In the latest installment of its ongoing teacher quality series, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on the challenges to firing ineffective teachers.
According to the story: “Getting rid of an ineffective teacher is expensive and complicated. Metro Atlanta school systems, which are among some of the nation’s largest, typically fire less than 1 percent of the teaching workforce in any given year. Many districts allow teachers to resign or transfer rather than go through the process of firing them, a practice known in education circles as ‘Passing the Trash’ or the ‘Dance of the Lemons.’”
The focus on their ineffective colleagues upset many teachers, who dashed off angry emails or vented on my AJC education blog, Get Schooled.
As one poster wrote, “First, most teachers I know work 12 hour days and on weekends to give this sub-par performance you allege. Let’s also mention the 10-minute lunches and trying to find time to go the bathroom. Second, let’s talk about other professionals — yes, teaching is a profession — should we blast them on the front page of the paper?”
Yes, if they are public servants on the public payroll.
Education is one of the largest publicly funded programs in Georgia, claiming $7 million in state funds each year and more than $10 billion in locally raised dollars.
As school funding expert Joseph Martin recently testified at a legislative hearing: “Teaching is crucial to the success of our schools and represents over 80 percent of all operating costs at every level. All of our efforts in education should be focused on our students, but the funding formula is tied largely to the provision of teaching positions.”
After writing an education blog now for two years, I’ve seen the rising frustrations of teachers who have to cope with increasing cuts to their classrooms at the same time they are facing escalating demands for higher performance and achievement.
But there is no way we can improve schools if we can’t talk openly about good teaching and bad teaching.
And we can’t talk about teacher quality without talking about teacher training and whether our colleges of education, long stepchildren on most Georgia campuses, are turning out elementary school teachers who know enough about mathematics to teach second graders about fractions.
“The thin skin of teachers is understandable. They feel battered and for good reason,” says Kate Walsh, president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit research group dedicated to effective teaching.
“When you are a public servant and constantly being held up to a bright lens by a newspaper or by all these Washington know-it-all-groups, it gets tiresome,” Walsh says. “But it is still a healthy process, and we have to learn to develop a tougher skin and embrace it for the value it can offer. But that is not happening.”
Walsh has seen that resistance firsthand because of her organization’s plan — in collaboration with U.S. News & World Report — to rate the more than 1,400 schools of education throughout the country, including 32 programs in Georgia.
The schools would be rated on selectivity, the robustness of the course work required and the quality of their field experiences. A cellular examination of how we train teachers is necessary, says Walsh, to spur the core reforms that transformed medical schools a century ago.
In 1910, Abraham Flexner, a high-school-teacher-turned-researcher at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, visited all 155 medical schools operating at the time and issued a scathing report that decried “cheaply made doctors,” med school deans who “know more about modern advertising than about modern medical teaching,” and classes taught by a “scientifically dead practitioner whose knowledge has long since come to a standstill.”
The Flexner report dramatically improved the quality and effectiveness of doctors by demanding higher admission and graduation standards, rigorous curricula, skilled faculty and hands-on training.
“Modern medicine, like all scientific teaching, is characterized by activity,” wrote Flexner. “The student no longer merely watches, listens, memorizes; he does.’’
Improving teachers and teacher education can’t happen unless we highlight both the successful and unsuccessful classrooms as both have something to teach us.
About the Author
