Fire Bad Teachers or the Terrorists Win

If you make it possible to instantly fire the drunk guy, you open the door to the instant firing of, say, the biology teacher who insists on teaching about evolution, and that's not an outcome anybody wants.

That's not an outcome that most people want. But surely there are those out there who do!

That's not an outcome that most people want. But surely there are those out there who do!

It's not an outcome that's desirable to anybody whose opinion is worth listening to, let's put it that way...

No one has a right to be a teacher. Imagine a small school has a need for only one calculus teacher. The current calculus teacher has done a wonderful job. But the school has found someone else willing to work at the school who would do an even better job. If the purpose of education is to help students rather than teachers then the school should fire its old calculus teacher to hire the new one. This same logic does not apply to imprisoning terrorists.

I wrote more about this here:
http://jamesdmiller.blogspot.com/2007/02/firing-teachers-and-imprisonin…

The basis of this idea seems to be the fact that unions often defend bad teachers against attempts to fire them. It's a short jump from there to the belief that teachers' unions are somehow all about protecting incompetents, or that they approve of the actions of bad teachers.

So... do the people who make these arguments also apply them to police unions, or firefighters' unions? And if not, what's the justification for picking on teachers?

I used to teach at a high school in Florida. One of the science teachers was not a good teacher (close to retirement, and didn't care very much) but the school could not get rid of him for this. The only thing they could do was reassign him to teach other classes, so this teacher (who had at one point been a department head and the physics teacher) ended up teaching 7th grade science.

If this described my work ethic, I would be fired. I have a hard time seeing how the public is helped by making it hard to fire incompetent people. I am not pro union, so I'm probably biased here, but I would support unions more if someone could explain to me why multi-million dollar professional athletes need a union.

As Chad says, the unions are more about following due process. Your defense attorney might not actually think you're innocent, but it is his or her obligation to make sure that due process is served. In all honesty though, the union will fight harder for the person who was fired for putting a picture of a burning flag in her class (happened near me) than the person who is drinking on the job.

re: Brian

They didn't always earn multimillion dollars. The union is part of that reason. Don't forget that the owners are the billionaires and they're worth/making more money than any of the players ever will.

Wait a minute. You dismiss the entire idea that non-union schools are better than union schools as products of a "right-wing noise machine" and claim that evidence exists otherwise.

And, as the evidence for this startling claim, you cite a blog which points out that (drumroll please) schools in the largely unionized North generally outperform schools in the largely non-unionized South?

Really? There's no other possible reason why Mississippi schools do worse than Massachusetts schools?

In truth, it wouldn't surprise me if there are some studies out there which give actual results, say of private (non-unionized) schools vs. public (unionized schools) in the same area. I'd love to see data like that, but an argument that Alabama could have New Hampshire's test scores, if it only unionized, seems a bit specious.

As a sidenote, the ability to fire teachers is only the most obvious impact of unionization, not the largest.

A more serious impact is basing almost all tangible means of reward (e.g., increased pay, desirable assignments) on seniority, rather than merit. The problem isn't so much the inability to severely punish the small fraction of teachers who shouldn't be there; it's the inability to reward the large fraction of teachers who should be.

"I have a hard time seeing how the public is helped by making it hard to fire incompetent people. I am not pro union, so I'm probably biased here, but I would support unions more if someone could explain to me why multi-million dollar professional athletes need a union."

So your support unions in general is predicated on the justification of unions for pro athletes in particular? That seems a bit like you're arguing from a corner case there.

I think even more fundamental than ensuring that proper procedure is carried out, unions are basically a way for employees to achieve things as a group that they would have a much more difficult time to achieve on their own. This is more or less independent of the particular compensation level for a given union. Why should a high salary eliminate the occurrence of legitimate grievances?

I don't know of anyone out there saying that principals ought to have the power to walk throughout the school pointing at teachings firing them at will. I'm not a teacher, so I don't know all the ins and outs of the system, but I do know that I have seen, and had terribly poor teachers that are at the same school as my sister goes through 10 years after me. Teachers who simply haven't cared about teaching for a single day in the last 10 years. I can either conclude that no one knows he's terrible, or it's too difficult to fire him.

