Showing posts with label bad teachers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad teachers. Show all posts
What teachers should do instead of trying to get rid of bad students
Lazy or incompetent? As long as you're a teacher, it's okay
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded.
The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand
By STEVEN BRILL
May 17, 2010
MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
Next to Mulgrew was his press aide, Richard Riley. “Suppose you decide that Riley is lazy or incompetent,” I asked Mulgrew. “Should you be able to fire him?”
“He’s not a teacher,” Mulgrew responded. “And I need to be able to pick my own person for a job like that.” Then he grinned, adding: “I know where you’re going, but you don’t understand. Teachers are just different.” ...
[This is a 9-page article about Race to the Top.]
School Factors May Influence Teacher Effectiveness
School Factors May Influence Teacher Effectiveness
By Stephen Sawchuk
Education Week
May 17, 2010
I've heard a lot of people question the wisdom of teacher transfers based on the reasoning that a teacher who's effective in one school setting might not be as effective in another, due to differences in the student population, the culture of the school, or the pedagogy/curricula.
So far there's been precious little research literature on this topic, but a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that there are good reasons to investigate it in depth.
Analyzing a set of matched student-teacher data in North Carolina between 1995 and 2006, researcher C. Kirabo Jackson found that what he calls "match quality"—the factors that make a teacher more productive in one school setting than another—can account for up to a quarter of the observable "teacher effect," i.e., how effective a teacher appears to be at raising his or her students' academic achievement.
He also found that the teachers studied tended to be more effective in mathematics after they moved to a new school. That finding suggests that they are actively seeking out schools with a better match for their talent. Teachers were also less likely to leave their current school when the "match quality" was high.
"Part of what we typically interpret as a teacher quality effect is in fact a match quality effect that may not be portable across schooling environments," Jackson writes in the paper.
This is potentially an important thing to consider, especially in the context of the "equitable distribution" of teachers. Typically, that phrase refers to policies and incentives to encourage teachers who are the most effective to transfer to—and stay in—schools with high percentages of disadvantaged or minority students, or to keep highly effective teachers from transferring away from such schools.
After all, if a large part of teacher effectiveness is related to match quality, and if teachers themselves are responding to match quality in their choice of workplace, then equitable-distribution policies probably need to take into account which teacher-school pairings are the most successful.
Is Teacher Tenure Still Necessary?
by Alan Greenblatt
NPR
April 29, 2010
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
"Teacher effectiveness" has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children's education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
"There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure," says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. "Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective."
Action All Over
This is not merely an academic debate. A bill in Colorado that would change tenure rules and tie them to student performance passed out of a Senate committee last week and has the support of Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter. A Florida bill to abolish tenure was vetoed this month by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, but a similar bill is pending in Louisiana...
Less than 1% fired
Firing teachers is hard. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have each fired fewer than 1 out of 1,000 of their tenured teachers in recent years. Those numbers are not unusual.
Administrators complain that the process is too draining. Reviews of dismissal cases can take years to make their way through the system, costing tens of thousands of dollars each.
Teachers say that administrators are themselves at fault for performing perfunctory, "drive-by" evaluations. One study of selected districts in four states found that 99 percent of teachers receive "satisfactory" ratings.
Sometimes, bad publicity can curb the worst abuses on either side. The Los Angeles Times found last December that L.A. schools deny tenure to fewer than 2 percent of probationary hires, with evaluations often amounting to nothing more than a single, pre-announced classroom visit lasting 30 minutes or less.
Following the report, Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines pledged greater scrutiny. In February, the district announced it would fire more than 110 nontenured teachers for performance -— three times the annual rate in recent years...
New Book says we need to get rid of the bottom 5% of teachers
Book Argues for How to Improve the Teaching Corps
One of the bolder ideas is to 'deselect' the field's bottom 5 to 10 percent.
By Debra Viadero
Education Week
A new book stitches together ideas—some of which may be controversial—for building an improved corps of teachers from the time they start their professional training until they retire.
“Research clearly shows that teacher quality is the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement,” write Dan Goldhaber and Jane Hannaway, the editors of Creating a New Teaching Profession, which is being published this month by the Urban Institute, a research organization based in Washington.
Yet, they add, “the myriad systems that govern the quality of teachers today are too often disconnected, incoherent, and out of step with the market mechanisms that govern the broader labor market.”
Among the bolder of the book’s suggestions is a call from Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek for systematically “deselecting” the least-effective teachers. He calculates that shedding the bottom 5 percent to 10 percent of teachers could, over 20 years, boost American students’ scores on international math tests to the level of their Canadian counterparts and raise the United States’ economic output by $200 billion.
“Relatively modest changes in the bottom end of the distribution have enormous implications for the nation,” Mr. Hanushek concludes...
