UNFIT TEACHERS:

Suffering Children,

Parents Who Have Had Enough,

Principals Who Need to Do Their Jobs, and

Legislators Who Need to Act

 

Daria Doering

Education 200

December 17, 2002

 

 

CONTENTS

1)    Introduction

2)    History

3)    The problem

4)    Causes

a)    Teacher quality

b)    Teacher evaluation

c)    Protections

i)     Civil service laws

ii)    Unions

iii)   Tenure

d)    Principals

e)    Powerless constituents

5)    Parent involvement

a)    Epstein’s Six Types

b)    Shared Decision Making

c)    Parent Rights

d)    Rights that Parents Do Not Have

e)    Complaints about Teachers

6)    Solutions

a)    360 Degree Evaluation

b)    Parent review, peer review or both?

c)    PTA activisim

i)     Parent ombudsmen and mediators

ii)    Voluntary 360 Degree Feedback

iii)   Educating Parents about Activism

d)    Protecting teachers from “bad parents”

e)    Parent lawsuits

f)     Taming unions

i)     Truth campaign

ii)    5-year contracts

iii)   Non-union & charter schools model

iv)   “New Unionism”

g)    Principals

i)     Must be a district priority.

ii)    Effective evaluation systems.

iii)   Training for administrators in giving critical feedback.

iv)   360 degree evaluation

v)    Training on evaluation, dismissal

h)   TAP

i)     New attitudes needed

7)    Conclusion

8)    Bibliography

 

9)    Appendices

a)    What’s the problem with teachers’ unions?

b)    Notes on professionalism from Occupations and the Social Structure

c)    Teacher evaluation procedures

d)    Teacher discipline procedures

e)    Teacher dismissal procedures

f)     Bad Teachers: The Essential Guide for Concerned Parents – outline

Introduction

 

This paper started as part of a school improvement project, which the “history” section very briefly describes.  The purpose of my research was to learn about legal issues related to parent activism in education.  However, although my school improvement project encompasses many areas, the area of “unfit teachers” is by far the most difficult and controversial.  Therefore my research into legal issues has focused on that area.

I also expanded the paper to include an overview of background topics that I found it necessary to be informed about.  That took me into many fields I knew nothing about, including school administration, teachers’ unions and teacher quality, and this paper became a gargantuan research effort.  I know I “did it to myself” by making the subject so broad; but I’m a wholistic thinker, and wouldn’t be able to learn about a small part of it without understanding the whole.

The style also vacillates between literature review and a general interest article for publication.  Since I’m considering turning this into a series of articles or book, I couldn’t resist just letting it flow, or “that was how the paper wrote itself,” so to say.

Writing this report was a very emotional experience for me.  I went through stages of anger, shock, and grief.  I started off angry.  Why, when I was young, did I have a happy year with about half of my teachers, and a miserable year with the other half?  Why, today, are my children’s teachers a constant source of anxiety to me?   Why should I have to desperately strategize to try to avoid my children getting a “bad teacher”?

I found out.  For the most part, researching this paper resulted in my long-term misgivings, based upon my own experiences as a student, parent and teacher, being confirmed and explained in detail.  But there were other things that were true surprises.  In fact, my shock and dismay grew larger on a daily basis.

The first shock was that not only is it almost impossible to fire unfit teachers, but they very rarely even receive negative evaluations.  In other words, they receive little feedback, and principals are not doing their job on a massive scale.  In fact, supervision of teachers is so meaningless that teachers are virtually mavericks, ruling worlds unto themselves, with children at their mercy.

The second biggest shock was the mounting evidence that any college graduate off the street who is psychologically well-adjusted, enthusiastic about learning and loves kids could probably walk into a classroom and do a better job than a typical elementary school teacher.

The third biggest shock related to the subject of teachers’ unions, professionalism, and the nature of the job of teaching.  I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I never realized that teachers don’t receive merit pay.   I guess I must have known this, being employed as a (non-union) teacher, but maybe I just hadn’t thought about the implications, and the lack of financial incentive to do a good job.  Or maybe what really shocked me was seeing the San Diego Teachers’ Association pay scale, the step increases, and learning that it’s true that some fossilized, sub-standard teacher really is making $70,000 just for staying on the job all those years.   So teachers are not only unsupervised, and not the brightest, but also not meaningfully compensated, and hence unmotivated.

The fourth major shock was discovering the field of “teacher quality,” and realizing that that’s what all of this is really about.  I always thought the two big variables in teaching were curriculum and instruction.  I now believe there are three: teacher quality, curriculum and instruction, with teacher quality being the most important.

How could I have not known this?  To begin with, even mentioning the issue of “teacher quality” is politically charged and a no-no in most circles.  According to most school principals, there is no art to teaching, none of their teachers is better than another, and all their teachers are qualified.  Of course we all know that’s ridiculous.

Then when I’ve heard governors and presidents talk about “teacher quality,” and “the need for more credentialed teachers,” I barely noticed that either, because obviously bad teachers have credentials, so it would never occur to me that there would be any connection between credentials and teacher quality.

Through my research, my thinking changed from the challenge of even mentioning the denied and suppressed problem of bad teachers, to becoming aware of the legitimate field of teacher quality, and seeing it less as a black and white issue than as a continuum of quality, that all teachers fall somewhere along.

Lastly, I guess the shocks just never end.  I had written in my report that the “PTA appears to be in the teachers’ unions pockets,” due to my recollection of the last time there was legislation on the California ballot that would have given principals much more power to fire teachers, during Pete Wilson’s last year as governor, I think.  Of course it was opposed by the teachers’ unions, but the PTA lined right up with them, and the legislation was defeated.  Now I find books about how the NEA is firmly in control of the PTA, and a whole book about the NEA and parent involvement, which I wish I’d had time to include in this.

 

 

History

 

This project was prompted by my nine-year involvement with Smug Elementary (pseudonym), our local public school.  My involvement with Smug began as I enrolled our oldest child in kindergarten there.  I was full of optimism, hope, and a commitment to making this neighborhood school into a suitably wonderful environment for our three beloved children.  I became a Highly Involved Parent Volunteer, and started an after school arts and foreign language program – a huge undertaking – which I ran for five years.

During that time, I began advancing to stage two of my involvement at Smug: Disillusioned, Disenfranchised Departee.  A panoply of painful and unresolved issues created this situation; the worst of which was a handful of poor teachers, and the refusal of the principal to take parent concerns seriously, do anything other than defend the teachers, or change any child’s classroom assignment unless the teacher went so far off the beam as to start acting irrationally at meetings with the parents and principal (which unfit teachers often do).  So in other words, only to protect a teacher against her own embarrassing and inappropriate behavior would the principal ever take any action.  All of this resulted in our pulling our third grader out of Smug midyear, and never starting our youngest child there.  I barely set foot inside Smug for several years, although one of our children still attended school there.  After all I had done for the school, and how I had been treated, it was too painful.

Stage three – Parent Activist – began when I learned that the inept principal was departing.  I got a sudden urge to jump back into my involvement at Smug, and joined the Governance team.  My motivation was probably nothing more than the fact that as a  determined and persevering person who doesn’t like to leave projects unfinished, I saw the opportunity to finish the changes I had started nine years earlier, and thus not feel that I’d wasted my time.  In the intervening years I had also gone back to school and gotten elementary teaching credentials, and almost finished my master’s degree in education.

The problems I saw at Smug, then and now, were basically of two types.  One was negative, a “clean up the mess” type need, involving the necessity to do something about the bad teachers.  The other was that Smug needed to be transformed from a bastion of mediocrity into a shining paragon of excellence.

I did a lot of thinking about why these problems existed in the first place.  To take the easiest one first, why would a math/science magnet school, with a preponderance of excellent teachers, have such a negative and complacent school culture?  One obvious explanation was that the former principal was status quo oriented, afraid to look at or deal with problems in any way whatsoever, and did not encourage anyone to aspire to greater heights.

Parents who wanted to improve things were “not stopped,” at best.  Although they were not financially, technically or morally supported by the school, a few parents did do terrific things, such as creating a school garden, installing mosaics in the lunch arbor, and the aforementioned afterschool program.  Parents who tried to discuss or deal with anything that touched on a problem or controversy were unhesitatingly slapped down, although it was always dressed in the principal’s warm and fuzzy manner, which left people angry but confused.  Parents were told they couldn’t speak in front of the PTA (parent who wanted to present research about bullying), lied to (principal insisted there had “never been a complaint” about various problem teachers), and threatened (parents warned to “not spread rumors.”)

As far as I know, since there was complete secrecy about everything regarding teachers, teachers were left alone, to do as they pleased, and defended in whatever that was.

Finally it all became clear to me when I realized that nobody at Smug had ever had to lift a finger in order to improve the school.  Smug was handed a math/science magnet program, given the specialty teachers and funding, and was located in the middle of a very affluent and educated neighborhood to begin with.  So the test scores were relatively high, none of the teachers or administrators at Smug had to do anything jointly or individually to improve things, and they rarely did.

There were exceptions.  The first grade teachers team-taught for awhile, with excellent results, until that was quashed by the new District mandates.  One of the science teachers organized parent nights, school fundraisers, and other “above and beyond” activities.  One of the third grade teachers, immensely talented and popular (among students and parents – he was shunned by the other teachers at his grade level), taught all his students piano and chess, took them on numerous field trips (before all of that was quashed by the district), and started a native plant propagation project at a park adjacent to the school.

The principal had an easy berth because the school’s name, “Math / Science Magnet School,” generated a waiting list of hundreds of students from disadvantaged neighborhoods.  Consequently, as neighborhood families got fed up and left Smug in increasing numbers, there was always someone to take their place.  The principal made a point of showing no concern over these departures, no matter how much the parents had done for the school.  The final blow came when a charter school opened nearby, and over 30 families left Smug, including most of the PTA and other most involved and committed parents.  That was the same summer in which the principal gained her new position, with no hint of a sullied reputation.

The question of why unfit teachers were left alone to do their ignoble deeds became the subject of a large research project on my part.  At the same time as I had joined Governance, and also become its chair, I was also taking a class on Educational Research.  I told the professor about my school activism project, and that I wanted to make it the subject of my report for the class.  He had concerns about that, and encouraged me instead to research all the legal issues related to school activism, as the basis of my final report.  I readily agreed, since the legal research was something I needed to do anyway.  I didn’t figure that our new principal would go along with anything I might propose out of the goodness of his heart, so I needed to find out the exact limits of the legal rights of parents.

To do this research, I printed out a six inch stack of articles from the internet, bought several books, and interviewed numerous people connected with education.  I quickly found out that the problem with bad teachers was far worse than I thought, the principal I’d thought was inept was actually “the norm,” and no parent lobby was doing anything about this situation.  I can only chalk the latter up to a common pitfall of human nature: the tendency to fight the easy battles and avoid the hard ones.  This is understandable, since the battle against unfit teachers is truly leviathan.  But it has to be done: for the sake of our children, for the sake of doing what’s right, for the sake of intellectual integrity, and for the sake of all other necessary school reforms.

 

The Problem

 

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably jockeyed desperately for position, lost sleep, and prayed mightily over what teacher your child would get for the coming year.  You’ve probably seen parents clustered around the newly posted list of classroom assignments; some whooping with victory and talking excitedly with friends; some with tragic expressions as if someone in the family just died; and others with clenched teeth and ominous expressions, muttering obscenities.  Did you get a great teacher?  An okay teacher?  Or a lousy teacher?  If the latter is the case, you know you’re in for a year of torment.

More commonly, the problem presents itself when your child starts complaining about the teacher, throwing daily fits about not wanting to go to school, and can’t or won’t do homework.  Other children are less communicative, and simply become sullen, get “sick” every morning, or suddenly come home with bad grades.

It is estimated that 18% of teachers are less than satisfactory, and 3-5% are actively harmful to children, either academically or emotionally.  When you consider that there are 2.6 million teachers in the country, the number of unfit ones is in the hundreds of thousands.  Multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of students each of those teachers affects during her career, the number of students affected is astronomical, virtually all students at some point or another.