To draw upon a due process analogy, our current system seems to me like finding someone with explosives in his shoes, and then requiring that he be allowed to fly freely about the country while 17 years of pre-trial paperwork is filed.

A few quick replies (It's a Lab Day, so I need to get back to research):

Brian Gibbons: Wait a minute. You dismiss the entire idea that non-union schools are better than union schools as products of a "right-wing noise machine" and claim that evidence exists otherwise.

And, as the evidence for this startling claim, you cite a blog which points out that (drumroll please) schools in the largely unionized North generally outperform schools in the largely non-unionized South?

The claim is a little more substantiated thatn that, as shown in the "second update" toward the bottom of the post, where a correspondant provides a number of literature references, and then notes:

"The decent studies show that the average performance of students is pretty clearly improved by unions. There are equivocal, or slightly negative effects at the top and bottom of the student achievement scales, but the overall positive effect is repeatable, significant and measurable, even after controlling for everything education researchers know how to control for."

A more serious impact is basing almost all tangible means of reward (e.g., increased pay, desirable assignments) on seniority, rather than merit. The problem isn't so much the inability to severely punish the small fraction of teachers who shouldn't be there; it's the inability to reward the large fraction of teachers who should be.

Having just returned from an hour-long meeting about assessment of teaching, let me just say that determining how to apportion rewards is not as easy a question as you seem to think.

Tom Renbarger, quoting a different Brian: "I have a hard time seeing how the public is helped by making it hard to fire incompetent people. I am not pro union, so I'm probably biased here, but I would support unions more if someone could explain to me why multi-million dollar professional athletes need a union."

So your support unions in general is predicated on the justification of unions for pro athletes in particular? That seems a bit like you're arguing from a corner case there.

Actually, I suspect that Brian's comment does have a lot to do with negative public perceptions of unions. The most prominent unions in the country these days are probably sports unions, and it's not uncommon to hear people running down professional athletes as spoiled millionaires. Even my father, the former teachers' union head, sometimes makes comments about the absurdity of the amount of money they get.

People who run down sports unions are missing two issues that make the unions fairly necessary, both of which have been noted above: First, that the owners of the sprots teams are making billions off the efforts of the athletes in question, and the athletes should get their fair cut of that money; and second, that there is no shortage of real abuse of pro athletes (hey to Ted Johnson), and the union can play an important role in improving working conditions for its members.

Back to science, now... I may have more to add later.

Pam (#4) has hit the nail right on the head. Nobody, nobody criticizes police unions, despite many high-profile cases where clearly incompetent or abusive officers have proved unfirable. The reason seems to be that most people (at least in the white community) start with the default assumption that police officers are good people trying to do a tough job within a difficult system. The `court of public opinion' places the burden of proof (and then some) on the complainant against the police department.

Clearly the default assumption about teachers is quite different.

Unions certainly ought to defend their members; that's why members pay dues. My only concern is whether there is an effective situation in some areas where you have to be in the union to work there. As I said in the other thread, I think that there should be a choice of unions, that choice including, minimally, the freedom not to be in a union at all.

"If you make it possible to instantly fire the drunk guy, you open the door to the instant firing of, say, the biology teacher who insists on teaching about evolution, and that's not an outcome anybody wants."

To get back to this point, I would suspect that this is the exact reason that some really want to abolish tenure. They may not be worth listening to with regard to their understanding (or lack thereof) of reality, but they must be thwarted, nonetheless.

Captain C #14:Well, that would be an issue for the state's Board of Education anyhow, wouldn't it? Firing a science teacher that insists on teaching about evolution would be a Constitutional issue even if the Board wanted to do away with it. Which won't, of course, stop some boards from trying until it does get all the way to the Supreme Court (almost a pity, in that regard, that the creationist/ID members of the Dover schoolboard were kicked out and the schoolboard didn't exercise their right to appeal the excellent judgement against them, although I understand why they chose not to, at least from the financial perspective).

