Teachers Getting Fired...

Rhode Island's continued controversy. A pretty good overview. 

I agree that mass firings are not necessarily productive. They also have the risk of backfiring and damaging the credibility of good ideas (teacher accountability, tenure-reform), should the turn-around not be as quick as public opinion would like (again, this is what I suspect is happening with some of the ideas Ravitch is going back against). The truth is, however, that the plan to hire back 50% of the teachers at a school like Central Falls is, more than likely, too generous (I say this per the corporate-inspired logic that many of these style reforms are based upon). There is rarely a 1 to 1 ratio of good to bad teachers in failing schools such as this, at least not as any private company would evaluate "good" and "bad" in terms of the performance of their employees.

But that, perhaps, is just the point. We're not in a private sector situation here, and while I, personally, support the influx of more market force into education to some degree, the reality is that in a community collaborative and contracted process such as public education, the system has failed these teachers just as much as the teachers have failed the system.

In a private sector situation, this wouldn't really matter. The company needs to mind its bottom line and has the power and the moral right to lay off employees at whatever rate necessary, regardless if the company has found itself in this situation in part because of its own mismanagement. Company A has underperforming employees and massive benefit responsibilities, so Company A lays off the bad employees, takes the severance package hit, then hires back better trained and higher performing employees and eventually returns to profitability.

In education, however, we run into a different situation, because (ideas of commonwealth and community contract aside) the simple fact is that the same system that installed and failed to train these underperforming teachers into schools like Central Falls is the one that has taught and trained the teachers that will replace them. The teacher market is simply not that dynamic. Especially when it comes to the top-notch-teachers-of-severely-disadvantaged-students market. New blood may give the feeling of a new start, but unless the system dramatically reassesses its end of the bargain it will be, after some perhaps modest improvements, back to the same old thing.

On that note, I enjoyed this comment: “Actually preparing teachers to work in high-needs schools is a bold move, but it’s something we often don’t do." This from Barnett Berry, the head of a North Carolina think tank called the Center for Teaching Quality. I won't pick on Mr. Berry for this, but just end with this comment: Bold? A bold move? It is a sad state of affairs when bold action for the leaders of our public education sector would look like Management 101 in any business course in any college nation wide.