Unfit teachers are of three types.  The first type is incompetent, and can’t teach effectively.  The effects of such teachers can be long-lasting.  According to Dr. Robert Mendro, assistant superintendent for research and evaluation at Dallas public schools, declines in achievement can last for up to three years after a student leaves a bad classroom.  “It is a myth that if a kid has an ineffective teacher, you can make up the difference next year.”  (Parks, 2001)

Dr. Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the nation’s foremost education economist, has found that “the estimated difference in annual achievement growth between having a good and having a bad teacher can be more than one grade-level of achievement in test performances.” (Hanushek 1992 in Dawson, 2000)

The second type of unfit teacher is emotionally abusive.  The Teacher’s Code of Ethics states that the teacher “Honors the integrity of students and influences them through constructive criticism rather than by ridicule and harassment.”  Yet we all know teachers who emotionally abuse through sarcasm, put-down’s, picking on a particular student all year, or turning a blind eye to groups of students doing the same.  Teachers who dislike children can be the most troubling (Parks, 2001).

Another type of emotional abuse is the “control freak” teacher who demands a tomblike silence at all times, or otherwise has standards of classroom behavior that are unnecessary and make the children miserable.

Another way to summarize it: “Education experts say bad teachers share one or more of the following traits: disorganized, mean to children, unwilling to team up with colleagues, a shrinking violet incapable of maintaining classroom order.  Some are just burned out.”  (Parks, 2001)

Countless children end up with emotional scars, years spent in therapy, and a lost love of learning, after emotionally abusive treatment.  Many families pull their children from abusive classrooms and put them in private schools, at a huge cost to the family budget.  Or they simply have a miserable child, which can throw a wrench into all aspects of family functioning, chores and recreation.

Unfit teachers have an equally bad effect on the entire teaching profession.  In general, the public perceives teachers as near saints, doing a grueling job that most people wouldn’t want, entrusted with passing on the entire knowledge and wisdom of our culture, and dealing with myriad social problems to boot.  But like an oozing wound that can’t be ignored, bad teachers get most of the attention in conversations among parents.  Parents aren’t so much gossiping as desperately searching for solutions for their beleaguered children, since solutions are rarely forthcoming from principals or even districts.

In the words of Richard Schwartz, attorney and expert in teacher terminations:

The fact that we allow this problem to persist is an indictment of school administrators and, in some cases, represents an abandonment of professional, moral, and ethical responsibilities.  Beyond that, it represents perhaps the greatest public relations problem we face in the schools today.

By tolerating or offering excuses for poor teaching in our classrooms, we add to the credibility problems facing public schools.  Just as bad, we damage the credibility and reputation of the teaching profession in general by allowing poor teachers to taint the reputations of all teachers and make their challenging job more difficult.  (Schwartz 1997)

I’m not even addressing the subject of teachers who are criminal, such as sexual molesters or drug addicts; or those who engage in the most specifically prohibited types of unprofessional behavior, such as drinking on the job or leaving children unattended.  These types of unfit teachers are often removed, though typically it is only after many years, and having been passed through many districts.

 

Teacher Quality

It bad teachers are one sorry end of the scale, the overarching issue is an emerging field called “teacher quality.”  I went to an excellent website, run by the National Council on Teacher Quality, to try to find a definition of “teacher quality.”  The website said, “A review of the research on teacher characteristics that affect student outcomes is humbling; it turns out that lamentably little is known for sure about what makes an effective teacher.”  Okay … Here’s my simple definition: “A high quality teacher fosters student learning and motivation in measurable ways.”

And here are a few things that teacher quality is not:  Studies have shown that there is no difference in the impact on student achievement between teachers with certification and emergency certification.  Similarly, there is no statistical difference in achievement between students of teachers with a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree (Goldhaber and Brewer, 1999, in Dawson, 2000).  So forget the certificates.

Likewise, studies have shown that teacher experience has almost no relationship to student achievement.  Teacher effectiveness increases for the first two years of teaching, and then remains flat (Rivkin 1998 in Dawson, 2000).

If schooling and experience don’t count, what does?  I can say from my own experience: knowledge of subject matter, understanding of how to teach a particular subject, love of learning, enthusiasm, ability to relate to children, ability to make concepts relevant, effort, planning … But I’ve never seen those qualities quantified.

Even if we can’t define teacher quality, we are beginning to learn how important it is.  Statistician William L. Sanders, former director of the Value-Added Research and Assessment Center at the University of Tennessee, says that in comparing the importance of teacher effectiveness with other variables such as class size, whether schools are urban, suburban, or rural, ethnic makeup, and the percentage of children eligible for subsidized lunches, teacher effectiveness is 10 to 20 times as significant as these other factors (Sanders 1999 in Dawson, 2000).

 

The Causes

 

So what allows this dreadful situation of unfit teachers to exist?  The short answer is what I call the “Three P’s”: “Protections for teachers,”  “Principals,” and a “Powerless constituency.”  While we’re at it, let’s also consider another “P”: “Professionalism.”

Protections

To begin with, it is somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to fire tenured teachers, depending on whom you talk to.  Although teachers occupy the most important position in a child’s life, next to the parents, and therefore should be the most closely scrutinized of all employees, the distressing reality is that teachers are the most protected occupation in our society.  (McGrath)  Teacher protections consist of three layers: federal and state laws covering civil service, teacher unions with their collective bargaining agreements, and the tenure system (explicit or de facto).  The relevant legal principles are those of due process, just cause, and contract law.  These are embodied in one or more of the protective layers.

 

Political Structure

First it is necessary to review the legal and political hierarchy within which our educational system operates.   Education is governed by state law, except when the federal government comes in occasionally with directives, such as President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act”; or doles out money for special programs, such as Title I.

State law in California is contained within the California constitution, 29 codes (including the education code), and statute law, or new laws that are constantly being passed.  State law is the framework within which collective bargaining takes place, and collective bargaining agreements are the framework for individual teacher contracts for particular positions, at a given rate of pay.

State educational policies are supposed to be interpreted locally, by locally elected school boards.  That can be hard to understand, since I don’t think most of us feel very “connected” to our school boards, given that each school board member has a constituency of tens of thousands of voters in San Diego.  But we do elect school board members, no matter how absent – mindedly, and they are supposed to represent the will of the public regarding public schools.  The reason is that the public has its children in the local public schools, and is footing the bill for them.

The school board then hires the superintendent, who is the manager of the school system, much like the CEO of a company that has a Board of Directors.  So the way it’s supposed to work is that the school board sets policy, and the superintendent carries it out.  In practice, however, the balance of power between superintendents and school boards varies by locality.  School board members are often not educators, while superintendents usually are, so often the superintendent sets policy more than vice versa.  In San Diego, the superintendent is not an educator, but can’t be accused of failing to set policy!

 

Civil Service

The first layer of protection for teachers is civil service protections.  These are based on the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of “due process” for those accused of wrongdoing.  “Due process” generally includes the rights of individuals to be informed of the charges, be heard in court, call witnesses, etc. California law contains its own due process provisions, plus “just cause” clauses.

“Just cause” is the legal principle that state employees can only be dismissed for a set of reasons specified within the law, and for no other reasons.  These reasons in California include “unsatisfactory performance,” “immoral or unprofessional conduct,” “evident unfitness for service,” “insubordination,” “alcoholism or drug abuse,” “dishonesty,” “conviction of a felony or crime involving moral turpitude,” and a few others.  In California, grounds for dismissal were changed in 1995 from “incompetence,” which has a more technical definition, to “unsatisfactory performance,” which gives wider latitude in interpretation  This was supposed to make charges against teachers easier to prove, but in practice, hasn’t made much difference.

Lastly, even within the context of state employment law, teachers have special status.  Unlike other types of licensed professionals such as doctors and nurses, who are accorded “modified” court proceedings during dismissal hearings, teachers are entitled to full court hearings with evidence and full-blown discovery.  This can cause court cases to be dragged out for years, and is the biggest reason for the high cost of teacher dismissals (add footnote).  See Appendix C for the steps of dismissal.

 

 

Teacher Unions

The second layer of protection is teacher unions.  Teacher unions are such a huge and important subject that I had a very hard time with what to include in this paper, and included much of the material in another appendix.   Several books have been written about teacher unions, although the literature is actually sparse, and teacher unions are virtually unmentioned in the main body of literature about school reform (Riley 2002).  Like bad teachers and teacher quality, teacher unions are a political hot potato, and I guess polite people don’t talk about any of them.  Interesting how they’re all related, however, as will be shown.

Many people believe that teacher unions are the single biggest obstacle to educational reform and improvement in our country, as embodied in the title of the book, The Teacher Unions: How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students, Parents, Teachers and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy by Dr. Myron Lieberman, one of the country’s foremost authorities on the subject.  Other people believe passionately in the right of all employees to organize, and think that teacher unions are simply doing their job.

First, some facts about teacher unions:

Teachers became unionized starting in the 1960’s, and in California with the passage of the “Rodda Act” in 1975, which required school districts to engage in collective bargaining with teacher’ union.  Prior to the Rodda Act, school districts operated under the “Winton Act,” which required only that school districts “meet and confer” with teacher organizations.  Districts without unions still operate in that manner.

In terms of national trends, between the ‘60’s and the ‘90’s, unionization of private sector employees dropped to about 10% of the workforce.  At the same time, unionization of public employees increased to around 65%.

The two largest national teacher’s unions are the National Education Association (NEA) and the smaller American Federation for Teachers (NFT).  In California, over 100 districts, including almost all the large districts, are affiliated with California’s branch of the NEA, the California Teacher’s Association (CTA).  11 districts are affiliated with California’s branch of the NFT, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT).  64 districts have no union contract; almost all of them very small, with student enrollment under 500.

Between the NEA and the AFT, there are about three million unionized teachers in the country.  The NEA is the largest union in the country (check this fact).  Teacher unions take in about a billion dollars of dues each year, according to estimates.

The main controversies involving teacher unions, for the purposes of this paper, are:

1)    Their defense of unfit teachers.

• Collective bargaining agreements add even more layers of “due process” to those already present in state and federal civil service laws.  See Appendices for steps in dismissing teachers in California.
• Historically, unions have fought for the jobs of all teachers, from the most glaringly incompetent to actual criminals.
• Teachers have paid-for personal advocates in the form of unions representatives and lawyers, who are available to teachers at every stage of any attempted disciplinary proceeding or dismissal.
• Teachers may file formal grievances against a wide range of things, as specified in their contract, from derogatory material placed in their file to evaluations they don’t agree with.

2)    Union opposition to merit pay of any form.

• All teachers under a collective bargaining agreement earn the same amount of money, no matter what their degree of effectiveness, what subject they teach or what their class size.  The only difference comes from automatic yearly step increases in pay.
• There are several major problems inherent in this system.  For one, it is unionism in the industrial model, treating teachers as if they are laborers, all doing the same thing.  Is this the way we want our children treated?   Professionals usually receive performance-driven pay.
• There is no financial incentive for a teacher to do a good job, as exists in other professions.  There is no pay differentiation between the most outstanding teachers and the poorest performers.  I guess teachers must know the value of “intrinsic motivation,” because that’s all they have.
• Another problem is that, in contrast to rhetoric about “underpaid teachers,” teachers in California are very well compensated.  The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College found that, with add-ons considered (bonuses for additional duties, etc.), the real average salary of teachers in San Diego is almost $51,000, eight percent higher than what the district reports.  This does not include benefits, estimated at 30% of wages.  Adding benefits brings the average San Diego teacher’s salary for nine months work to over $65,000.   This exceeds the average for other professions, including mechanical engineers, computer programmers, college math and political science professors, chemists, registered nurses, etc. (Frates, et al 2000 in Dawson, 2000).  Overall, California teachers’ salaries are the eighth highest in the country.  (Nelson & Schneider, 1998 in Dawson, 2000)
• The step increases gives teachers an incentive to stay on the job for as long as possible, drawing a higher and higher salary, while, as mentioned earlier, studies have shown that teacher experience provides almost no benefit as far as student achievement.

3)    Union opposition to accountability.

• A frequent clause in union contracts is that standardized test scores of a teacher’s class may not be used as part of that teacher’s evaluation.  Some contracts even go so far as to state that student progress may not in any way be used to evaluate teachers, or that progress toward site plan goals may not be used in evaluating teachers.
• “Failure to hold teachers accountable is the single greatest flaw of collective bargaining and underlies its adverse effect on the quality of education.”  (Riley, 2002).

