Firing Bad Teachers
Over at Forbes, E.D. Kain is embarking on a new blog venture where he’ll be writing about education policy. Join me in wishing him good luck. He is also calling himself a progressive these days. I’ve followed his writing when he described himself as a conservative, an independent, and a prodigal conservative. I’m happy to continue reading him through this new iteration, though I still don’t see the point of asserting an ideological identity when it’s plain to everyone that he’s a thoughtful, intellectually honest guys who is figuring things out as best he can. There isn’t any shame in being uncertain or conflicted about what first principles to embrace or how they translate into policy – or being perfectly clear about one’s core convictions but cognizant that they don’t map onto any ideological category so banal that guys like Conn Carroll can immediately peg you.
It’s a blessing to live in Arizona, far from the Beltway, and to write about public policy as a side gig, unbeholden to the ideological constraints that make so many writers at think tanks and ideological magazines less interesting than they’d otherwise be. I’ll read Kain regardless of the ideological lens through which he’s engaging the world. But I’m rooting for him to try out the naked eye. To hell with gradually accumulating thumb prints.
Here’s the passage in his latest that I want to address:
We should get rid of bad teachers. This is just common sense in any organization, schools included. But it isn’t easy, and not just because there’s a union shielding bad teachers from getting fired. That’s a far too simplistic explanation – just like getting rid of bad teachers is a far too simplistic solution. Evaluating teacher performance is no simple task.
This is one of those statements that is true only because it’s so damned vague. Is it difficult to develop a precise metric for ranking every teacher in a school from highest performing to lowest performing in order to divide up compensation by merit? Yes, very tough indeed. In extreme circumstances, however, it is very easy to evaluate teacher performance. Say that there’s a student at your school who attempts suicide, and on his first day back, one of his teachers tells him, “Carve deeper next time – you can’t even kill yourself.” Or imagine another teacher who is caught keeping a stash of marijuana, pornography, and vials with cocaine residue on school grounds. Ponder a case where a male middle school teacher is observed lying on top of a female student in shop class. Or a special education teacher who fails to report child abuse, yells insults at children, and inadequately supervises her class. These aren’t hyperbolic examples crafted to make a theoretical point that has little bearing on the real world. These are actual examples of misbehavior by Los Angeles Unified School District teachers who weren’t fired!
In these cases, is getting rid of bad teachers “a far too simplistic solution”? I fail to see why. Let’s delve into another example from the same article.
District officials thought they had a strong case against fourth-grade teacher Shirley Loftis, including complaints and other evidence they said dated back a decade. According to their allegations before the commission, Loftis, 74, failed to give directions to students, assigned homework that wasn’t at the appropriate grade level and provided such inadequate supervision that students pulled down their pants or harmed one another by fighting or throwing things. One child allegedly broke a tooth, another was hit in the head after being pushed off a chair, a third struck by a backpack.
The commission, however, sided with Loftis. It acknowledged that she showed signs of burnout and “would often retreat from student relationship problems rather than confront them.” But it said the district did not try hard enough to help her and suggested administrators find her another job — perhaps training other teachers. “She’s obviously an intelligent lady, and such a program might well succeed.” When the district took the case to Superior Court, lost and appealed, Loftis retired. The district agreed to pay $195,000 for her attorney’s fees. Through her attorney, the former teacher declined to comment. Collins, whose first case with L.A. Unified was Loftis’, recalled being frustrated because, although the problems allegedly had gone on many years, the district was allowed to present just four years of evidence under the state education code.
Is it too much to ask that when the ultimate finder of facts determines a teacher is burnt out and inclined to retreat from problems rather than solve them she is fired? Under the current system it is! And it is that system those of us who want to make it easier to fire bad teachers seek to reform – not some hypothetical system where it isn’t exactly clear who ought to be fired because we’re still working on a very complex system of evaluation.
A bit later on, Kain writes this:
Yes, an exceptionally good or exceptionally bad teacher will make a difference for better or worse in students’ lives, but for the most part you’re going to attract a fairly average work-force into the teaching profession. Most teachers are neither exceptional or awful – they’re average, just like most workers in most fields. And I’m not sure that you’ll attract much better people even with higher salaries. People teach for a lot of reasons, but the money isn’t one of them (though, obviously, better pay wouldn’t hurt.)
Skip past the tautology in the first part of that excerpt – it’s the assertion that money isn’t a reason people teach that interests me. An extreme, counter-intuitive claim, it is contradicted by common sense and experiments like this one. Will that scale? Probably not. But it sure seems as though money attracts much better candidates, doesn’t it?
Kain’s post was prompted by an argument over this reform proposal: “It would give tenured teachers who are rated unsatisfactory by their principals a maximum of one school year to improve. If they did not, they could be fired within 100 days.” This post at The Daily Dish makes the case that even if that reform were adopted, it would still be far too difficult to fire bad teachers. Says Kain, “Andrew is falling into the trap so many pundits fall into: that simple solutions exist and if we just hold people accountable the system will fix itself. I would strongly recommend both Jim Manzi and Noah Millman on this issue, because both present sober, realistic evaluations of the limits education reformers face.” I too have a high opinion of the recent posts by Manzi and Millman. I suspect that both would agree that the ideal protocol for being allowed to fire under-performing teachers would proceed faster than one year plus 100 days.
I hope they’ll correct me if I’m wrong.
Maybe I’m missing something because I don’t have time to read the whole LA Times article, but Loftis was removed from teaching. It took longer and was more expensive than necessary, but that’s apparently because the district drug its heels and tried to fire her outright rather than move her into another, non-instructional, position or encourage a 74-year-old to retire.
