Andy Chen/The New York Times

Updated, March 3, 6:00 p.m. | Steve Perry, principal of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford, joins the discussion.

In an article this week, The Times described the slow progress New York City officials are making in their efforts to get rid of teachers who have been judged incompetent. Despite a two-year push by the city, only three teachers have been fired, a rate of success that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein called “far too modest.” He and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have blamed the teachers’ union for defending the rules governing the system, which requires that teachers receive full pay while their cases are being decided (they spend the days in one of the system’s so-called rubber rooms), a burden that costs $30 million a year. The city’s critics point out that its officials approved many of the rules in the teachers’ contract.

New York City is hardly alone. Many other school systems in the country face problems in getting rid of teachers accused of misconduct or ineptitude — a recent article in Los Angeles Weekly detailed some of the toughest cases there.

A broader question for school reformers in New York City and elsewhere is: What is the most effective way to identify incompetent teachers and take steps to get rid of them? What would a fair and effective system consist of?

Here’s a New Process

Timothy Daly is president of the New Teacher Project.



Rhetorically, districts and unions agree on the importance of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom fairly but quickly. Both sides have been saying this for decades. And yet it almost never happens.

Why, in some districts, do 99 percent of teachers earn the highest possible rating in evaluations?

Part of the problem is that, according to current teacher evaluations, ineffective teachers don’t really exist. In our recent report, “The Widget Effect,” we found that most teachers are evaluated based on short and infrequent observations by administrators that put them into one of just two categories: “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” As a result, more than 99 percent of teachers in some districts earn the highest possible rating.

The first step in the solution is simple: fix the evaluations. Evaluations should include multiple rating categories that allow for a nuanced assessment of teachers’ abilities. And since everyone agrees that a teacher’s primary responsibility is to help students learn, evaluations should emphasize evidence of student learning.

A common objection to more rigorous evaluations is that they give too much power to administrators, who are said to be unable to rate their teachers fairly. That’s a cop-out; just like most teachers are effective, skilled professionals, so are most administrators.

Read more… The best way to hold administrators accountable for conducting good evaluations is to balance their assessments with objective data about student learning – and that means including standardized tests in the equation. An administrator would have a hard time justifying a low rating for a teacher whose students show strong evidence of learning on assessments. When evaluations have been improved, it’s time to address the dismissal process. Why does the U.F.T. fight the dismissal of teachers who have failed by any measure? The Times article shows why there is reason to question whether unions are serious about going beyond rhetoric to embrace real reforms. The U.F.T. president Michael Mulgrew says that lengthy dismissal proceedings are “not good for anyone.” On the other hand, the U.F.T. waged an appallingly expensive, multiyear fight on behalf of a teacher found to be ineffective by the peer review program the union helped create. If the union proceeds this way even when poor performance has been validated, what part of the dismissal process is it actually willing to change? Furthermore, in a recent Op-Ed in the New York Post, Mr. Mulgrew wrote about three-day disciplinary hearings that are allowed under current policies but neglected to mention that the Department of Education is prohibited from seeking dismissal in these expedited hearings. Let’s all agree that we’ve done enough talking about dismissing ineffective teachers. What would it take to have a new process in place by the start of next school year?

Let the Teachers Decide

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the author of “All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice,” and “Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy”.

When I speak to friends and colleagues about my biography of Albert Shanker, the founding father of modern teacher unions, the No. 1 complaint people have is that unions protect incompetent educators. Shanker recognized that this was a problem and as president of the American Federation of Teachers was willing to concede that the union did include some “terrible” educators who should not be in the profession.

Genuine professions police themselves and teachers can do that as well.

Who should make the decision about which teachers are fired? Not the principals, Shanker argued. They might play favorites and fire excellent teachers with whom they personally clashed. Besides, how would a principal trained in physical education or history know what makes an excellent French teacher? Not administrators, far removed from the classroom, who pore over raw test score data that can be influenced by a host of factors beyond a teacher’s control.

Instead, Shanker proposed a system of peer review in which excellent teachers from outside a school would come in and try to help struggling teachers develop their talents, but if that didn’t work, recommend that teachers be terminated.

Read more… Some within the union thought peer review was anathema: How could a union, which is supposed to represent teachers, recommend that some members be fired? But Shanker argued that genuine professions — like law and medicine — policed themselves and teachers should do likewise. In places where peer review has been employed, like Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio, the number of incompetent teachers removed is greater than when administrators were in charge. Why? Because every fourth grade teacher suffers when an incompetent third grade teacher fails to educate students. Superb teachers are ideally positioned to weed out substandard ones.

How Tests Can Identify the Inept

Marcus Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where he has done several studies on education testing and school report cards.

How much does teacher quality matter? A good teacher can mean as much as a grade level’s worth of learning in a school year. Getting rid of bad teachers is by far the most effective education reform we could hope to enact.