Whatever the rights and wrongs of tenure, I don't think that firing teachers over teaching evolution is one of them. Otherwise, some public schools could just write 'mustn't teach evolution' into the contract, in which case tenure wouldn't save anyone because teaching it would be a breach of contract and you could get fired for insisting on doing it. Tenure wouldn't stop that; it'd just save the teachers that are already tenured and eventually those people will retire and would be replaced by people contractually constrained not to teach evolution.

Unions certainly ought to defend their members; that's why members pay dues.

In fact, unions generally defend people whether they're members or not. The contract is the same for everyone, and the procedures must be followed for all employees.

I don't have a very strong opinion regarding the "closed shop" issue. On the one hand, it doesn't seem right to force people to pay dues if they're not interested in joining, but on the other hand, they're going to get most of the benefits of belonging whether they're active members or not, so the union might as well have the extra resources.

I'd probably come down as approving of "closed shop" arrangements, just because so many of the people who oppose them appear to be doing so out of a general opposition to the existence of unions in the first place.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of tenure, I don't think that firing teachers over teaching evolution is one of them. Otherwise, some public schools could just write 'mustn't teach evolution' into the contract, in which case tenure wouldn't save anyone because teaching it would be a breach of contract and you could get fired for insisting on doing it.

Evolution's not the only issue like that, though-- there are a whole host of issues about sex and sexuality, alcohol and drugs, and basic questions of history that are a legitimate or even essential part of the educational process that are likely to upset some students or parents. Teachers need to be able to teach those subjects without fear of being fired the first time some whack job raises a stink.

(And then, of course, there's the question of people being fired because the new superintendant's brother-in-law happens to need a job, or because they don't get along with the new principal, etc.)

We've got a number of safeguards in place to prevent educational abuse, including state curricular standards, but given the large and well-funded efforts out there to prevent the teaching of ideas that rub certain groups the wrong way, this is an area that demands constant vigilance. And tenured contracts and teachers' unions are an important part of that system of safeguards.

I think that you have to have freedom to choose; if not, it seems to me to be an infringement of the workplace rights of the teacher, who may not believe in unions, for example, or may not agree with the policies of that particular one. Also, don't the unions provide legal insurance, etc, to members only?

The union might donate, using your money, to political causes that you find objectionable. I think that unions should be able to donate to political causes, because employers and corporations can, but the money that they are donating should be freely given in the sense that the members have the choice of joining, perhaps joining some other union, or joining no union at all.

The closed shop is extortion, so far as I am concerned; as I said, I am wholly in support of the existence of unions, but I can see no compelling reason why they should be able to insist that I join, and pay, to be employed at a school (or anywhere else). As for 'we all get the benefit', even where it is true, that is the result of the union's choice, not mine; they should hardly be able to compel me to give up part of my wages on account of it.

The issue of getting fired because someone's relative needs a job isn't just a teaching issue, it's a general employment issue. The issue of being able to teach certain topics obviously is a teaching issue, although frankly, I don't see that teachers have the right to teach whatever they see fit (I taught sex education myself and I think that it was valuable, but I don't think that I had the right to teach it anymore than I had the right to teach anything else). It should be a curricular issue and the curricula aren't set by the teachers (or shouldn't be). I appreciate that, particularly in some states, there are some concerns about the curricula; tenure doesn't actually solve that problem, though, because the majority of teachers will bend anyhow. In any case, isn't materially disobeying the curriculum a breach in contract from which tenure doesn't protect a teacher?

For myself, I'd have preferred a much freer structure; we didn't have tenure in the UK anyhow, but I'd have liked to see the payscale utterly broken (which is, so far as I can see, the only affordable way to correct the lamentably falling numbers of well-qualified and talented teachers in many subjects). The situation with the unions was OK with me; the NUT (by far the dominant union in the 70s) did screw some things up for the rest of the profession with the occasional deranged rants but things are better now that there are a reasonable choice of unions (primarily, at schools I worked at, the NUT, the NASUWT and the ATL). The service that a union provides is also better as the other unions have grown and competition for members has become fiercer.

Frankly, the taxpayers pay our wages and the parents are our customers. I found that, in general, you could work pretty well with them if the correct approach, of calm consideration, was adopted. In particular, the really obnoxious parents would piss off the other parents and with the other parents behind you, you win. Teachers that adopted a 'I know best, I'm the expert, so screw you, peasants' approach, or appeared to, did tend to get problems. Fortunately, most teachers aren't utterly arogant jackasses* and don't do that stuff.