Kain appears to be giving two different arguments. First, there’s need for too many teachers to hire only the exceptionally good ones. There aren’t enough John Keatings to go around; we may even need to hire some Ben Steins or worse. Better pay may improve things a bit, but not enough to replace all the Ben Steins. Second, many good teachers are less interested in money than other goods. One doesn’t go into a career that requires long hours and a great deal of patience, returning a quite modest salary, for fame and fortune. Better pay probably will expand the teaching pool a bit — attracting people who are more interested in the money — but that doesn’t mean many of the new recruits will have the virtues of excellent teachers. The increase may come mostly in the middle of the distribution, with people who arbitrarily chose teaching rather than (say) copyediting or claims adjusting and have no particular interest or aptitude for teaching.
Since both of these arguments work at the level of state or national teaching pools, they’re not disturbed in the least by an experiment that picked 8 excellent teachers from a pool of 600.
— Dan Hicks · Mar 3, 02:42 PM · #
Conor at some point I realized that I don’t have faith that you’ll accept any solution that doesn’t involve the destruction of the teachers unions. I wonder if in time your own preference hasn’t gotten backwards backwards: you seem now not to want to destroy the teachers unions to improve education, but to use the effort to improve education as leverage to destroy teachers unions. Your vendetta against them is that pronounced.
Now, when you wrote your own response to Jim’s post here, you praised it, then wrote a last sentence that utterly contradicted what he was saying without any justification. I wonder if you can be convinced about the epistemological difficulties with what you’re proposing. Wanting something does not equate with being able to get it, but that’s a lesson the school “reform” crowd is absolutely dedicated to not learning. Which is odd, because it’s such a conservative insight.
— Freddie · Mar 3, 03:07 PM · #
Conor – first off, thanks very much for the kind words. You know I can’t help but talk about my ideological shifts – it’s the only way I can find to properly frame my writing. I’m a hopeless addict I suppose. C’est la vie. And actually, I’ve been referring to myself as a leftwing civil societarian – Kling’s lefty doppleganger – because I’m not sure what progressive really means and I want more specificity.
And Dan Hicks is right up above. This is exactly what I’m driving at. I am also arguing that tests and test scores are lousy ways to identify good or bad teachers. Yes, we should have ways to remove the truly awful ones you’re describing – but this should be done outside the awning of test scores. Sometimes unions do impede sensible firing decisions, and that should also change. I think you could build a coalition of union leaders who would support this.
Thanks again for the post. A real response at Forbes will be forthcoming.
— E. D. Kain · Mar 3, 03:08 PM · #
Conor: I started writing a response to E.D. Kain and yourself here, but it got too long, so I turned it into a post in its own right.
— Noah Millman · Mar 3, 03:44 PM · #
Where would you rank abusive, pot-smoking, porn-reading teachers in a list of the most significant challenges our education system faces?
— matt · Mar 3, 04:07 PM · #
Connor, you hypocritical sack of shit. It seems like just yesterday when you were preening on Sully’s blog about how seriously you took critical e-mails in addition to your everyday routine of wagging your finger at everyone else for not living up to your high standards of political discourse. So naturally I was interested to see your Trig Truther boss put up a post titled “New Rule” which read, in its entirety:
“If your name is Koch, it’s pronounced cock. And if your name is Boehner, it’s pronounced boner. They can always change their names if they want. Until then … I’m calling it like it is.”
Now, as someone who made his name partly by protesting his being named “Friedersdork”, one might think you would be expecting a few e-mails on that subject, huh? Well, there was one that the Trig Truther posted. Here it is, again, in its entirety:
“No. I will not pronounce Koch “Cock.” I will not pronounce Boehner “Boner.” I like those two things too much.”
So let’s clear things up here, “Friedersdork”: your a lying, hypocrtical sack of shit. The next time you want to open your Sully-shit-sniffing mouth about what high discursive standards you have and how we could all do better if only we tried and what not, instead why don’t you shut the fuck up and stuff some of the Trig Truther’s nuts back down your shit-clogged throat. You’re a lying, hypocritical scumbag, “Friedersdork”, and you work for one too. What is the difference between you and Mark Levin? You’re the lying sack of shit, bitch.
— Mr. Johnson · Mar 3, 05:09 PM · #
It’s intriguing that Forbes would give an education blog to someone with no obvious expertise or training in the subject.
— JD · Mar 3, 07:10 PM · #
Freddie,
Even if my feelings about teachers unions changed, I don’t think that would affect the stance I’ve taken in this post – that it should be easier to fire the worst teachers, and that a year plus up to a hundred days is too long to wait.
Erik (and Noah),
Just to be clear, I don’t want pay to be based on test scores.
Matt,
I have no idea where I’d rank them – only that getting rid of them should be obvious, and the inability to do so suggests to me that it’s far too hard to fire bad teachers.
Mr. Johnson,
First, calm down. My goodness. Obviously you’re right that there’s no difference between Mark Levin and I. We’re exactly the same. So you’ve got me there. I actually agree with you that Sullivan’s post is a needless descent into name-calling. I suspect it’s motivated by affection for dick humor more than an attempt to score points in an argument, but either way, it isn’t something I would’ve written. Should it become core to the regular shtick on The Dish I’m sure I won’t fit there very well. As one post I disagree with among thousands, however, I can’t seem to work up your level of outrage. If you’d like to email me with something that isn’t filled with profanity and violent testicular imagery, and objects to the post in a reasoned, insightful way, I am certainly happy to see if my boss would like to publish it.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Mar 3, 10:57 PM · #
Not only does he have no expertise, he doesn’t seem to be aware that businesses don’t pay 100% of their revenue out in wages. Check out his most recent post saying that if teachers were babysitters, they’d be earning $108,000 per year, because they would be paid 100% of the babysitting revenues. Hmmm.
— JD · Mar 4, 02:10 PM · #