Only 25 of New York City’s 6,250 eligible teachers (0.4 percent) were denied tenure in 2006.

Before we can weed out bad teachers, we first need to identify them. Current evaluation systems based on classroom observation don’t even try to do this. Urban school districts across the country routinely grant “satisfactory” or above ratings to over 99 percent of teachers.

These evaluation systems produce homogenous results because they forgo objective measures of teacher quality. Thanks to widespread standardized testing that matches student learning to his classroom teacher, we can now do a better job of identifying poor teachers. Modern statistical techniques allow researchers to measure a teacher’s independent contribution to his students’ learning. These techniques are not perfect, but they do raise red flags. We should use them.

Read more… But even the best information about teacher quality is unhelpful if school systems can’t act upon it. The iron-clad job protections of tenure ensure that a teacher remains on the payroll no matter how ineffective he is in the classroom. In 2007, only 10 of the 55,000 tenured teachers in New York City were fired for any reason. Neither are we too discriminating when deciding who gets tenure. Principals denied tenure to only 2 percent of New York teachers who were eligible to receive it last year. Believe it or not, that’s actually an improvement — only 25 of Gotham’s 6,250 eligible teachers (0.4 percent) were denied tenure in 2006. If tenure is to exist at all, it should be treated as a privilege, not a right. Principals need to scrutinize which teachers do and don’t deserve tenure, and the school system should hold accountable those school leaders who don’t take that responsibility seriously. And no teacher should be immune from the consequences of poor performance, no matter how long he has been in the classroom. That’s a two-step solution to the teacher quality problem: first distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, and then use that information. Adopting that sensible plan takes political courage from Albany — state law currently prohibits schools from using test scores in determining whether a teacher receives tenure and provides tenure’s job protections. We have the tools to improve teacher quality. Unfortunately, pursuing this fairly obvious strategy has proved to be frustratingly difficult.

Why Some Teachers Hold Out

Molly Pease has taught at the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn for almost seven years. She currently teaches government and economics in the social studies department.



I believe, and I think most teachers at my school believe, that the “rubber room” is a taint on the entire school system. There should definitely be cleaner, quicker, and more humane ways to fire a teacher.

Incompetence can be difficult to prove within the given system.

The slow “firing system” allows teachers to hang on to their jobs and benefits as long as possible. The system gives teachers (and rightfully so) great health care, pension (the more years you accrue, the more you receive), tax deferred annuities (401K), etc., and many teachers definitely feel entrenched.

If I were suddenly deemed incompetent and sent to the rubber room, I might, depending on my state of life, hold out for as long as possible, too. If the system wants to make the firing process quicker, perhaps it should offer incompetent teachers some type of training/job-seeking course, and maybe pay them the money in their pension (if they have not vested).

Read more… Identifying incompetent teachers is a more difficult issue. The reason the union and the school system are struggling to find a proper way to fire incompetent teachers is because they cannot agree upon the traits that define an “incompetent” teacher. There are, of course, many clear signs of incompetency, like chronic lateness/absenteeism, sexual harassment, drunkenness, disregard of students or complete lack of classroom control, etc. But even these acts can be difficult to prove by a supervisor within the given system. How does a supervisor prove incompetence? A doctor might have low scores based on outcomes, a lawyer might not get the right verdict, a corporate manager might not see a profit — but what about teachers? If a supervisor uses test scores, where does that leave teachers of special education students? A supervisor could use student surveys, but are 16–year-olds reliable judges? (Surveys and test scores are used on the school report cards). I teach at a school that has an extremely competent staff. The only way to ensure that a school has competent teachers is to visit the school, and sit in the classrooms, and make sure that the principal is visiting the classrooms, and not just once a year – but over and over and over again. Teachers need to be used to having others in their classroom, and they need to talk about their students, lesson plans and goals for the classroom. Only those interested in teaching should stay in the system; those who aren’t should seek other professions.

Give Principals Real Control

Don Soifer is the executive vice president and an education analyst at the Lexington Institute, a free-market think tank.

A system that requires schools to pay upwards of $350,000 in fees, arbitration and salary, and then wait three years to dismiss an ineffective teacher, can’t possibly be working in the interests of children. But simply transferring those teachers to different schools to avoid the hassle and expense of the termination process is just as outrageous.

Unless principals have the authority to fire teachers, the system will remain broken.

The ability of reform-minded chancellors, like New York’s Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee in Washington, to succeed in turning around schools that have been recalcitrant to improvement for decades depends on transforming the culture of those schools to one where success can thrive.

Principals, as the educational leaders of their schools, should be held accountable for their results. But unless they also have both the authority to make the personnel decisions on which those results largely depend, and the flexibility to carry them out, the system is broken and their ability to succeed is severely compromised.

