Today's Washington Post "About 250 Teachers Are Given Pink Slips," by Bill Turque discusses District of Columbia Chancellor Michelle Rhee's plans to layoff 80 experienced, tenured teachers who were notified by administrators that they had 90 days to improve their teaching or face termination. The process is considered so cumbersome and time-consuming that administrators have only terminated a handful of employees each year for poor performance.
Michelle Rhee is clearly determined to improve the quality of her teaching staff, as she knows that the research consistently shows that placing an effective teacher in the classroom is more important than any other factor, including class size, in raising student achievement. A good teacher can make as much as a full year's difference in students' learning growth. Students taught by a high-quality teacher three years in a row score 50 percentile points higher than students of ineffective teachers. Students taught by a bad teacher two years in a row may never catch up.
Defenders of the status quo claim that it is possible to easily remove ineffective teachers. Would that that were so. If this were true, a school district the size of Seattle would be certainly removing more than a handful of teachers every year, wouldn't you think?
Fortunately, there is accurate information on the Seattle School District available to provide an answer to this question. The McKinsey Report to the Seattle School Board dated January 30, 2008, which is part of the Superintendent's Strategic Plan for Excellence, indicates on page 18 that of the 3220 teachers in the district, 8 teachers were put on probation and 7 teachers were dismissed.
These numbers reveal that it is not easy to remove ineffective teachers from Seattle's classrooms.
Here are some suggestions for questions to ask your school district: How many ineffective teachers has your district put on probation or dismissed in the last year? What is your school superintendent doing to negotiate changes to the union contract to streamline the process for removing ineffective, tenured teachers, without jeopardizing the due process rights of teachers?
