Are Teachers Too Hard to Fire?

I think the teacher benefits of becoming tenured should diminish, but the trade-off should be a substantial raise in salary for teachers that perform. Creating a more liquid labor force (like that of the private sector) is fine, but there needs to be a proportional increase in compensation. Teachers should get to keep their existing benefit packages.

I think if you were dissatisfied with less than 2% of your workforce you're doing awful good.

Anyhow, you have to also remember if you can fire people without cause, you then basically re-hire them (somewhere else) without knowing what caused the first instance.

Do we want teachers bouncing around from school to school without knowing if they're satisfactory or not?

Sure, there will always be a few dead-enders hanging around. But, there is no point in being able to cull the dead wood, if you can't hire good replacements. Right now, independent of any contract, the system doesn't look very attractive, everyone knows school budgets are going to be under intolerable pressure in the near future. Why would anyone want to enter a system that is or will soon be breaking under stress?

They're talking about different things. You shouldn't want to fire more than 2% of your workforce, that number is about right depending on the size of the org of course. The human resource person might be thinking about those who are "underperforming" but who needn't be fired to join the ranks of the satisfactory. That number is usually about 10%, and some you fire, and some you leave alone (change the culture) and some you retrain.

A couple of points. First, there's more downside to tenure than simply not being able to fire people. It also makes it very hard to manage those who are "underperforming" but not badly enough to merit dismissal. With the backstop of tenure, it is very easy for the teacher to simply resist. From my own experience as a former school board member, this group of teachers is probably larger than the group who merit sacking.

Second, if tenure is eliminated, salaries are going up. As with a 10-month work year and a formal 7-hour work day, part of the non-monetary compensation for teaching is the substantial likelihood that, after 3 years, a teacher will have something akin to a lifetime job. That factors into the salary. People will accept less pay in return for greater job security. But, if teachers have the twin pressure being expected to work harder under a merit pay scheme [longer hours, more supervision, greater pressure to perform] and no [or greatly reduced] job security, they will demand higher pay. This is true as a general matter of economic theory as well as in the give-and-take of collective bargaining where, in the absence of an impending calamity [think, airlines], nothing comes for free.

Having been a former teacher (five years) and a human resources director for a medium-sized organization (2,000, nearly all of whom were under a merit pay program) for over twenty years, I can tell you that most of the really incompetent people know who they are, curry favor with their supervisors, and often wind up with higher paying jobs (Peter Principle) and thus are immune to to firing. Under-performing people can always be fired, but too many supervisors are not willing to do the hard evaulation and documentation work to carry out a firing or their own supervisors protect the under-performers. Likewise, most supervisors are unwilling to make the tough decisions for meriit pay to work (e. g. rating more than half of all subordinates as superior and the other half as acceptable).

Regardless of public school district or municipality, it's unrealistic to compare rates of "unsatisfactory" performance among teachers with industry. Somebody already mentioned that the educational requirements for teaching are high; in addition to a bachelor's degree, teachers are also required to take courses towards licensure, then they're required to take tests to determine whether or not they've mastered both content areas and classroom management procedures. Isn't it just barely possible that most of the slackers really are weeded out before they reach tenure? People who will eventually work for industry are washed out of teacher education programs and refused licensure. Don't even get me started on how difficult it is to judge meritorious teaching (Do we reward the teachers who teach to the test, or the ones who put in extra time with underperforming students? Do we have different standards for teachers who teach in the inner city than for those who teach in the affluent suburbs? etc.) or whether tenure for people who earn between $28k and $32k when they start is a good idea. Teachers have to go through more to get to be teachers in the first place, so it isn't at all fair to assume they'd have the same "unsatisfactory" rates as people in other lines of work.

> namely that virtually no one is ever fired for poor job
> performance after their three-year probationary period
> is up and they have tenure.

Can we start out with the percentage of K-12 teachers nationwide covered by some form of "tenure"? Contrary to what the "reformers" imply, I don't think that the percentage is actually very high. But since the "reformers" and their supporters are all into metrics and everything I am sure they have the numbers right at hand.

Cranky

It is incredibly hard to be a good teacher--but it is even harder to be a bad teacher. Bad teachers have student discipline problems, parent problems, curriculum problems, administration harassment, department troubles, reputation problems—the list goes on and on.

How long does it take to know if someone is a good employee? Two years? Three years? Tenure isn’t about securing a teacher’s job for life, tenure is there to protect the teacher from the whims of administrators, overburdening bureaucracy, educational fads, extreme parents and in rare cases, out of control kids.

A principal worth their salt can get rid of any teacher they want to. They do this by harassing them: they come into the room each day, send them to summer trainings, check lesson plans ever day, critique each and every thing they do, until they break. At a school, the principal is god.

And for all you who think that teacher unions are so powerful think about this: If the unions are so powerful, why isn’t there better pay, why don’t I get health coverage, and how in the world do we live in a world of NCLB?

NPR just ran a story about a large southern school district importing teachers from the Philippines. It would appear it is more difficult to hire good teachers than it is to fire poor teachers.

"Are [Bad] Teachers Too Hard to Fire?"