Read more… Likewise, Chancellor Klein’s leadership in using strong data systems that measure student growth and allow teachers to target instruction to best address learning needs is an essential component to improving public schools. But teacher union leadership that has fought the use of meaningful student performance data in teacher evaluations and tenure decisions is not simply harmful to the interests of children, but harmful to teachers as well. Most teachers are dedicated, hardworking professionals who want their schools to be effective organizations geared toward producing the highest-quality education. But the highly politicized leadership of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and their New York affiliates who have consistently pressed, through advocacy and collective bargaining, against allowing school leaders the use of these essential tools, may be as much a part of the problems as the rubber rooms themselves.

Early Intervention

Aaron Pallas is a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The big issues are what count in teacher incompetence, and preventing it in the first place. Many things are labeled as evidence of teacher incompetence: an accusation of inappropriate behavior toward a student (e.g., corporal punishment); a principal’s judgment that a teacher cannot maintain order in the classroom, or has poorly prepared lessons; a teacher’s inability to find a new teaching position somewhere in the system after his/her school closed or after being laid off; and teachers being ranked below most of their peers in their measured contribution to their students’ standardized test scores, to name just a few.

The best hedge against teacher incompetence is careful evaluation and support for teachers early in their careers.

Whether each of these examples should be considered evidence of incompetence is a matter of judgment. Laid off teachers, for example, are commonly believed to be bad teachers but sometimes it’s just a matter of budget constraints. And defining the teachers in the bottom 25 percent based on contributions to students’ test scores as incompetent is an arbitrary threshold — the bottom 25 percent of a highly qualified group may still be very competent.

Read more… It’s true that some issues must be hammered out at the bargaining table. Teachers should not be kept on the city payroll indefinitely after being laid off, but they need to be given a fair opportunity to find new positions; and teachers accused of professional misconduct are entitled to due process and a speedy disposition of their cases, without spending years in limbo. But the best hedge against teacher incompetence is careful evaluation and support for teachers early in their careers. Lengthening the probationary period before the award of tenure from three years to five or six years would provide more information both to novice teachers and to the Department of Education about these teachers’ professional development and trajectories. And a more differentiated evaluation system can help identify teachers’ strengths and weaknesses, and assist them in deciding whether teaching in New York City schools will be a rewarding career.

Supporting New Teachers

Charles Merrill was a teacher and psychologist for the New York City Department of Education for 35 years. He is currently writing a book about his teaching experiences.

There are strategies that do effectively eliminate incompetent teachers. The article itself notes that 7 percent of new teachers were denied tenure last year and that 418 teachers left the system rather than go through the competency hearing process. Some teachers assigned to the notorious “rubber rooms” resign or take early retirement. So the education department’s statement that only three teachers were fired is misleading.

Every new teacher should be assigned a mentor, who is available on a daily basis.

Even so, principals do give tenure to some teachers who should not teach. Why? There are many reasons. One may be that teachers are not always easy to replace. A warm body may be better than nobody at the front of the room. For example, the education department says it is now offering financial incentives to try to staff hard to fill math and science position in problem schools.

The best way to reduce the number of incompetent teachers is to raise teacher competency overall. New teachers who are thrown into extremely difficult circumstances with little more than a “good luck” are likely to fail.

Read more… Instead, every new teacher should be assigned a mentor, who is available on a daily basis. Knowing the subject and how to present it, as well as mastering classroom management requires years of practice and training for most of us. This is particularly true when many students come from backgrounds of chronic deprivation and neglect, including foster care, parental incarceration, living in shelters and more. They require enormous patience and support. In my first teaching assignment, I had a geometry class, with many students who were repeating the class. There was chaos. The next semester I taught algebra to a group of students who were in a special “college bound” program. Suddenly I was a highly competent teacher. What percentage of new teachers make it a career? Many new teachers leave after a few years as they realize how difficult educating children, particularly severely disadvantaged children, can be. (Some have called Teach for America, with its high attrition rate, “Teach for Awhile.”) The long-term solution is to recruit more highly educated, dedicated people into teaching, and to encourage them to stay in the profession. Lastly, the article notes that there are only eight full time lawyers and eight part-time consultants in the unit dealing with incompetency cases. To speed up the reviews, the department should triple that number.

The Unions’ ‘Plant’ Mentality

Steve Perry is founder and principal of Capital Preparatory Magnet School in Hartford.



It’s time for some plant closings. While our teachers and principals prepare for lives in the suburbs, where their kids go to private or solid suburban schools, their students suffer from educational neglect, starved by the crumbs that they have been offered.

The teachers’ unions have blamed poverty, race, Republicans, budgets, rain, sleet and snow for the failures of the last 30 years.

The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have created contentious industrial working conditions, replacing the artistry and professionalism of education with a “plant” mentality. Since they want their members to be treated as if they work in a coal mine, where the conditions and the job are deplorable, then it’s time that we respond in kind.

Every single person employed in a failed educational plant, from the lunch ladies to the principal, must be removed, period. In their place we must employ a combination of public and private options.