Can't teach? So what
New York Daily News - nydailynews.com
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
Many of New York's 80,000 public school teachers are topflight professionals who go above and beyond the call for students. But, as in any large workforce, some lack the skill or dedication to help children fulfill their potential.
This group, a decided minority, is taking a large toll. If only 1% of the Department of Education's 80,000 teachers are incompetent, then children in 800 classrooms are being denied quality instruction. And the number may be far larger. Mary Jo McGrath, an attorney specializing in education and employment law, estimates that as much as 10% of any teaching workforce is incompetent.
Whatever the actual count - 800 or 8,000 or a number in between - reason and good sense say teachers who fail to impart knowledge should be brought up to snuff or removed from the classroom. But reason and good sense do not govern the school system. The school system is ruled, instead, by the United Federation of Teachers contract and employment arbitration decisions that bar firing virtually any teacher with a heartbeat.
State law mandates that officials must have "just cause" to dismiss a teacher. But arbitrators, who earn $1,000 a day with the UFT's okay, have so narrowed the definition of "just cause" that the department managed to fire only four for poor performance in the past two years. That's .00005 of the ranks. Facing such odds, most principals know better than to waste the hundreds of hours and to scale the mountains of paperwork that it takes to bring proceedings against an instructor whose students don't achieve.
Letting a classroom run out of control, allowing children to roam the halls, using flawed lesson plans, displaying projects filled with grammatical errors, permitting students to sit for long periods without work - none is grounds for stern action under the disciplinary system. Arbitrators give passes even to teachers whose failure to supervise children leads to injuries.
To read the case files is to understand how radically the disciplinary system must be overhauled. It is geared to preserving the jobs of teachers when their abilities are questioned, just as it maintains the employment of those who are guilty of misconduct on the order of sexually propositioning students.
Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have made reforming teacher discipline a key goal in negotiations with UFT President Randi Weingarten. They've concluded that strengthening the teacher corps will strengthen learning, and, beyond any doubt, they're correct. A toughened disciplinary system is critical to ensuring that children encounter only skilled, dedicated teachers.
Bloomberg and Weingarten together have a responsibility to achieve that goal. They also appear to have the means, because state education law says they can jointly establish new disciplinary procedures. While they cannot eliminate the standard of just cause, they could agree to work with new hearing officers who do not depend on anyone for fees and have a track record of fairness. Hearing officers like that are readily available in the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH, an agency set up to serve as a forum that decides charges against city workers.
Standards would surely rise. It is very doubtful that independent examiners would accept the mediocrity and worse that prevail. And prevail, they do.
Consider the case of the Brooklyn third-grade teacher who let her students sit idle. We'll call her Ms. Smith because the Department of Education deleted her name from records for privacy reasons.
A new principal arrived at Smith's school in 2000, hoping to improve student performance and "raise the bar" for teachers. Suspecting that Smith was a "marginal" instructor, the principal observed her class 10 times and brought in an early childhood learning specialist as well.
After 22 days of hearings and 3,612 pages of testimony, an arbitrator found that Smith read to students in a "dull and uninspired" monotone and "lacked the questioning technique of a skilled teacher." In one period dedicated to sustained reading, only nine of 26 students read anything at all, while others misbehaved behind Smith's back. In a similar period, six children did nothing for 40 minutes while one "slithered" on the floor, several walked around the room talking and "not much learning was accomplished."
Overall, the arbitrator concluded that Smith was a "mediocre teacher who is unwilling or unable to improve her technique." Still, she was good enough to stay in the classroom. Despite the evidence, the arbitrator rejected the principal's "incompetence argument" as "somewhat speculative" because the school system had presented no data "to actually show or calculate" that Smith had harmed her students.
Instead of firing Smith or prescribing remedial training, the arbitrator fined her $5,000 and ordered her transferred to a new school where she would "not be on any form of probation and will be given every opportunity to make a success of the remainder of her career."
Another elementary school teacher - Mr. Jones - was afforded similar deference even after his negligence resulted in injuries to two students.
Over three years, administrators visited Jones' sixth-grade classes repeatedly, and an arbitrator found Jones had fallen below standards no fewer than 24 times in just one of those years.
The arbitrator concluded that Jones often had no lesson plans, spent time talking outside class, failed to maintain discipline, used poor questioning techniques, didn't properly assign or review vocabulary words, kept his reading, social studies and math bulletin boards bare, frequently allowed children to leave class and run through the halls, sat at his desk doing nothing and displayed student work with incorrect spelling. One student was hurt when Jones let children throw a tennis ball around class. A second needed medical help after Jones sent a group to the bathroom unattended and a brawl broke out.
The arbitrator found that Jones had often offered false explanations for his conduct or wrongly blamed others. Citing his "limited credibility and his unwillingness to assume responsibility," the arbitrator called him "unwilling or unable to improve the quality of his service." Then, the arbitrator turned the case on its head to consider what was best for Jones, not for his students.
Saying he was "not prepared to state that [Jones] is beyond remediation," the arbitrator suspended him for a year. "Perhaps, when he returns from suspension, if his class control is effective, [Jones] will be better able to accept supervision and to assume responsibility."
The damage Jones inflicted by depriving children of quality instruction was irrelevant, as was his dishonesty, as were three years of work by officials, as was the likelihood that more kids would be shortchanged in his classes. What counted was that, maybe, Jones would figure out how to teach before he went back on the payroll.
How bad do teachers have to be for an arbitrator to okay dismissal? They must lack the most fundamental skills - such as the ability to spell and explain arithmetic - despite years of remedial help.
Ms. Green was one such first-grade teacher. With 12 years on the job, Green was written up in 1996 for not being able to control her classroom and in 2000 for poor questioning techniques and planning. Green transferred to a school where administrators found her severely deficient. Over the next three years, they observed Green in class and brought in a "buddy teacher" and two reading specialists to help Green improve. She didn't.
An arbitrator found that children were often unruly in Green's class and that she didn't know how to use basic teaching aids, such as blocks designed to help kids understand number concepts. Over and over, Green proved unable to apply the aids that her students were expected to master. The arbitrator also said she misspelled the word "climbed" as "climed" and told students they should sound out the letter "h" in the word "rhino" and didn't correctly accent the syllables in the word "every."
And so, in approving Green's dismissal, the arbitrator set the bar: Teachers who can't spell common words or use first-grade counting cubes are out. All others can rest easy and collect their checks.
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