*Although, sadly, some are. I guess that's the result of having hundreds of people defer to you every day. Not me, though, of course. Not me. No sirree Bob.

Incidentally, George Will has an interesting piece today; some of his normal irritation with Campaign Finance Reform, but most of it is about the 'Employee Free Choice Act'. I don't buy his line on it, but I certainly don't like the replacement of secret ballot with a card-based scheme, just based on employee free choice. That's not to say that I am not concerned about the overarching effect that employers' expressions of concern about unionisation can have, I just don't think that the fix is to put what should be a personal employee vote out in public.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/02/congress_prepares_to_…

Couple of questions:

How do you measure quality of teaching? Avg. test scores can fluctuate based on the composition of the classroom. Rewarding "merit" sounds nice but how do you actually put into practice without increasing the numbers of teachers who teach to a test? Not to mention creating incentive to cheat on such standardized tests?

Second, are there really that many people wanting to be teachers in the US at the current pay scale that are being kept out of teaching because their spots are being taken by poor teachers? I know schools that have to settle (usually poorer districts). At the better public schools I have seen turn down applicants because they pick who they think is best and they get rid of those that don't live up to those expectations. Older teachers who are past their prime are usually bought out and replaced by a cheaper model. These better schools have a hard time retaining teachers because of the high cost of living in those areas relative to the salary teachers receive.

In order to be in a position to get rid of "bad" teachers the system needs to have a large enough supply of good teachers wanting jobs not just in schools in affluent neighborhoods but also poor districts. You want to be able to sample for a larger pool to get higher quality, you have to make the job more rewarding which gets back to Chad's original point.

For myself, I'd be looking for pay increases of 50-100% for teachers in shortage subjects; sure, it won't be competing with accountancy or law, but it'll be enough to live relatively well. If teachers in some subjects, on the other hand, are easy to find, pay them less (the classic case in the UK would be PE teachers, who are legion).

I've known teachers, good bad and indifferent. I've seen schools both well-run and not-so-well run. I've seen more examples of appalling management than of appalling pedagogy. Have the anti-teachers-union types ever looked closely at school administrators?

When teachers burn out, they either plod on to retirement (your "incompetent teachers") or they decide it's time to go into administration. The ranks of management are filled with the least competent line-staff.

So the anti-union folks want the least "competent" teachers (for some values of "competence" - some teachers-turned-administrators are great at it, but many are horrible at it) - those who have (for whatever reason) given up on teaching and become principals - to have the untrammeled, arbitrary power to fire those still fighting on the front lines? They're placing entirely too much faith in the competence of management. (Which might be a conservative theme....)

The anti-union folks need to listen to some of the horror stories told in teachers' lounges, first.

I'm not one of the anti-union folks and have obviously, as a teacher, spent much time in teacher's lounges. However, this is another example of an alleged problem for which tenure is hardly the best solution. You argument seems to be:

'The Schools are run by incompetents'
'Thank Christ the teachers have tenure'

If the first part of the argument is true, that's a huge problem. The solution to that is not tenure to stop teachers being unjustifiably fired by these incompetents, it's not appointing incompetents to run your schools because, if you do hire incompetents, even good teachers won't see their best use.

I don't completely buy the 'bad teachers become administrators' stuff, either. It can go either way; people generally choose to become administrators for the better money or the chance to have a wider effect outside the classroom, in my experience. You can get good and bad teachers following the administration route for those reasons, and I've worked for both.

I'd also add that the alleged incompetents already running some places should be fired. Clearly, anyone in any job that falls to execute their duties adequately should be fired; when, however, we are talking about the education of children, which is one of the most important human endeavours, not to fire those people is pretty inexcusable according to a fair procedure (fair to both sides). That may even be the current situation with teachers and tenure; I'm somewhat agnostic on that, although I never felt the need for tenure myself as a teacher. I'm just not convinced by the arguments advanced thus far for tenure. Incidentally, I don't see the need for tenure for administrators (who don't, presumably currently get tenure?), either, even if it would give them the pluck to stand up to a creationist state education board.