4)    Seniority used as the main determinant in hiring and transfers.

• Seniority may mean that hiring and transferring of teachers proceeds on the basis of seniority, rather than the principal or a committee’s determination of who is best for a particular classroom.
• Seniority may mean that districts cannot hire more qualified applicants from outside the district.

5)    Union involvement in teacher evaluation.

• Principals frequently have to schedule a time to observe a classroom for purposes of evaluation.
• Teachers can frequently grieve evaluations they don’t agree with.
• Teachers can often form their own “objectives” for improvement.
• Unions often place various other limits on evaluation, or even design the forms.

San Diego Unified’s contract with its teachers was rated an unfavorable 4 out of 5 in restrictiveness in a report from the Pacific Research Institute, which rated the contracts of all school districts in California.  Large districts generally had some of the most restrictive contracts.

If teachers’ unions were abolished, would these problems disappear?  They would probably improve, since statistics tell us that the vast majority of teacher dismissals are in non-union districts.  But they wouldn’t disappear, as any of us who had crummy teachers prior to their unionization in the ‘70’s knows.  There are still civil service rules and tenure.

 

Tenure

The tenure system began with college professors, as a way to protect academic freedom and allow professors to present unpopular or opposing views, without fear of being fired.   The tenure system quickly spread to high school and elementary school teachers, the rationale being to prevent the termination of competent teachers who might simply rub a principal the wrong way.  The way it works is that teachers are hired for two to three years (two in California) on probation, during which time they may be terminated at will.  But if they get through the probationary period, which the vast majority do, they now have a “job for life.”  A few states claim to have outlawed tenure, but other protections make that a moot point

Says Chuck Sambar, a member of the Glendale, California Unified School District board, “Good teachers do not need tenure.  Poor or incompetent teachers use it to protect their jobs.”

Adds Joe Nathan, head of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humprey Institute, “The tenure system is really adult welfare.  It cheats kids out of the most effective faculty, and keeps some of the worst teachers in place.  It’s a system that puts the need of adults first.”  (Schweizer 1998)

 

Result

The net results of all these protections, in the words of Diana Halpenny, general counsel for the San Juan Unified School District, is that “It takes longer to fire a teacher than convict a murderer.”

The expense is also enormous.  According to EdSource, an independent, non-political group that tracks California K-12 issues, in 1995 the basic dismissal of one teacher, before any appeals, was estimated to cost a school district between $10,000 and $30,000.  If one includes the full appeals process, it could cost the district as much as $300,000.

One the most notorious and oft-cited examples in the literature took place right here in San Diego County, in Grossmont Unified School District.  Juliet Ellery was a high school English teacher who refused to adhere to lesson plans, wouldn’t answer students’ questions, and insulted and demeaned students who asked.  Parents didn’t want their children in her class, and the students took up a petition calling for her dismissal.  (Cambor 1999)

The district spent four years compiling what they thought was overwhelming evidence against Ellery.  However, the local union gave her a glowing review and supplied her defense.  It took a total of eight years and over $300,000, plus a year’s paid leave, to fire her.  Ellery’s license was suspended for one year, and then she returned to teaching!

In conclusion, according to the California School Boards Association, “Districts are forced, often out of necessity, to allow bad teachers to remain in the classroom and on the payroll because the costs in time, money and human resources to remove them are too great … districts often have trouble fitting the particular conduct or behavior of a teacher into the required categories for dismissal, even though the conduct or behavior may clearly warrant dismissal.”  (Dawson 2000)

This is borne out by the statistics regarding how many teachers are terminated.  In the entire decade of the 1990’s, less than one tenth of a percent of California’s teachers were dismissed.  In Los Angeles, only one teacher went through the entire dismissal procedure.

Principals

If the role of teacher’s unions regarding unfit teachers is appalling, the role of principals is shocking.  The most surprising thing I found out in all my research is that not only are unfit teachers not fired; they are typically not even given negative evaluations.  According to Mary Jo McGrath, an education attorney who specializes in training principals and assisting in teacher terminations, although 18% of teachers should receive less than satisfactory evaluations, less than 1% do.  This is according to oral polls she has conducted with the 60,000 principals she has trained.  According to numerous other published articles, experts throughout the country agree with her.

Ms. McGrath attributes this situation to “an affliction of principals” she calls “inarticulitis,” or “lack of ability to describe in clear and straightforward language.”  She describes how principals typically evaluate in “code,” either inserting faint criticism between warm and fuzzy phrases, or merely using fewer superlatives to describe bad teachers than good ones, and never saying anything bad at all.

It’s an obscure condition called inarticulitis, characterized by paralysis of the portion of the psyche that governs straightforward communication.  Its usual cause is fear of the reaction of others …If you find yourself sandwiching remedial input between warm, fuzzy phrases, and diluting assessments of substandard performance with ‘sweet nothings,’ you’re suffering from inarticulitis.  (McGrath, website)

Another analyst describes unfit teachers as typically losers, with multiple problems in all areas of their lives.  They blame their problems on anyone and everything except themselves, and refuse to “get” what students, parents and administrators try to convey to them (Waintroob 1995).

By contrast, principals cannot attain their position without having good social skills.  Principals don’t comprehend that unfit teachers are the opposite of themselves in this regard, and that the teachers don’t grasp critical feedback unless they’re squarely confronted with it.

Educators are frequently masters of euphemism.  Evaluator use of “satisfactory” to mean “unsatisfactory” seems to be the rule rather than the exception.  Also, many managers write evaluations in a form of personal code, using understatement and hints to alert the employee to a serious problem.  People in supervisory positions have succeeded because they reacted to the least hint of criticism; they mistakenly assume the problem employee will do the same … Evaluations are aimed at building self-esteem rather than clearly labeling problems …Incompetent teachers realize they must confront performance problems only when they have “hit bottom” and been forced to confront them … Indirect, euphemistic evaluations hurt them by preventing them from understanding the job-threatening nature of their problems … Negative adjectives like “unsatisfactory,” “poor,” unsuccessful,” and “unacceptable” must be used … (Waintroob 1995).

Another analysis put forth by Richard Mannatt, a proponent of 360 degree feedback, is “Teachers and their unions are well aware of the dirty little secret of the clinical supervision approach to teacher evaluation.  Lacking enough data to make accurate summative evaluations, principals rate everyone high.”  (Mannatt 1997)

A final explanation is that since teachers don’t receive merit pay, the evaluation is not that important, and principals don’t take it that seriously.

If principals won’t even give negative feedback, do they take action to remove unfit teachers?  Not surprisingly, the answer is “very rarely.”  The reasons for this situation involve lack of support from their district, lack of necessary skills, lack of time, and reluctance to disrupt the social fabric of the school.

To begin with, principals are such overworked individuals that there is a shortage of those wanting to enter the profession.  Procedures for removing incompetent teachers call for principals to do extensive observation, documentation of problems, formulating plans for improvement, retraining and modeling of teaching.  (See Appendix B – disciplining teachers.)  According to McGrath, working with one problem teacher will usually take up 35-40% of a principal’s time.  Principals are understandably reluctant to devote the necessary time.

Secondly, evaluating employees is considered to be the most difficult part of any manger’s job, according to business management experts.  Criticism is hard to give or receive, for the vast majority of people.  Principals, like any other managers, need specific training in how to give critical feedback, document, remediate, and follow through, and they often don’t receive it.  They also need to know the specifics of the union contract of their employees, in order to not make mistakes that would invalidate all their time and effort.

Third, many principals cultivate more of a collegial or friendly than a supervisory attitude toward their teachers, and depend on the teachers as their social support network.  “When a principal starts documenting a teacher, it’s amazing how unpopular he becomes.”  Although you’d think teachers would want to cleanse their ranks of the “bad apples” that tarnish the profession, employee groups notoriously close ranks to defend their own, and teachers are no exception.  So as soon as a teacher is under fire, the faculty essentially turns on the principal, and the entire social fabric of the school is torn.  Studies have shown that principals who successfully terminate teachers must have alternative social support networks, such as other principals.

So how do principals live with themselves?  They may tell themselves that they are focusing their supervisory efforts where they will bear more fruit, on probationary employees.  Or perhaps “The principal leaves the incompetent teachers alone and pats himself on the back for being virtuously nonjudgmental.” (Strickland, 1998, p.189)

They may deal with their problem by making the unfit teacher someone else’s problem, thus engaging in a practice that has become so common that it’s earned various nicknames: either “passing the trash,” or “the lemon dance.”  Teachers are often passes from one school in a district to another, allowed to continue with their harm in a new place, buying some time until the parents at the new school rise up in anger.

Put another way, for a principal to terminate an unfit teacher requires a huge commitment of time and energy, and involves taking major personal and professional risks.  The potential rewards don’t seem to justify the costs and risks, unless there is strong support from the district.

Not that they should be let off the hook.  To quote Dr. Robert Mendro, assistant superintendent for research and evaluation at Dallas public schools, “To date, there is little evidence that principals turn around the performance of teachers.  Rather, effective principals do not tolerate having ineffective teachers on their staffs.”  (Parks, 2001).

 

 

Powerless constituency

Another lens through which to look at this problem is to ask ourselves: why are bad teachers a worse problem in elementary school than in high schools or universities?   Why do middle and high school students get to switch teachers with relative ease, compared to elementary school students?  Why do colleges almost universally have student evaluation of faculty (SEF) systems in place, while elementary schools refuse?

Little children are inarticulate and powerless compared to older children and adult college students.  College itself is optional, and students choose the college they want to attend.  Thus colleges are forced to serve their clientele, in order to attract students.  Just something to think about.

What’s more surprising is that parents are usually a powerless constituency as well.  Parents may remain silent because they’re afraid if they say anything, their child will be retaliated against by a psychologically disturbed teacher, in whose classroom the child still resides six hours a day, which is the cause of the problem in the first place.  It’s an endless “catch-22” with no solution other than removing the child from the classroom, which principals usually refuse to do.

Parents are probably also intimidated by “education-ese,” and may wonder why, as professionals themselves, they can’t even begin to understand what is said at a school governance meeting.

Rather than treating parents as clients, and as important sources of information about teachers and their own children, districts seem to have a deathly fear of parents gaining the upper hand.  This is probably a last gasp in their fighting the wave of the future of education: competition.

 

Professionalism

A final fundamental question to consider is a basic confusion and schizophrenia over what teaching is and isn’t.  Appendix B contains a variety of fascinating viewpoints on what constitutes a “professional.”  Teachers fit most of the definitions, some listed as follows:

• The major criterion for professional status is the presence of an intellectual technique, acquired by special training, that performs a service for society and is unavailable to the laity.
• Licensing, by the profession itself, or by the state, with the profession providing criteria
• Community sanction of the profession, its powers and privileges.
• A profession has proprietary language and symbols.
• “… professional is viewed as working with an unstandardized product.  His knowledge is applied to solving particular problems, each of which, though unique, fits within his general body of theoretical knowledge.”
• Professional’s service is essential to the health and welfare of the individual and society.
• Monopolistic control over knowledge.
• Most legislation concerning the profession is generated by the profession itself.  This relates to the ignorance of the general public, including legislators, of the profession’s knowledge.
• “ … a profession is typically the terminal occupation for members … The professional has a financial and temporal investment in the occupation.  Additionally, the long socialization has made him, in many ways, incapable of changing occupations, since both his skills and his attitudes are relatively fixed.”
• “Another aspect of the issue of theoretical knowledge is that the knowledge base itself is not totally consistent.  Every professional field has deep and sometimes bitter disputes regarding the appropriate theoretical perspective.”

