (15% of the full time teaching staff), the challenge of taking over an often times dysfunctional classroom from the previous teacher can prove insurmountable to even the most hard-working replacement. If that replacement is not a "proven talent" as was the fortunate case for the DC KIPP principal, the power to fire a teacher is only half of the solution.

The other half, of course, is increasing the pool of high quality teaching candidates in low-performing school districts--a challenge that is much more complicated than the power to fire. It incorporates licensing rules, pay structures, workplace rules, and other issues that have plagued K-12 public education for decades. The power to fire is only one part of the equation--truly fixing our struggling schools will also require a fundamental shift to the human capital picture in public education.