October 18, 2007

Big Cities, Big Schools... Big Changes?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 3:17PM

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Two potentially ground-breaking changes took place on the teacher quality front this week in two of America's most maligned public school systems: New York and Washington, DC. It would have been nice if both had taken place together in the same city, since the two reforms could function together as book ends to dramatically improve student achievement in urban school settings. But school reformers have nonetheless heaped praise on both ideas as they have been released.

The first change was announced yesterday in New York City, by a united front of Mayor Bloomberg, New York CIty Chancellor of Schools Joel Klein, and United Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten. Starting next year, as many as 200 schools will be eligible to receive privately financed bonuses that would be divided up among the schools' most outstanding teachers by individual committees created at each school. The decisions must be based on student performance (and not on teacher seniority, as existing union contracts do), and the size of the bonuses available may be as much as $3,000 per teacher.

The fact that the city's leaders and the teachers unions could come together on this idea--which has long been considered anathema to the two million-plus member teacher unions in America--is a major development in the union / school dynamic. A major reason why the teachers are ok with this particular bonus program is that all of the money is new money raised from private philanthropic and business sources. In other words, there are only teachers who win -- no teacher will lose money when it is discovered that she or he is not raising student achievement. Another positive aspect of this law is the voluntary element--schools can choose whether or not the free bonuses are preferable (although it is absolutely shocking to me that some school 's employees might decide that they don't want more money for doing the same job!).

The second change, which may represent the other book end to the teacher quality problem in my estimation, was suggested (though not finalized) in Washington DC earlier this week. There, Mayor Adrian Fenty and new DC Schools Chief Michelle Rhee announced that they would be seeking increased authority to fire low-performing teachers. The current process in DC allows a teacher to be fired after a 90-day review period, which some have suggested takes too long. However, it should be noted that some districts have even more onerous processes than DC's.

The teacher firing process has come under much scrutiny lately, since it would seem that there may be other factors at play than the Unions' protection of all employees (including the lousy teachers). For instance, often times principals are unwilling to make difficult decisions like firing people, or they may decide that the alternative to firing a teacher is no better since there is hardly a surplus of high quality replacements waiting on the sidelines. In my school here in Saint Louis, there is at least one teacher whose incompetence is so far into the unacceptable territory that our principal is virtually negligent in not firing him... except that the alternatives aren't much better: a permanent substitute teacher, a rotating system of subs, or a prayer that there is a good teacher out there who is willing to apply for the job. That said, the idea of more administrative discretion over teacher tenure is critically important in a profession where quality has been trumped by seniority.