Teachers would appear to meet all those specifications.  However, they seem to be in a somewhat unique position.  Roger Corwin, a sociologist who specializes in education, says:

Teachers have virtually no control over their standards of work.  They have little control over the subjects to be taught; the materials to be used; the criteria for deciding who should be admitted, retained, and graduated from training schools; the qualifications for teacher training; the forms to be used in reporting student progress; school boundary lines and the criteria for permitting students to attend; and other matters that affect teaching.  Teachers have little voice in determining who is qualified to enter teaching.  Nonprofessionals control the state boards which set standards for teaching certificates.  (Corwin in Hall, 1975)

In his own research Corwin found that teachers who are highly professionally oriented are usually militant in their professionalism.  They want to change the system.  At the same time, these teachers experience the most numerous and intense conflicts in the schools, as evidenced by heated discussions or major incidents.  They are the most dissatisfied with the system.  Teachers who accept the status of an employee, as opposed to that of a professional, are likely to be satisfied with the system.  Here again, a high level of professionalism is dysfunctional for the smooth operation of the organizations involved (Hall, 1975)

Another author mentioned refers to teachers and nurses as “semi-professionals.”  Maybe that’s what makes all of this so confusing.  Are teachers professionals, who use their specialized knowledge and judgment to solve particular problems (teaching individual students), as their job description and job requirements might suggest?  Or are teachers non-professionals, doing a standardized job, and instructed in exactly what to do, which their single wage structure would suggest?

Perhaps more importantly, should teachers be professionals?  Do teachers need to do more of “what they’re told” by the real professionals, such as instructional designers?  Or do teachers need more control, and to apply more creativity and effort?  Should they be compensated as laborers or professionals?

Legendary teacher union leader Al Shanker said something to the effect that claiming that “anyone who loves kids can be a teacher” is akin to saying that “a surgeon is just someone who loves to cut.”  There is a vital difference, however.  Doctors, lawyers and other professionals have a knowledge base that the general public lacks.  Teachers, at least at the elementary school level, do not have such a specialized knowledge base.  They are teaching the same material that we all learned as children.

 

Parent Involvement

Types

“Epstein’s Six Types of Parent Involvement,” developed by Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins University, is a widely used model of parent involvement that specifies the following categories:

1)    Parenting (parenting classes, support for families, etc.)

2)    Communicating (notes home, conferences, translators, etc.)

3)    Volunteering (school and classroom volunteers, etc.)

4)    Learning at home (helping with homework, planning for college, etc.)

5)    Decision making (PTA, advisory councils, independent advocacy groups for school reform, etc.)

6)    Collaborating with community (information on community services available, field trips, performing community service)

There are many “parent involvement” programs in existence, local examples being San Diego Parent University (San Diego Unified program), the California Parent Center at SDSU (funded by U.S. Dept. of Education), and San Diego Unified’s District Framework for Parent Involvement and Parent Involvement Task Force.  I am not delving into them, however, because they focus on issues such as getting uneducated parents involved in the education process, improving the parenting skills of marginal parents, helping all parents cope with the homework nightmare (see my web sight www.sanehomework.com), and recruiting volunteers to help with the schools.

One immediately sees what is left out of this picture.  The one type of “involvement” parents are desperate for is input in choosing and evaluating their child’s teacher.  That type of involvement is unwanted by most educators, and not even discussed.  As Guy Strickland says, “To those really affected by the choice of teacher, it is an injury and an insult to be left out of the choice-making process.”  (Strickland 1998 p. 184)  It gives rise to the sentiment: “Parent involvement – their definition or ours?”

The only category that purports to empower parents, and thus is relevant to this paper, is the “decision making” one.  There is at least lip service paid to the concept of shared decision making, involving parents.   San Diego Unified has a Parent Involvement Framework, with a vision statement and three legs, none of which would keep me awake.  The first leg is entitled, “Capacity building and preparation for school staff.”  What could “capacity building” possibly mean?  Later it refers to “capacity for building relationships with parents.”  Is this strange thinking, or just strange language?  The paragraph opens with, “School staff shall take the initiative to welcome parent participation …” an appreciated sentiment which we can at least understand.

Then there is the new “Parent Congress,” at which parents are apprised of what the district is doing, one person at each table gets to ask a question, and delegates are given prepared overheads to take back to their PTA’s.  Very empowering.

One of the items under “Key Elements” in San Diego Unified’s Administrative Procedure 9050 (Parent Involvement Program Coordination) specifies that parents should be involved in evaluation, as follows: “Evaluation.  Parents and school staff should participate in planning, organizing and implementing appropriate processes to assist in conducting needs assessments, self-evaluations, and long-range planning.”  This is the most significant provision, I think.

 

 

Shared Decision Making and Advisory Councils

Shared decision making is in opposition to “administrator decisionmaking,” and is a concept pushed by teacher unions.  Most of it is done through governance committees that parents have the opportunity to be on.  The real question then becomes: are all these committees just a pain that nobody wants to deal with, or do they ever do anything worthwhile?  Or do those who are willing to go through being on the committees thus gain power?

Most of the committees with the exception of governance do not pertain to average students, but to special groups of students, or more to the point, to overseeing special budgets devoted to those students.

Here is an overview of some of the major committees (San Diego Unified, 2001):

• School Site Council – this is the oldest of these committees, required by the state, and around since the (‘70’s).  Its composition is half teachers and half parents.  It is the “mother of committees” related to compensatory programs, or programs for the disadvantaged.  Other optional committees, such as the Bilingual Advisory Committee, may have their responsibilities delegated to the SSC, and in practice often do.                                                                                                                                               All elementary and middle schools must have an SSC, because they all have a School-Based Coordinated Program (allows school to combine categorical programs into one), and all high schools except three (Patrick Henry, University City, and La Jolla) have either an SSC or SAC (School Advisory Committee; required of schools that receive Title I funds, though SSC can sit as SAC).                                              Interestingly, at the District SSC training last year, members were given a helpful document entitled, “What the School Site Council Is Not …” as follows:
  • SSC is not a policy making body.
  • SSC is not a school management committee.
  • SSC is not a personnel committee.
  • SSC is not a fund-raising group.
  • SSC is not an extension of PTA.
  • SSC is not a grievance committee.
  • SSC is not a political organization.
• Governance – If they are so careful to tell us that the SSC is not anything of significance, is governance?  That’s hard to figure out, since there is no mention of governance on San Diego Unified’s web site.  I finally spoke with two individuals at San Diego Unified, one of them the Program Manager for the Program Monitoring Office (mainly deals with SSC’s), and learned the following:
  • Governance teams are a district requirement for every school, as per the teacher’s union contract.
  • There is “nobody” at SD Unified who is in charge of governance, because “the district has not spent much time or money developing this.”
  • There was a document produced in 1998 called “Shared Decisionmaking Procedures,” which I got a copy of.

Upon reading the Shared Decisionmaking Procedures document, I learned that:

• Governance teams are supposed to be composed of 50% teachers (including union rep), 35% parents or community members, 15% others (including CSEA rep and student at secondary levels), and the principal.
• Schools are to create their own shared decisionmaking document, and review and update it every 2-4 years.
• Governance is to deal with 1) scheduling / assignment of staff, 2) staffing / hiring, and 3) budgets.
• Decisionmaking is preferably by consensus.
• If the principal disagrees with a decision of the governance team, he may 1) request a review by the Shared Decisionmaking Dispute Resolution Team (SDDRT).  2) If he disagrees with the decision of the SDDRT, he may request a hearing before the Board of Education.  The intent is that the Board of Education retains final authority over school policy, and responsibility that it is consistent with applicable laws and policies.
• Our local elementary school’s governance document extends the areas of shared decisionmaking to include discipline, curriculum, annual action plan (written by governance) and community involvement.

I think the real story on governance teams is that they are a concession to teachers’ unions, with a few parents added to lend legitimacy.  They are supposed to deal with things that teachers care about: distribution of monies, hiring and staffing.  There are extensive procedures regarding what happens in the principal disagrees with a decision of governance.  I’d be interested to know if these procedures have ever been used; that is, if governance teams have ever even tried to do anything significant enough to generate opposition.

• District advisory committees – some of these district-level committees have one member from each corresponding school-level committee (i.e. District Advisory Committee for Bilingual Education has a delegate from each school’s Bilingual Advisory Committee or SSC), some have a delegate chosen by the principal (i.e. District Advisory Committee for GATE), and some are chosen by other means.

Parent Rights

This is a hodgepodge, taken from San Diego Unified’s administrative procedures, the California Department of Education’s Parent’s Rights list, and elsewhere.

• Parents have the right to observe their child’s classroom, by appointment (San Diego Unified, 1995).
• Parents have the right to bring a friend or advocate to meetings with school personnel (phone conversation with San Diego Unified counsel)
• Parents have the right to be present at meetings such as governance and school site council, under the Brown Open Meeting Act (San Diego Unified, 1995)
• Parents have the right to leaflet outside on public sidewalks adjacent to school grounds, on the grounds of federal First Amendment rights (if the principal won’t let you put your item in the school newsletter …) (San Diego Unified 1992)
• Parents have the right to view their student’s file, under the Freedom of Information Act of 1975 (?)

 

Rights that Parents Do Not Have

This list is unfortunately much more significant than the “parent’s rights” list, and includes:

• Parents do not have the right to observe their child’s classroom without an appointment.
• Parents do not have the right to observe anyone’s classroom except their own child’s.
• Parents do not have the right to request a particular teacher for their child (some principals permit this, though there is never any guarantee of getting that teacher).
• Parents do not have the right to know anything related to a teacher’s employment, performance, or anything in a teacher’s personnel file, including how many complaints have been made about the teacher, or whether the teacher is being documented for dismissal.
• Parents do not have the right to know the average standardized test scores per classroom, although the principal has this information.
• Parents do not have editorial control over the school newsletter, which the principal retains.

 

Complaints About Teachers

These are the steps to take are, in the following order, according to the “official channels” of San Diego Unified:

1)    Meet with the teacher, and try to resolve the problems.

2)    You may contact school counselor for advice.

3)    Meet with the principal, if meeting with the teacher has been unproductive.

4)    Call San Diego City Schools Support Systems, if the principal does not resolve the issue.  Parent’s call will be logged so there is a permanent record, and staff member will outline parent’s concern.  An administrator will contact parent within three days to work on resolving the problem.

5)    San Diego Unified also has a formal “Complaints About Employees” process and administrative policy, and forms for parents to use.

1. Forms require a description of the complaint with names, dates and as much other specific information as possible.
2. Employee will receive a record of the complaint, and know the identity of the complainant.
3. Complaint will be dealt with by a Support Systems administrator.  If he can’t resolve it, it will be given to the General Counsel (school district lawyer), who will submit it to the Board of Education.  The Board will consider the complaint in closed session.

 

Advice from experts includes:

• Another appendix is my outline of the book, Bad Teachers: The Essential Guide for Concerned Parents by Guy Strickland.  This excellent book contains detailed advice about what parents should do, why, and what attitude to assume.  A few points from the book:
• Documentation is essential.  It consists of keeping written, dated records of facts, conversations and observations.  “Ideally, you will present the kind of documentation that illustrates your point of view all by itself, without any further editorial comment from you.”  (Strickland, 1998)
• Strickland suggests creating a “memo of understanding” after every meeting with a problem teacher, and then requesting that it be added to the student’s file.
• Meet with the teacher, and then have a follow-up meeting, before contacting the principal.
• Maintain an attitude of assertively questioning teachers and refusing to blame your child if there is any doubt involved, since a staple of bad teachers is to transfer the blame for any problems from themselves to the child.
• Be calm and cooperative.
• The book presents a compelling description of how and why principals will typically defend all their teachers, all down the line, and refuse to acknowledge incompetence, no matter how glaringly obvious it is.  Therefore, the book counsels parents to, while documenting everything, always refer to a “mismatch” between student and teacher, rather than alleging that a teacher is bad.

 

Real world considerations:

• Meeting with the teacher is very difficult, since parents justifiably fear that the teacher will retaliate against their child, and the child is usually left in the offending teacher’s classroom during a typically long process of trying to resolve problems.
• There is no anonymous way of complaining about teachers.  If there were, the volume of complaints would no doubt increase geometrically.  In some other fields where a complainant is felt to be in jeopardy, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Air Pollution Control District, there are provisions for anonymous complaints.

 

Guerilla and Practical Tactics for Parents:

• Go directly to a teacher whose classroom you want to observe, and ask his or her permission, bypassing the principal.
• Put all complaints about teachers into writing.  There is at least a chance that your complaint will be put into the teacher’s personnel file.  If your complaint is not in writing, it’s as if the incident never happened, as far as the principal’s taking action is concerned.
• If there is a “bad teacher” that the principal is apparently not doing anything about, because the teacher has been there causing problems for years, and you know that numerous parents are upset about this teacher: have all the parents simultaneously write e-mails or letters to all the layers of administration above the principal, voicing complaints about the teacher.
• To get your child out of a bad teacher’s classroom, get a letter from a licensed psychologist, stating that the teacher is harming your child’s emotional health, and raising or implying liability.