One reason the teaching profession may be ailing in the United States, experts argue, is that it’s attracting less academically able students than it once did.
In his chapter, for instance, New York University researcher Sean P. Corcoran notes that the percentage of new female teachers drawn from the top tenth of their high school graduating classes shrank from 20 percent in 1964 to slightly more than 11 percent in 2000 as women began to follow other career paths that were once dominated by men. More than a third of new female teachers, on the other hand, came out of the bottom third of their high school classes in 2000—and that proportion hasn’t changed much since the 1960s.
In comparison, some countries that typically score high on international assessments draw teachers from the upper end of the academic-achievement spectrum, according to Mr. Goldhaber. He says that’s in part because, under the more centralized teacher-preparation systems in those countries, the number of entrants is often tightly regulated and there are fewer teacher-training institutions...
Bravo for the ACLU and Arnold Schwarzeneger for working to keep the best teachers
Lawsuit: Layoffs hurt minority kids
John Fensterwald
The Educated Guess
Feb. 25, 2010
Regulations for teacher layoffs are a prime example of how interests of adults are put ahead of those of children, especially minority children. Now, that system, along with state budget cuts that set it in motion, will face a court challenge.
In a case with statewide implications, the ACLU of Southern California and other public interest and pro bono attorneys are suing the state and Los Angeles Unified, charging that teacher layoffs have savaged three low-performing, low-income middle schools. All three have been thrown into turmoil since between half and nearly three quarters of their teachers got layoff notices last year. Most eventually did lose their jobs because of rules that dictate that less experienced teachers must be the first to go, regardless of how good they are with students and how well they fit in the school.
The suit, filed Wednesday in Superior Court in Los Angeles, comes less than three weeks before school districts must formally notify teachers that they may be laid off next year. With Los Angeles Unified facing a $640 million deficit, thousands of teachers are expected to get layoff notices, including yet again, many remaining teachers at the three schools named in the lawsuit. The ACLU’s next likely step is to seek an injunction preventing disproportionate numbers of teachers from those schools from being let go...
Will we finally get effective and transparent teacher evaluations? I could forgive Arnold for a lot of his budget screw-ups if he accomplished this.
Bill would end layoffs by seniority
John Fensterwald
The Educated Guess
Proposals that Gov. Schwarzenegger made during his budget speech in January to weaken teacher tenure and seniority rights have finally taken bill form.
Republican Sen. Bob Huff introduced SB 955 on the governor’s behalf last week. Its chief provisions would be to give local school boards, instead of the Commission on Professional Competence, final say over firing teachers, and to enable districts to lay off teachers based on a district’s subject needs and teacher effectiveness, instead of by seniority.
The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers will likely fight every piece of the bill. But a civil rights lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other public-interest attorneys against the state and Los Angeles Unified, challenging seniority-based layoffs, may improve chances of at least the seniority piece becoming law. That would be a major step forward.
The lawsuit, filed earlier this year on behalf of students at three low-performing middle schools, noted the constant churn of new teachers at these schools, where seniority rules make it next to impossible for principals to hire and keep teachers they want.
SB 955 would apply not only to layoffs; it would give principals more latitude in reassigning and transferring teachers. Passage of the bill would make it imperative that districts come up with more comprehensive and transparent teacher evaluations.
DON’T BLAME TEACHERS UNIONS FOR OUR FAILING SCHOOLS
How about giving them a nice round 50% of the blame?
I think teachers unions definitely deserve some (but not all) the blame for our failing schools. I have personally seen the teachers union work hand-in-glove with corrupt administrators and board members to destroy a school for political reasons. The trigger was a teachers union election, the 2001 election at Chula Vista Educators. Gina Boyd was afraid that someone might challenge her for the presidency, so she went along with rogue teachers at Castle Park Elementary who were determined to have control of the school at any cost to students.
DON’T BLAME TEACHERS UNIONS FOR OUR FAILING SCHOOLS
Click HERE for audio, video and transcripts of the debate.
If we refuse to pay for good schools for poor kids, we end up without national defense
Too Few Youths Eligible for Military, Leaders Say
Report Recommends Investments in Early Childhood Programs
By Dakarai I. Aarons
The United States should invest in early education to help bolster the number of young people eventually eligible to serve in the military and protect national-security interests, a report released last week argues.
A majority of the nation’s young adults are ineligible for military service because they have not graduated from high school, have criminal records, or are physically unfit, says the report.
Based on research from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the report says 75 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24—about 26 million people—are ineligible to join the military.
“A quality education is really an issue of national security,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at a Nov. 5 news conference held to release the report. “If we don’t educate our children well, we put our nation at risk.” ...
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