- Thomas Sowell
Whatever horror stories about rubber rooms come out of NYC are not indicative of the reality on the ground most places.
I left California 3 years ago, so maybe this has changed, but at that time there were countless stories about "teacher jails" where Los Angeles would send teachers who should have been fired, but the process is so expensive and fraught with appeals and obstructions that it was cheaper and easier to keep them on the payroll - permanently. They would isolate them so they couldn't have contact with students, but they'd go on paying them to go sit in empty offices - for years.
The argument that tenure only adds requirements for coaching sort of whitewashes over the practical challenges presented when a district needs to let a teacher go.
Because of management negligence (and worse) in dealing with, documenting, and preserving documentation of earlier incidents, including the district at one point systematically destroying records relating to sexual abuse at district schools.
The problem was not the rules requiring documented cause for firing, the problem was management repeatedly covering for him and other abusers, including by destroying evidence.
Management misconduct doesn't justify giving more arbitrary power to management. Though, of course, that's what management likes to argue for whenever its own misdeeds are at issue.
Sure, you can make a case that management failed to document his previous behavior so they had to start over from zero and document, counsel, coach, whatever the contract requires, but once he was actually busted for ejaculating in kids food - how is it reasonable that they couldn't fire him on the spot?
He wasn't actually caught (or even formally accused of by the district in its dismissal charges) doing that. Everything that came out and was cited as the basis for his dismissal was the result of a photo lab reporting pictures, and in the charges for dismissal what is identified as being on the cookies is “an unidentified milky-white substance”. Notably, none of the reports of sexual abuse that students identified were made around the same time to school officials, or even the reported sexual context of the events in the photographs used as the basis for dismissal charges, were even referenced in those (exceedingly nonspecific) charges.
The management failures continued into the suspension and firing process.
Listen, I don’t have a problem with firing teachers. I just don’t think the common perception of “infinite job security” for teachers is accurate.
A much larger and more concerning issue - in my opinion - is that we have very poor measures for teacher effectiveness. This is problem in at least two major ways. It inhibits districts from dismissing poorly performing teachers. It likewise prevents teachers from improving their performance because it often isn’t clear what problems might exist in their curriculum and instructional practices.
I also believe that if we were able to make teacher designed and administered assessment more universally trustable (as their results are now only [sometimes] trustable within the context of that specific teacher’s coursework) we could start to address some of these problems.
A much larger and more concerning issue - in my opinion - is that we have very poor measures for teacher effectiveness."
If bad teachers, by your own admission, are not being fired, teachers have the very job security you claim they lack. If being fired for bad performance is unlikely and schools are much less likely to run out of funding than a company (if run even semi-responsibly), these jobs may not have "infinite job security" but they're as close to that as can reasonably be found. After all, what is job security if not confidence you will not be fired?
Elaborate systems have been made measure and quanitfy teacher effectiveness; however, it’s not a solved problem. Obviously problematic teachers do get dismissed. Like I said elsewhere in this discussion, my first three years of teaching I could be fired without cause. After that, I could be dismissed after two poor performance reviews or with cause.
You’re arguing that teachers known to be “bad” are being protected from firing. I don’t believe this is true - at least in my experience as a teacher in the Midwest.
I’m saying that once you get beyond a certain threshold for quality it becomes very difficult to separate teacher effectiveness from other noise in the process. Because of this, there are some teachers who may be more effective than others (and possibly some who are only marginally effective); however, we can’t accurately identify them or what makes them better/worse.