 

Guerilla Tactics Used by Principals (Parks, 2002):

• Assign unfit teacher to a grade level she doesn’t want to be at.
• Assign unfit teacher to committees that meet frequently after school.
• Encourage concerned parents to visit the unfit teacher’s classroom and write down observations.
• Assign unfit teacher to be a “floater teacher” without a classroom.
• Use social ostracism.  “Sometimes you just have to humiliate them out the door,” said an unnamed source.

Solutions

360 Degree Evaluation

360 degree evaluation, or multilevel assessment, is a form of evaluation in which employees are rated by a variety of others that they have profession contact with – those they supervise, clients, and peers – usually three to seven rater groups.  In the case of teachers, they may be evaluated by students, parents, sometimes peers and self in addition to principals.  In the case of principals, they may be rated by teachers, students, parents and self as well as their supervisor.

360 degree evaluation has become increasingly popular in the business world since the consulting group Teams, Inc. copyrighted the term in 1973.  Many school board members have experienced its benefits, and called for its implementation in schools.  It has been in use for some time by a few individual districts.  More recently, it was mandated by the legislatures of Alaska and Florida.

One rationale for its use is that studies have shown that evaluating teachers is so complex that every method is flawed, and the best approach is to use a combination of methods.

My own view is that other teacher quality initiatives will not work without parent and student feedback.  The reason is simply that whenever an administrator is in the room with a teacher, she is on her “best behavior.”  A certain percentage of bad teachers is so incompetent or abusive that they can’t even “fake it,” but a much higher percentage can fake it around their boss.  Children are the ones that are with that teacher day in and day out, and children hopefully tell their parents about problems.

Guy Strickland writes that research has shown that parents and students are able to rate teachers more accurately than administrators or other teachers, and that parents’ ratings are more correlated to how much learning takes place.  He says, “The customer knows when the service is good or bad.  The customer isn’t fooled by phony certificates or endorsements; results are what counts.”

In specific terms, multilevel assessment is done in the following ways:

Tips for implementing a program (Mannatt, 2000):

• Use a collaborative design team that includes all stakeholders to identify the competencies to be assessed, and then design surveys with rating scales.
• Teachers should also complete self-evaluations, using the same questions.
• Start multilevel evaluation with those on top: principal, superintendent, and school board if possible.
• Do a small-scale pilot project to debug the procedure before applying it widely.
• Avoid early publicity that only causes worry among teachers about the feedback they’ll receive, and stirs parent concerns about retribution for critical feedback.
• Feedback can be used at three levels: development (only the employee sees it), appraisal, and compensation.  Stay at one level for at least a year or two.  The third level is rarely utilized.
• Surveys may be evaluated by school secretaries, professionals, or seen by the evaluees only.
• Once a year, ask teachers to look at all their 360 degree data sets, and create one or more professional goals.

Benefits of 360 degree feedback (Santeusanio, 1997):

• Leads to more thoughtful consideration of standards of performance.
• Improves accuracy of evaluations.
• Leads to specific behavior changes for professional improvement.
• Improves student achievement (Mannatt, 1997).
• Satisfies stakeholders who feel the need to give feedback, and improves morale.
• Teachers are often pleasantly surprised by the feedback they receive.
• Stimulates collegiality and trust between teachers and administrators.
• Takes pressure off the principal to be “judge and jury,” and makes her into more of a mentor and coach.
• Considering how time-consuming observations by the principal are, it actually takes less time.

The results of multilevel rating have been good.  Although opposed by almost all teachers’ unions, once multilevel rating is in effect, their opinion may change.  In Rochester Public Schools, teacher evaluations depend up to 25% on parent feedback, and 83% of teachers approve of the system (Clark 2001).

The only problem I came across was a private school that published parent comments about teachers.  This was considered to create bad feeling, and the school returned to still soliciting student feedback, but not publishing it (Clark 2001).

PTA Activism

 

Merit awards:

Since teachers are not paid according to merit, PTA’s need to step in and provide acknowledgments of merit and cash awards.  It wouldn’t make a big difference to teachers’ pocketbooks, but it would provide a moral boost to hard-working, competent, caring and innovative teachers who go “above and beyond,” and point out, by omission, those who don’t.  It would promote healthy competition between teachers, which exists in most jobs as competition for promotion.

I am planning to suggest this idea at my local elementary school.  I will suggest categories, such as:

• This teacher’s students are excited about learning or (Makes learning fun)
• Stimulates student achievement and improvement or (Gets students to work hard)
• Incorporates art throughout the curriculum.
• Excellent classroom management: relaxed but orderly atmosphere.
• Inspiring role model for students.

At present, I’m thinking this might work through soliciting parent nominations from the entire school, of any teacher their child has had at any point.  Parents would nominate one teacher, and specify their reasons.

 

Voluntary Student & Parent Feedback

If states and districts won’t adopt 360 degree feedback yet, why not have the PTA encourage it on a voluntary basis, with cash awards?  I am going to suggest to our PTA that we develop student and parent feedback forms, and offer teachers $100 to distribute them toward the end of the year, read the feedback, and summarize it to some person in confidence, so we can be sure the feedback has been read.  I haven’t figured out that last part yet.

 

Educating and supporting parents to be activists:

The PTA also needs to hold meetings specifically to inform parents about what to do about bad teachers, ahem, “problems with teachers.”  The PTA needs to develop straight-talk, written material, which I am intending to do.  Again, the problem is, how much can you get away with saying?  I guess I’ll find out.

Parent Ombudsmen and Mediators

One major issue which is unsolved, and unsolvable under the present conditions, is this: even if parents are brave, and risk retaliation to their child, and complain about a teacher, they have no idea if the principal is taking any action to deal with their complaint.  Parents have no idea whether the teacher has received a verbal warning, written warning, letter of reprimand, has been documented for years and is two weeks away from dismissal, or if the teacher has been reassured that the parent is crazy.

Parents don’t even know whether to go over a principal’s head, which is necessary, with frequency, in the case of deadbeat principals.  Principals do earn reputations as either effective or deadbeats, but the question is how long it takes for that to become obvious.  Another idea is to ask a principal if he has ever documented a teacher for dismissal.  If not, assume he is a deadbeat, and take matters over his head whenever resolution is not assured.

What is sadly needed, in reality, is a mechanism for parents to monitor and “document” the performance of principals as well as teachers.  It is harder to monitor principals than to monitor teachers, since parents are not allowed to know whether a principal is doing his job of evaluating and disciplining teachers a little, a lot, or at all.  All parents can really do is complain about a pattern of unresolved problems with teachers.  Parents can also document parents being lied to, threatened, and the harder-to-document offense of principals simply dismissing parents’ concerns, and treating parents with veiled disrespect   In all of this, there is an even greater threat of retaliation than with complaining about teachers, as principals have ultimate control over class assignments each year.

One idea I have is for a “parent ombudsman” to invite parents to relay to him, also, all complaints made about teachers.  When a certain number have accumulated about a particular teacher, the parent ombudsman takes them to the district.  This is done already, through the grapevine and surreptitiously.  What would happen if this were made an official process?

Parent mediators: What about having parent volunteers available to support parents in talking with teachers?

 

Protecting Teachers from “Bad Parents”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of “bad parents” around.  Bad parents are those who:

• Excuse and defend their misbehaving child, with their mind closed to the possibility that their child could ever do any wrong, and blame their children’s problems on the teacher.  They are the antithesis of the proverbial “village that raises a child,” since they splinter the “village” of adults.
• Practice “anything goes” parenting, and expect others to adopt the same no-standards attitude, claiming that any requirements or enforcement of the rules will “damage their child’s self-esteem.”
• Assume an unwarranted victim status and accuse a teacher falsely of racism, sexism, sexual harassment, and so on.
• Insult, use vulgar language, threaten, or lie to a teacher.

One idea I have is to develop a rubric for evaluating parent complaints, that could be used by parents who have volunteered to help, or even be adopted by the PTA.  I haven’t worked on this rubric yet, and it would require lots of thought and input, but it might include:

• Has your child had academic or behavior problems in the past?  In other words, might this problem be part of a pattern?
• How many times have you complained about a teacher at this school?  In other words, is your behavior part of a pattern?
• Are you treating the teacher with courtesy?
• Are you expecting or demanding that the teacher to do an inordinate amount of work on behalf of your child?
• Are you expecting or demanding special treatment for your child?  Is there a reason for the special treatment?
• Is your child causing problems for other students, or violating their rights?
• What rules and limits on behavior do you enforce at home, concerning physical violence, respectful language, vocal volume, and so on?
• What responsibilities for chores, self-care and completion of homework does your child have at home?
• How much television does your child watch?

I would not for a moment support a parent who is acting abusively toward a teacher.  Nor would I support the parent of a child who has poor attitudes or is out-of-control, to the extent that it is the child who is abusing the teacher and other students.  On the other hand, such a child should not be treated with abuse, either.

 

Principals

The first issue is that remediating or weeding out poor teachers needs to be a district priority.  Teacher training is being emphasized in San Diego Unified, and more teachers are being dismissed than before, but not enough.  The number of teachers in the “special evaluations” process, which is the precursor to either improvement or dismissal, has been brought up from a ridiculously small number of about 10 per year to about one per school.  This is still not enough, in a district with 7,000 teachers.

Concomitantly, poorly performing principals are being dismissed.  This is not being done with the fanfare of the first year.  The district has gotten smarter about doing it in a quiet and less contentious manner, notifying principals early in the year, or encouraging retirement.

Principals need to be required to adequately supervise, evaluate and discipline teachers, and receive training and support in doing so.  In general, principals need to receive training in 1) giving critical feedback, to cure “inarticulitis,” and 2) thorough and fair written documentation, and 3) dismissal procedures.  I haven’t been able to research this topic enough to know where things stand.  I know that principals have received training from a law firm in teacher dismissal.  I haven’t heard that there is an adequate evaluation system in place, of the type specifically developed to get principals to document and remediate teachers in a way that will stand up to legal scrutiny.

I also don’t know how principals are evaluated.  In general, I think the issue of “deadbeat principals” has hardly been looked at.  I’ve never seen a single mention of it in non-educator publications.  I think a lot more needs to be expected of principals, along the lines of teacher supervision, remediation and dismissal, striving for improvement, and a client (parent)-satisfaction focus.  At least there is some hope for principals, since they are employed under year-to-year contracts.

One issue is supervision of teachers.  An article I read said, “principals are expected to supervise in the classroom, but they rarely do.”  It would be interesting to get statistics on how often principals typically walk into a classroom.  The principal I talked to said that he does weekly “walk-through” observations of all teachers for 5-10 minutes, plus follow-up weekly visits of 20-30 minutes (dividing this responsibility with the vice principal).  If he really does this, my guess is that he’s highly unusual.  Unfortunately, it might be difficult to get this data, as teachers could provide it, but they have no incentive to get a principal into trouble for not supervising them enough.  When I was student teaching, I can’t recall any principals walking through my room, ever (this was in three different schools).

As far as dismissal of teachers, unless a principal has at least one teacher in special evaluations, I strongly question whether that principal is doing her job, and think the district should question it too.  I hear that some principals carry a very heavy burden of having several teachers in special evaluations, which takes a huge amount of time per teacher; and other principals have no teachers in special evaluations.  It doesn’t mean that the latter’s pool of teachers is any better.

Another policy that should be implemented is 360 degree feedback for principals.  Parents have an entirely different outlook on a principal from teachers, and need to be listened to.  Principals commonly serve teachers, while providing very poor service to those who pay their wages, that is, the tax-paying public, more commonly known as “parents.”  This is an outrageous situation, and the most amazing thing is that this disrespect toward parents has gone on for so long without a parent revolt.