Tenure protects teachers from being let go for teaching material that is contraversial it does not protect them against gross incompetence. If you do drugs with your students and get caught you are going to be let go. If you harass a student you are going to be let go. If you physically harm a student & it isn't in self-defense, you are going to get fired. The union and rightly so insures due process to make sure the offense actually takes place & isn't a made up reason to get rid of a teacher who is teaching something someone in the community doesn't like. Tenure is not an iron-clad get out of jail free card.

Now in terms of the quality of teaching, how do you measure that? It is subjective. Teaching is an art. To be good at it you have to be true to yourself, your students and your material. Are there mediocre teachers who do not inspire? Yes but who are you going to replace them with? Who is available? Teaching is looked down upon and many of the potential good teachers can get better paying jobs that are respected more by society. You want to improve the quality of teaching you have to select for a larger pool of potential applicants and you need to create school environments that do not burn teachers out after a few years.

"Teaching is an art. To be good at it you have to be true to yourself, your students and your material.

Woah. Teaching is about preparation and hard work and critical self-analysis. Being 'true to yourself' might work for writing poetry, but it's not the magic ingredient in teaching; the personal element comes in finding the best methods that fit your particular talents and characteristics. I wouldn't describe that as 'being true to yourself' or anything highfalutin like that, it's just an attempt to match abilities with strategies to achieve ends; it's an optimisation problem, albeit one with a lot of fuzzy edges. Likewise, so far as being 'true to your students' is concerned, I'm with Ausubel; the most important thing is to know what they already know. 'Being true to them' sounds like some metaphysical matchup of spiritual existence and trust, but really, it's a matter of obtaining and processing information about their existing skill and knowledge sets and proceeding to help them build on that. As for 'being true to your subject', if you mean 'representing it in an appropriate manner', ie, not telling untruths in the course of simplification and providing tasks that mimic the processes used in the subject at higher levels, then sure. I'd like it pinned down a little more, too (and would it hurt chemistry teachers to point out that the 2.8.8.etc model for the electron configuration is a simplification for the purposes of teaching at that level? The students will be learning the spdf configuration at highschool a few years later anyhow and then some genuine quantum chemistry after that if they take it at college. But perhaps that's a complaint that only applies to British schools. Chemistry teachers. I ask you).

Anyhow, teaching's not an art; it can be reduced and dissected. It's just not a straitjacket so that everyone should do it the same way, anymore than everyone should bowl the same way in cricket (ah, cricket, how I miss thee).

I said elsewhere that a teacher works out pretty quickly if another teacher is bad, but that veers a long way towards 'I know it when I see it', which is no way to establish a legal boundary. You can test value-added over some years if the existing assessment regime is suitable; if the existing regime is completely unsuitable, implenting a new regime just for this purpose is liable to be rather more effort than it's worth (burdening all teachers with extra paperwork to catch the small number of bad teachers), although there can be other benefits to it because it allows for tracking of individual student progress in context.

I found, myself, that most teachers weren't in principle bothered about the idea of being judged on their merits, nor of performance-related pay; they were extremely concerned about the method by which it would be evaluated. However, the tenure system itself depends upon an evaluation of teacher quality (you stay somewhere long enough to get tenure because they think that you're good enough is how it works, right?) so it's not as if everyone's objecting to the very principle of it, just fearful of how it will be executed and distrustful of the administrators that will execute it.

There are different ways to assess teacher quality and they all come with overhead. Impartial experts could assess a teacher but that would take some time; you'd have to interview students, read through their work, watch lessons, interview the teacher and their colleagues, etc. Value-added can be adjudged with a decent assessment scheme but you need to be careful with it and you never fully escape the risk that unscrupulous teachers could game the system. I favour looking at that because I prefer having an assessment regime and, once you have gotten that properly set up, looking at value added is a matter of querying a database and doing statistics, which is automatable. I'd be OK with that being used for performance-related pay but for firing someone, it'd only ever be a part of the evidence. Assuming it wasn't something obvious like inappropriate contact, intoxication, persistant absence or lateness or whathaveyou, you'd need to build a case based on a basket of evidence.