 

Restoring Equity to the Balance of Power between Teachers’ Union and the Public

Most people would not advocate abolishing teachers’ unions, as there is a need for protection for employee groups.  But teachers’ unions simply have way too much power, which has adversely affected teacher quality, student achievement, school management and public finances.  An equitable balance of power between teachers’ unions and the public needs to be restored.  Some steps that are needed:

A massive public relations campaign is needed, to expose the truth about teachers’ unions.  Teachers’ Unions still seem to have public sympathy, to the extent that they are able to sway voter opinion to quash any legislation that goes against their interests.  They also seem to have the PTA in their pocket, another group that is influential to public opinion.  This situation needs to be changed, which would not be difficult if the public knew the truth.

Tenure or permanent employee status should be changed to five-year contracts.  This has been done in a couple of places, but voted down in others.

New Attitudes Needed

There are several overriding new attitudes that are needed by both teachers and principals.

• Embrace Competition.  Our economic and political systems are based on competition, and the school system is one of the last remaining monopolies in our country.  The troubled and monopolistic public school system is a favorite target of free-market think tanks, entrepreneurs, and increasingly, the general public.  More and more outrage is being generated over its failures and waste.                                Charter schools were created as an alternative to union and bureaucracy controlled public schools.  Charter school continue to be created at a fast rate, are usually quick to fill, and parent satisfaction with them is generally high.  Charter schools have the option for being unionized, but generally are not.  They also do not involve the busing of students, as far as I know.  They provide a true alternative and competition to district schools and each other.                                                                           Competition needs to be embraced between teachers (merit pay), and between schools (open enrollment policies)
• Client satisfaction focus.  There seems to be a complete lack of recognition among public schools teachers and principals that tax-paying parents are paying their paychecks.  Much as Target, one of the country’s most successful retailers, has substituted the word “guests” for “customers,” I think the word “parents” should be erased from schools, and “clients” substituted.  After all, if teachers are professionals (a dubious claim), professionals have “clients,” not “parents.”  One might think the clients are children, but in fact it is parents who are paying the bills, and parents care about their children, so a child satisfaction focus would be included in a parent satisfaction focus.                                                                                                              There should be suggestion boxes at schools, or better yet, open-suggestion-box type bulletin boards, with a big banner that says, “Parents are our clients!  We value our clients’ input!” and then follow through.
• Openness.  There should be as much openness as possible, especially as it regards teachers, who are currently treated as a separate and hidden world.  Parents would like to know what training teachers are receiving, and the agenda of staff meetings.  Secrecy implies disrespect and exclusion, which nobody appreciates.

 

Conclusion

This project began as simply a mother trying to make things better at her children’s school.  This particular paper began as research into the legal aspects of parent involvement in schools.  Little did I know what a den of iniquity I was stepping into.  This whole thing was like a crime mystery.  The crime is what goes on at schools.  The mystery was: why is it allowed?

I found out, in gory detail.  Writing this report put me into an utter state of shock, similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.  I now see why I was so miserable in school for half of my life.  I grieve for the child I was, adrift in a sea of unmotivated, not-very-bright, insensitive teachers.  Children are at their mercy, with no effective supervision, no accountability, and no motivation on teachers’ parts to do better.  It’s like a nightmare, and even being a reasonably bright and educated person, I never knew any of the details before.  I worry intensely for my own children.  And I am deeply thankful for my own employment at essentially an anti-school, a school for homeschoolers.

What is needed, rather than layers of protection for teachers, is layers of protection from unfit teachers.  There need to be multiple methods for ensuring that unfit teachers are promptly removed from schools and prevented from harming students.  In short, all of the solutions listed above are needed.

I predict that in the near future, this issue will break in a major way, which I will be pleased to aid in.  I’m not exactly sure how it will happen.  There are several possible scenarios.  One would be a spate of parent lawsuits that would dwarf the Catholic Church scandals.  I am almost categorically opposed to lawsuits as the solution to any problem.  However, when you have an absolutely overwhelming problem such as unfit teachers, and some of the most powerful forces in the nation opposed to doing anything about it, the result may be an inundating flood of lawsuits.  When school districts and legislators are more afraid of parental wrath and lawyers than the teachers’ unions, they will finally start doing the job they should have been doing all along: protecting the children in their charge.

On the other hand, maybe unfit teachers are akin to drunk drivers: dangerous, but so prevalent that it’s hard to do anything about the problem.

The “bad teachers” issue ultimately concerns teacher quality, one of the most huge and unresolved issues in America education.  Of the leading voices on this issue, many focus on the need for teachers to have increased content area knowledge.  However, this pertains mainly to middle and high school teachers, and my focus is more on elementary school teachers, since that’s what my school improvement project is located.

Others voices call for better training in teaching colleges.  However, since the training that teaching colleges provides is quite questionable in itself, this merely opens up another area of unresolved issues.

The most hopeful focus at this point is on motivating teachers to take on the challenge of providing quality instruction themselves, through merit pay and increased accountability for student performance.

The “missing link” from this paper is the academic part.  Content and instructional methods are the other half of the crime that is happening in our schools.  I will tackle them next.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

About Parent Involvement (online) Available:

 

California Department of Education (online) Parents’ Rights Available: http://www.cde.ca.gov/iasa/parntrts.html

 

California Education Code Sections 44932-44947 (online)

 

California Parent Center (online) Available: http://parent.sdsu.edu/

 

Cambor, Kate  (1999, Sept.-Oct.) Bad Apples (online) The American Prospect 10 (46) Available: http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V10/46/cambor-k.html

 

Chapman, Michael  (1998, Sept. 21) Unions Defend Bad Teachers’ Tenure – At Students’ Expense (online)  Investor’s Business Daily Available: http://www.wakingbear.com/teetcher.htm

 

Chase, Bob & Lieberman, Myron  (1996, October 21) Symposium: Do teachers unions have a positive influence on the educational system?  (online)  Insight

 

Clark, Charles S. (2001, Feb.) The Rating Game (online) Teacher Magazine Available: http://www.educationweek.org/tm/tmstory.cm?slug=05rating.h12

 

Coeyman, Marjorie (2000, Feb. 22) It’s Not Always So Easy To Say, “You’re Fired!” (online) Christian Science Monitor Available: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/02/22/pl3sl.htm

 

Dawson, Thomas C. (2000, Sept.) Unsatisfactory Performance: How California’s K-12 Education System Protects Mediocrity and How Teacher Quality Can Be Improved (online) Pacific Research Institute Available:http://www.pacificresearch.org

 

DeSchryver, David A. (2001, March 26) The Modern Union: A New Blend? (online) The  Doyle Report available: http://www.thedoylereport.com/spotlight/feature?id{1}=1380

 

Education Law, pp. 301-351 (I forgot to write down the information before returning the book)

 

Fisher, Kent (2000, Oct. 2) Evaluations Tied to Student Achievement (online) St. Petersburg Times Available: http://www.sptimes.com/News/100200/news_pf/Pasco/Evaluations …

 

Haar, Charlene K. (1996, Sept..Oct.) Teachers’ Unions: Roadblocks to Reform (online)  The American Enterprise

Hall, Richard H. (1975) Occupations and the Social Structure Englewood Cliffs, NJ  Prentice-Hall

 

Higgins, Lori (2001, Jan. 23) Couple Want Parents to Evaluate Teachers (online) Detroit Free Press Available: http:// www.freep.com/news/education/teach23_20010123.htm

Kruskamp, Jessica (2002, Feb 16) Superintendent Touts Merit of 360-Degree Feedback (online) The Conference Daily: AASA National Conference on Education Available: http://www.aasa.org/publications/conference/2002/sat_360.htm

 

Lieberman, Myron (1994, Dec. 15) Teacher Unions: Is the End Near? (online) The Claremont Institute, Golden State Center for Policy Studies (online) available: http://www.educationpolicy.org/files/tchrunio.htm

 

Manatt, Richard P. (1997, March) Feedback From 360 Degrees: Client-Driven Evaluation of School Personnel (online) School Administrator Available: http://www.aasa.org/publications/sa/1997_03/manatt.htm

 

Manatt, Richard P. (2000, Oct.) Feedback at 360 Degrees (online) School Administrator Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JSD/9_57/77204880/pl/article …

 

Matthews, Jay (2000, Oct.) When Parents and Students Grade Staff (online) School Administrator Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JSD/9_57/77204879/pl/article …

 

McGrath, Mary Jo  (2000, Oct.)  The Human Dynamics of Personnel Evaluation (online)  School Administrator Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JSD/9_57/77204884/print.jhtml

 

McGrath, Mary Jo Accountability @#$%!!&* Whose Good Idea Was This, Anyway? (online) Available: www.mcgrathinc.com/articles-001.html

 

McGrath, Mary Jo Inarticulitis (online) Available: www.mcgrathinc.com/articles-003.htm.

 

McGrath, Mary Jo Tenure, Management, Communication, Mentorship (online)  Available: www.mcgrathinc.com/articles-002.html

 

McGrath, Mary Jo When It’s Time to Dismiss an Incompetent Teacher (online) Available: www.mcgrathinc.com/articles-005.htm.

 

Munk, La Rae G. (1998) Collective Bargaining: Bringing Education to the Table (online) Mackinac Center for Public Policy Available: http://www.mackinac.org/print.asp?ID=791

 

Painter, Suzanne R. (2000, Oct.)  Easing Dismissals and Non-Renewals (online) School Administrator Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JSD/9_57.77204885.print.jhtml

 

Parent Involvement Task Force (online) Available: http://prod031.sandi.net/parent/programs/taskforce.html

 

Parks, Scott (2002, Feb. 3) Bad Teachers Get Push Toward Door (online) Dallas Morning News Available: http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/stories/badteachers_03met…

 

Permuth, Steve & Egley, Robert  (2002, Sept.) Letting Teachers Go – Legally (online) Principal Leadership 3 (1) Available: http://www.principals.org/news/pl_letteachersgo_090902.html

 

Peterson, Bob (1998, summer) What Will Be the Future of Teacher Unionism? (online) Rethinking Schools available: http://rethinkingschools.org/Archives/12_04/unbook.htm

 

Riley, Pamela (2002) Contract for Failure: The Impact of Teacher Union Contracts on the Quality of California Schools (online) Pacific Research Institute Available: http:/www.pacificresearch.org/pub/sab/educat/contractforfailure

 

San Diego Education Association  (2002?) Contract Article 14, Performance Evaluation; Article 18, Peer Review and Enrichment Program (PREP); Article 25, Education Reform and Shared Decision Making; Article 34, Letters of Reprimand and Suspension (online) Available: http://www.sdea/net/contracts

 

San Diego Parent University: Parents Helping Children Learn (online) Available: http://prod031.sandi.net/parent/programs/parentuniversity/whoarewe

 

San Diego Unified School District (9-18-78) Citizens’ Advisory and Study Committees, General (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9055) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (7-5-02) Code of Ethics of the Teaching Profession (Online) (Administrative Procedure 7045) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (revised 8-5-98) Complaints Against Employees (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9430) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (12-7-01) District and School Level Councils and Committees (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9060) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (4-21-95) Legal Guidelines for Meetings Conducted by Citizens Advisory Committees (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9066) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (7-28-94) Meaningful Consultation of Parents in  Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 Programs (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9062) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (9-20-89) Parent Involvement Program Coordination (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9050) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District Process for Resolving Parent Concerns (Online) San Diego, CA

 

San Diego Unified School District (revised 2-08-95) Visitors to the District (Online) (Administrative Procedure 9375) San Diego, CA

 

Santeusanio, Richard P.  (1997, March) Using Multi-Raters in Superintendent Evaluation (online) School Administrator Available: http://www.aasa.org/publications/sa/1997_03/santeusanio.htm

 

Schwartz, Richard A. (1997, October) How to Get Rid of the Excuses and Tell It Like It Is (online) The School Administrator Web Edition Available: http://www.aasa.org/publications/sa/1997_03/schwartz.htm

 

Schweizer, Peter (1998, Aug. 17) Firing Offenses: why is the quality of teachers so low?  Just try getting rid of a bad one (online) National Review Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1282/n15_v50/21123122/print

 

Stern, Sol  (1997, Spring) How Teachers’ Unions Handcuff Schools (online) The Center for Education Reform Available: http://www.edreform.com/forum/sp97ss.htm

 

Strickland, Guy  (1998) Bad Teachers: The Essential Guide for Concerned Parents New York,  Pocket Books

 

Teachers Unions: Do They Help or Hurt Education Reform? (2000, April 11) (online) A Brown Center Issues in Education Series Event (transcript) Available: http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/comm/transcripts/20000411a.htm

 

Transforming Teacher Unions to Become Agents of Reform (undated; online) Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) Available: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/hosted/turn/proposal.html

 

Waintroob, Andrea R., (1995, October) Don’t Fool With Incompetent Teachers (online) Education Digest 61 (2), p. 36 Available: http://0-web5.epnet.com.sally.sandiego.edu/citation.asp?tb=1&_ug ..

 

White Sr., William E. (2001, Jan.) The Fear of Entering the Woods (online) School Administrator Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0JSD/1_58/76497113/print.jhtml

 

Wilms, Wellford W. (1996, Oct. 2) Marginalizing Unions: Formula for Disaster (online) Education Week Available: http://www.edweek.org/we/vol-16/05wilms.h16

TEACHER EVALUATION

 

I prepared the following because we hear a lot about “union harassment” and the difficulties dismissing teachers and even negative evaluations of teachers.  So I wanted to detail exactly what is involved.

 

Information flow:

• All aspects of teacher evaluation are kept secret from parents and other employees, due to requirements for employee confidentiality.

 

Teachers will be evaluated regarding:

• Progress of pupils toward academic goals
• Instructional techniques and strategies
• Adherence to curriculum
• Establishment and maintenance of a suitable learning environment

 

The following may not be used to evaluate teachers:

• Standardized test scores of teacher’s pupils.

 

PRINCIPAL ACTION	TEACHER RESPONSE
Beginning of year – principal holds meeting to explain evaluation procedures, distribute evaluation forms and job descriptions.	Each employee meets with principal and they mutually decide upon performance objectives, and criteria by employee will be evaluated.  Does each employee really get to select individual objectives?
Teachers are formally observed (how often?)	Teacher may attach written comments to written observation.
End of the year – teachers receive evaluation.	Teacher may attach a written response.
Permanent teachers are evaluated every 2 years.

 

 

 

TEACHER REMEDIATION

Information flow:

All aspects of teacher remediation are kept secret from parents and other employees (not directly involved), due to requirements for employee confidentiality.

 

Players:

• Peer coach
• Consulting teacher – exemplary teacher selected by Joint Panel (3 teachers selected by union and 2  administrators selected by District)
• Principal

 

PRINCIPAL ACTION	TEACHER RESPONSE
Principal gives evaluation of “requires improvement” or “unsatisfactory.”	Teachers are urged by their union to immediately call the union rep (or Association Rep – “AR”)
Principal arranges a conference, and informs teacher verbally and in writing of specific objectives and criteria where unsatisfactory progress is being made.
Principal develops a remediation plan, which includes: Specifies areas where improved performance is necessary. Resources to be made available, including peer coach, assistance of mentor teacher, or release time to observe other teachers. Principal’s role in assisting. Timeline for monitoring teacher’s performance.	Teacher has 60-90 days to improve.
Principal continues to monitor teacher for the rest of the year.
If teacher does not improve, teacher will scheduled for “special evaluation” the following 2 years.
“Special evaluation” entails more of the same, with mid-year review.
At any mid or year-end review that teacher is deemed to have improved, the special evaluation will be terminated.  If teacher has not improved within 2 years …

 

 

OTHER DISCIPLINARY OPTIONS

Information flow:

Verbal warnings, written warnings and letters of reprimand are kept secret from parents and other employees (not directly involved), due to requirements for employee confidentiality.

 

What is the relationship between documenting through observation, letters of reprimand and suspension?

 

PRINCIPAL OR DISTRICT ACTION	TEACHER OR UNION RESPONSE
Letter of reprimand Must be preceded by verbal warning (one or more) and written warning (one or more)	Teacher may contest within 10 days.
If teacher contests reprimand, superintendent’s designee will meet with teacher and issue written decision as to appropriateness of letter of reprimand.	Union may request a hearing to review decision within 10 days.
If no agreement is reached, case will go before a “hearing officer,” whose decision is final and binding.
Suspension Must be preceded by verbal warning, written warning, and letter of reprimand. Principal must provide a written list of the suspension charges. Union may request, within 10 days, a hearing by a hearing officer to review the suspension. Documents to be used at hearing by either side must be submitted more than 5 days before hearing. During the hearing, either side may present documents, call witnesses, and cross-examine witnesses.
	Either side may request a review of the hearing decision by the Superior Court, by filing a writ of mandate within 30 days.

 

 

TEACHER DISMISSAL

 

“Just cause,” under California State Law, Education Code (paraphrased):

• Immoral or unprofessional conduct
• Acts of criminal syndication
• Dishonesty
• Unsatisfactory performance
• Evident unfitness for service
• Physical or mental condition unfitting him or her to instruct or associate with children
• Insubordination
• Conviction of a felony, or a crime involving moral turpitude
• Membership in Communist party
• Alcoholism or drug abuse

 

“Mandatory leave of absence” required for charges involving:

• Sex offenses
• Drug offenses

 

 

PRINCIPAL OR DISTRICT ACTION	TEACHER OR UNION RESPONSE
Files written charges of dismissal Has 30 days to request hearing before Commission on Professional Competence Optional: appeal to Superior Court
	.
Optional: appeal to State Supreme Court
	.

 

 

 

Teacher Unions – Larger Issues

 

For the sake of completeness, some larger teacher union issues are:

1)    Excess of political power.  Teacher unions pour money into candidates and legislation that favors their agenda in every state and at every level of government.

2)    The fundamental difference between private sector unions and public employee unions.  Business and industrial unions operate in an environment of competition.  If they negotiate wages that unduly raise the price of products, customers will buy products from lower priced producers.  This serves as a check on wages.  But teachers’ unions operate in a non-competitive environment.  There is no tuition-free alternative to public schools, other than the fledgling charter school movement.  So the only forces that might keep those contracts in check are the school board, and public opinion.  Which leads to the next point:

3)    The fundamental inequity of one monopolistic employee group engaging in collective bargaining for the public’s money, striking if it doesn’t get it, and using its statewide funds to try to convince voters to throw out school boards who oppose it.  This creates a conflict of interest for school board members, who are supposed to be protecting the public’s interests and purse strings.

4)    Bamboozling the public over whose interests they serve.  We all know and accept that unions advocate for improved wages and working conditions for their members.  However, 1) teachers’ unions have extended their collective bargaining agreements to include issues way beyond the traditional wage and working conditions issues, and 2) teachers’ unions have managed to convince the public they are different from all other unions, and their concerns are truly “for the children.”

Let’s hope that teachers care about children (though many are harmful to children, which is the subject of this paper).  And sometimes, the interests of teachers’ unions and the interests of children actually coincide.  But it is almost coincidental.  Teachers’ unions protect the interests of teachers, not children.  Why might there be any confusion over that?

• Constant public relations by teachers unions (though they don’t seem to have to work very hard at it), and rhetoric about “underpaid teachers.”
• There seems to be a disconnect in the public’s mind between the heroic teachers we all idealize and the “bad teachers” that we are simultaneously working to keep our children away from.  Maybe it’s such an upsetting subject that we can’t bear to think about it.
• Maybe we feel a sense of guilt about being away from our children during the day.  The thought of being with our own child all day long, or mother of god, our own child multiplied by thirty, is enough to make us shut up and fork out the money to teachers.  I mean, teachers may be all screwed up, but you can’t accuse them of not being hard workers.
• Education is a very confusing field, that we are not doing very well with, and every aspect of it is rife with misinformation.  So the public is simply massively confused about everything

6)    Union opposition to higher pay rates for teachers in subjects like math and science,  who are always in short supply, because they can earn more elsewhere.  Colleges have different pay scales for different subjects.

7)    Far left social agenda.

A brief timeline of significant recent events involving teacher unions:

• 1960-1990  Unionization of teachers started and expanded
• 1996 – TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network) created, to expand teachers’ unions mission to include responsibility for educational quality, and partnering with management to improve education.  Many of the locals involved with TURN are those that have successfully experimented with revising contract language to stimulate school reform in areas of peer evaluation, student assessment, curriculum and instruction, accountability, and professional development.
• 1997 – death of Al Shanker
• 1997 – NEA president Bob Chase calls for “New Unionism.”  NEA adopts proposal to allow locals to negotiate peer assistance and review programs.
• 2000 – AFT releases tough criticism of teacher training and testing: “Building a Profession: Strengthening Teacher Preparation and Induction”
• New AFT leader Sandra Feldman proposes “thin” contracts which leave many details up to individual schools, and for unions to take an active role in reconstituting failing schools.

 

Has the “new unionism” gone anywhere?

While national leaders may be calling for some reforms, the problem is that contracts are bargained by thousands of local union representatives.  Most locals are still very protectionist, while a few are taking some steps toward reform:

• The Seattle Education Association (SEA) has a peer review system; a hiring system that allows committees composed of teachers and principals, rather than seniority, determine staffing; and is allowing the use of student test scores in teacher evaluation (Cambor 1999).
• The Concord-Carlisle Teachers Association in Concord, Massachusetts, has a system in which the union helped create the teacher evaluation system, and does not oppose firings as long as the procedure has been followed.  In practice, the union and management work together on assessments of teachers deemed incorrigible, who are allowed to resign rather than having lengthy dismissal procedures.
• Probably the best example is Rochester, New York, under the leadership of Adam Urbanski.  Urbanski is both a local union leader and a vice president of the NEA.  The Rochester Teacher’s Association has implemented peer review, parent feedback, and other reforms.
• Although NEA President Bob Chase called for merit pay during the annual NEA convention in July 2000, the union’s membership voted overwhelmingly to renounce performance pay in any form.  In California, Wayne Johnson, president of the CTA, urged, “I hope not one teacher or one association in California will even contemplate any merit-pay proposal.”

But overall, it seems unlikely that large bureaucracies with favored treatment like teacher unions would change much on their own.  Legislation, public pressure and tough bargaining will be required.

My conclusion about teacher unions:

While militants like Myron Liberman advocate repealing state collective bargaining laws, and the free-market oriented Pacific Research Foundation advocates returning power in schools to the hands of the principal, I can understand the position of teachers in wanting to essentially run schools through committees.

I’m not sure who’s right.  I think state collective bargaining laws need to be changed in key ways, to require public employee unions to disclose their financial structure, and protect the public budget from domination by one group of employees.

Although I believe teachers need to have power, I’m not sure unions have any place in public education, except maybe in a very reduced role.  I think they do make processes adversarial, costly and time-consuming.

I’m not sure principals with a lot of power would be any better than teachers with a lot of power.  I’ve seen successful schools run by committees of teachers and parents.  Maybe what’s needed is a balance of power between principals, teachers and parents.

Of course, maybe teachers’ unions are no different from any other union or special interest group.  All unions advocate for the financial good of their members.  All  special interest groups try to influence elections, if they have the money.

 

BAD TEACHERS: THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE FOR CONCERNED PARENTS

By Guy Strickland

 

This book is an excellent field guide for parents on how to rescue their children from bad teachers.  It gives excellent analyses of the positions of teachers, principals, superintendents and school board members, and why principals will typically defend teachers unto death, rather than acknowledging any problems.  The book’s strongest suit is in its detailed and humorous descriptions of the typical tactics of incompetent teachers and principals, and how parents can effectively combat them.

 

Ultimately the book is not aimed toward solving the problems of unfit teachers and deadbeat principals, which are regarded as impossible or at least long-range, but toward saving one’s own child.  Parents are counseled to document the problems, but label them as a “mismatch” between teacher and child rather than “incompetence” on the teacher’s part; and then to use strategy, persistence and cooperation to get their child transferred out of the unfit teacher’s classroom, or get the teacher’s problems “fixed” if possible.

 

The book begins by describing typical symptoms of a child with a bad teacher, such as a daily 7:00 a.m. stomachache, abruptly falling grades, or a suddenly uncommunicative child.  It describes three types of unfit teachers: emotionally abusive, academically incompetent, and “control freaks.”