As a question, does tenure protect a teacher from redundancy lay-off, say if student numbers fall a lot? That doesn't seem particularly reasonable to me if it does, although again, the case would have to be made by the school district to some legal standard (otherwise you could just claim that all the expensive teachers are redundant and replace them with cheap ones, every few years).

My preference is for teachers to be paid a lot more, with no set payscale and for the environment to much more competitive (and not have tenure). I'd personally rather compete for the benefits of being good than have a safety net. Judging who the good employees are isn't necessarily any easier in a lot of non-education employment, either, but there are still ways to do it and talented individuals still build careers.

I guess that I started on one topic and veered to another. If I can finish with something closer to how I started and in which I have had more interest, I would portentously say that, in my opinion, some of the most important elements in teaching are:

Continual and honest self-evaluation (such as always considering whether something worked in that lesson with those kids; this can be pretty hard to do and much harder when someone else questions it). You have to do this right through your career, because even if you don't want to change, everything else will.

Knowing what the students know and what they can already do (and this isn't a homogeneous thing, obviously; they will all be at different levels in different areas)

Hard work. It eats your life, but it's important. It's not a job for people that like a firm work/life divide, I don't think. It may also not be a job for a full lifetime of work, either, for everyone; it can burn you up.

Organisation. Oh yes.

Adam I generally agree my writing was more a short hand. As for art, I say that because it is individualistic. People I have thought as wonderful teachers and who I learned a great deal from were thought of as bad teachers by others in the very same class. A teacher must not just realize what the students already know but also how each student learns. I do agree you can dissect & evaluate techniques but artists do the same and they work hard which was my point with teaching. It takes effort, care, passion and skill to do it well. One as you pointed out must self-evaluate all the time and be critical. As for evaluations for tenure the sense I get is it is not quantitative because there are just too many variables to ever truly get a meaningful/accurate quantitative evaluation. It is more the qualitative good, ok, bad type of separation. School districts in the US with more resources (ie those in richer communities) typically can pick more the first pool than those with less resources. Which is the biggest problem with the American educational system. Those who need the most typically get the least. With more resources maybe better assessments can be developed to improve teaching. With "merit" pay you have to be very careful for what you are actually selecting for as any who has tried to carry out evolution experiments in laboratory setting knows.

Kstrna: Yeah, I definitely agree that the system where much/most of a school's resources are raised locally means that schools that are often the most challenging are the ones without the funds to attract the best teachers to meet those challenges. It seems to me to contrary to the American ideals of meritocracy later in life, which are founded on a belief that anyone can be anything they want, subject to the limits on their talent.

Even as a blackhearted conservative myself, I believe in a decent public education available to all kids and for the same reasons I mentioned above. It seems to me that the conservative meanness can only be justifiably founded on a belief that adults in straitened circumstances are reaping the rewards of their own sowing; that's clearly not close to being true if that person had no chance to get a decent education (they can still fail to grasp the opportunity to get that education, of course, but not getting a chance at all is not acceptable).

I can understand that people in many areas would feel resentment that their property taxes subsidise schools districts elsewhere but, frankly, they should try my situation of living in an expensive school district (with excellent schools) and having no kids at all; I still pay the same school taxes (and I'm not complaining about that; education's important). Those whiners can cry me a damned river (not to be confused with a dammed river).

One point I would make about merit pay is that in the UK, the teacher assembles supporting evidence themselves (including putting the value-added in and comparitive achievements and improvements of the same kids across subjects) and then the school also kicks in their own evidence. It's a hassle, but at least there is a potential payrise at the end of it. I just wish it wasn't a trap door, that later failings would see the extra pay taken away. It is important to have a basket of measures; in the end, it's not that difficult to identify those teachers that really are genuinely good and pay them more, it's just timeconsuming. I'd prefer to see the school have much more leeway to pay what they wanted for teachers they needed, though, in general, however they decided to do it.

My concerns about it being called 'an art' where based on my perception that you meant it in the sense of 'an art, not a science'. So apologies for misunderstanding there; the actual business of doing art is, of course, highly technical and reducible. At that level, the practice of art is not much different to the practice of science (it's just that science is about making falsifiable predictions).