 

It further details the characteristics of bad teachers as:

• Teachers who lack knowledge of the subject matter
• Teachers with poor classroom control
• Teachers who behave unprofessionally
• Teachers who can’t diagnose learning problems
• Teachers who are obsessive about method (methodology over learning)
• Teachers who overly focus on the wrong goals (self-esteem, socialization, obedience, etc.)
• Teachers who have no goal at all
• Scapegoater: each year chooses one child to focus his anger on.

 

Why does this problem exist in the first place?

• The book presents a very bleak description of how the brightest college students don’t go into teaching; the best ones don’t get hired; and half of all new teachers leave within six years.  One-third of teachers fail an eighth-grade test of basic skills (126).  In most states, there is no measure of teacher competence in basic skills.
• Research has shown that there is no relation between the teacher’s level of education and her students’ level of achievement.  (146)
• “The truth is that most parents could step in and replace a teacher, and do a better job of it, too.”  (147)

 

Why don’t principals see the problem?

• The book asserts that both principals and peers are very poor at rating teachers, and that studies show the only evaluators whose ratings of teachers tend to match the educational achievement of children are parents.  “The customer knows when the service is good or bad.  The customer isn’t fooled by phony certificates or endorsements; results are what counts.” (124)

 

… Many studies have shown that principals’ evaluations of teachers are far off the mark; their evaluations show absolutely no relationship to real teacher effectiveness as measured by student gains in achievement … This is easy to do because the principal may be required by the teachers’ union contract to give advance notice to teachers before he visits their classrooms; thus, the principal may have no idea of what really occurs daily in the classroom.  It is part of the principal’s job description to supervise teachers in the classrooms, but very few principals actually do this. (189)

 

What should parents do?  Some general points:

• A good teacher wants to fix the problem; a bad teacher wants to affix blame.  (77)
• Parents should be assertive in advocating for their child.  If a child has been a good student and reasonably content before, and his grades are suddenly falling or he is miserable, parents should not necessarily accept a teacher’s explanation that it is the child’s fault.
• If a teacher’s policies are overly repressive, the parents should question why they are necessary.
• A good line: “Let’s accept, for purposes of discussion, that what you say about my daughter is true.  Now what can we do to improve the situation?”  (78)
• “A cordial but confident demeanor, an unwavering refusal to blame the child, and an arsenal of challenging questions send a powerful message to the teacher.”
• Documentation is key.  The book defines and describes documentation: keeping written, dated records of facts, conversations and observations.  “Ideally, you will present the kind of documentation that illustrates your point of view all by itself, without any further editorial comment from you.”  (196)
• Get an opinion from a licensed psychologist that staying in a particular teacher’s class would be damaging to a student’s mental health.

 

This is a summary of the specific steps suggested:

 

1)    Initial conference with teacher.  Don’t leave until you have:

1. Agreed on the problem, or at least each voiced your opinion.
2. Gotten a sense of the teacher’s attitude and classroom atmosphere, which will probably be apparent by how she deals with you (and with your child, if he is there for part of the conference, as the author suggests).
3. Decided on an action plan, probably be formulated by the teacher.
4. Set a date for a follow-up meeting.

 

2)    Meanwhile, gather information

1. Observe the classroom.
2. Volunteer in the classroom.
3. Talk to other parents, who can tell you about the teacher, and also how the teacher reacts to parents who go to the principal.  “The grapevine is a better rating system than it gets credit for.”  (149)
4. Read between the lines of your child’s behavior.  Most children are not articulate enough to be able to give you a personality profile of the teacher.  Additionally, if they’re having a bad time, they try to not think about it outside of school

 

3)    Second meeting

1. Your teacher’s “action plan” for your child has not worked.  You have decided that the problem is the teacher.
2. You need to have a second meeting, which is not easy.  It takes a lot of backbone.  You should do it because:
   1. i.    A calm and diplomatic discussion need not be unpleasant.
   2. ii.    It will put an end to the teacher’s plan that was not working.
   3. iii.    It’s the correct protocol, according to principals and superintendents.
   4. iv.    It is the right thing to do.  “The ability to go straight to the source, state your grievance, and request correction is emblematic of mature, confident behavior.  Talking about the teacher behind his back or muttering at PTA meetings is not.”  (153)
   5. Bad teachers may try to schedule conferences when there will only be sufficient time for her to make her case.  Insist on scheduling the conference for the end of the day, when there will be enough time to deal adequately with the issues.
   6. Do not vent your anger and frustration, which will not be beneficial to anyone.
   7. The best long-term solution may be to have your child removed from the class, if possible.  But in the short term, you need to ask for changes that you believe will improve the situation.  These may include, depending on what the trouble is:
      1. i.    Change in teacher’s attitude or behavior.
      2. ii.    Change in teacher’s response to your child’s behavior or academic performance.
      3. iii.    Change in child’s seating or grouping.
      4. iv.    More time and attention for your child, in class or after class, from the teacher, aide or specialist.
      5. v.    Special assignments – either enrichment or remedial.
      6. vi.    Special record-keeping or assignment checking.
      7. vii.    Further testing.
      8. viii.    Request a transfer to another classroom.
      9. Bad teachers may try to schedule conferences when there will only be sufficient time for her to make her case.  Insist on scheduling the conference for the end of the day, when there will be enough time to deal adequately with the issues.

 

1. Be prepared to deal with the typical defenses of unfit teachers.  Some categories of defenses and effective responses are:
   1. i.    Blame the victim
   2. ii.    Mr. Chips defense – teacher will detail everything she is doing to solve the problem, but the problem is that those actions are not relevant and are not helping.  Ask teacher whether her efforts have shown results.
   3. iii.    Stonewall defense – teacher denies everything.  Parent needs good documentation, and probably to include the principal in conferences.
   4. iv.    Dr. Jekyll defense – becomes Mr. Hyde around children.  Be sure to always schedule follow-up meetings, so he knows you’re not going away.
   5. v.    The Old Lady Who Lives in a Shoe defense – there are too many children, and nothing this teacher can do.  These teachers need to plan better and be more effective.
   6. vi.    Large-Mouth Bass Defense – teacher is “fishing” for a definition of the problem or a solution, but is really just stalling.  The best defense is a good offense – jump in with your definition of the problem and solution.
   7. vii.    William Buckley defense – using education jargon.  Parents should humbly explain their ignorance and request the teacher speak in plain English.

 

1. Tips for meeting:
   1. i.    Begin with small talk
   2. ii.    Play dumb rather than trying to demonstrate how smart you are
   3. iii.    When the teacher asks you questions, remember that you are not her student, and do not give any more information than you choose.  You need not help her build a case against your child.
      1. iv.    Speak in hypotheticals instead of directly to the teacher, i.e. “How should Amanda respond if ‘a teacher’ does this or that …” or even “How should Johnny respond when this or that happens at ‘a school’?”
      2. v.    Include child in latter part of the meeting, so you’re all in agreement; after establishing ground rules about what will or will not be discussed in front of the child.
      3. vi.    Agree on a date for a follow-up meeting in two or three weeks, with the option of reducing it to a phone meeting if the plan seems to be working.
      4. vii.    Write notes on the meeting on who has agreed to do or stop doing what.  Send them to the teacher as a “memo of agreement.”  Also send a copy to the principal, and ask that they be included in your student’s file.  This documents your case if it goes to higher authorities.  The teacher has a right to file a response to your memo.  The parent has a right to see this response.

 

4)    Principals.

1. If your meetings with the teacher have not had a successful outcome, you’ll have to go to the principal and ask for a room change, or if the teacher is generally good but has a weak area, something to shore up the weakness.  But don’t expect things to be any easy.  Principals resist change, and therefore your needs do not coincide with his.  Basically, the principal will typically not help you because he wants stability, a happy staff, and to look good to his supervisor.  His tenured teachers will be around for much longer than you will, and he is responsible for their morale.  Therefore:

 

You, as a parent, can expect the principal to defend the teacher actively by offering you no information at all about a teacher’s background, qualifications, prior assignments, or anything else.  He will not share with parents any information about previous complaints or official job ratings.  The principal will deny that any information about the teacher is relevant to the problem, even long after you have concluded that the teacher is the problem.  The principal will actively try to shift the focus of the problem away from the teacher and onto your child.

You can also expect the principal to defend the teacher passively.  The principal will never agree with any of your documented criticism of the teacher; he will not acknowledge the validity of the criticism, and may not even acknowledge that evil was spoken.  In defending the teachers, he has to deny the existence of a problem, and ignore the reality of your needs. (p 190)

 

1. To deal with a principal: (193)
   1. i.    Try to work with the teacher first.
   2. ii.    Avoid confrontation, be cooperative.
   3. iii.    Do your homework.  Describe the problem, suggest solutions, and explain why your solutions are the best possible choices.
   4. iv.    Support your request with documented observations, rather than opinions.  “In the final analysis, documentation is the key element in your attempt to save your child.  Without it, the principal has no compelling reason to upset the status quo, no reason to act upon your request, and no reason to fear a reprimand from his supervisors.”  (203)
   5. v.    In general, “Your documentation, persistence and cooperation must persuade him that change (a minor change, a change in your child’s favor) is the best way to avoid the storms and keep the ship afloat.”  (204)
   6. vi.    Don’t accept the recommendation of counseling for your child, which is a major commitment, without the matching commitment from the school to change his classroom assignment, prior to the counseling (if the child has been okay before, and is reacting to a bad teacher).
   7. Then there is a list of principal tactics, which has many similarities to the teacher list:
      1. i.    Delay.  Best response is to schedule a follow-up meeting at the conclusion of each meeting.
      2. ii.    Teacher conference.  Most parents are embarrassed to voice their complaints in front of the teacher.  But if you do it in a calm and reasoned way, and assert a “mismatch” between your child and the teacher, rather than asking anyone to acknowledge the teacher’s incompetence (because you know the principal won’t), it shouldn’t matter that the teacher is there.
      3. iii.    Shift the blame.  “It is not very productive to drive a child to anger or depression, and then blame him for being angry or depressed.  But that’s what schools do.  Bad teachers do this, and then principals back them up.”  Don’t accept “counseling” to force a child to live with an unacceptable situation.
      4. iv.    The petty bauble.  Offering concessions to make up for a lousy teacher.  These concessions can range from an aide or student teacher to new computers for the classroom.  The principal is trying, and your only choice is to accept the efforts, or transfer to another school.
      5. v.    Stonewall.  Citing rules or policy, the principal will routinely refuse to make any changes.  You will have to go over his head, or transfer to another school.
      6. vi.

5)    Superintendents are the next rung of the ladder.  They:

1. Are managers, and have little to do with personnel decisions.
2. A superintendent will generally no more acknowledge an incompetent principal than a principal will acknowledge an incompetent teacher.  If you need to have a principal overruled, try to come up with other, alternative reasons, so it will look like something other than “overruling.”

 

6)    Finally there are school boards

1. The balance of power between superintendent and school board varies among districts.
2. Personnel issues are not the school board’s job.
3. The school board will only get involved if you can convince them that it’s their obligation; that the solution to your problem is within district policy, but other players are refusing to act, so it’s the school board’s job to compel somebody to own the problem.
4. Approach school board members individually, not in open meeting.

 

Rights parents do have:

• Access to their child’s file, under the Freedom of Information Act. (201)

 

Rights parents do not have:

• Access to a teacher’s personnel file
• Right to observe a classroom without advance notice
• Access to standardized test results, by classroom (quote on 200)

 

As listed, the tactics of unfit teachers and principals fall into similar patterns: shifting the blame for problems from teachers onto children; resisting acknowledging the problem at all, because the principal is stuck with unfit, tenured teachers, and needs to protect staff morale; resisting changing classroom assignments, since someone needs to be stuck with the unfit teacher; using delaying tactics in an effort to wear down parents and get them to give up; stonewalling by refusing to release information or obscuring it; feigning helplessness; and trying to confuse parents with education-ese.  These patterns are disturbing and depressing, but it’s helpful to finally have them labeled and described.

 

In conclusion, this book is incredible.  It actually makes me feel that I could deal effectively with a bad teacher, one of the most frightening and devastating experiences one can have; especially because the academic and emotional life at stake is that of your child, not your own.   The humorous descriptions of the typical defenses of bad teachers, alone, are worth the price of the book, and the specific attitudes and strategies recommended are invaluable.  Dealing with a crazy person, who is your child’s teacher, requires the ultimate in strategy and diplomacy.