A Denver Post story on Feb. 6, “DPS alters teacher placement,” described the predicament of Tom Boasberg, the district’s new superintendent. Sixty percent of DPS schools are designated as Title 1, serving students of low-income families. In an effort to improve the quality of teachers in those schools, Boasberg wants to end the practice of shunting unwanted teachers from other schools to these Title 1 schools.
As usual, the root of the problem can be traced to the teachers union and the current tenure policy. The union doesn’t represent students, administrators, parents or taxpayers. It represents the interests of its members. The way things work now, when a school administration identifies a teacher as incompetent, firing “for cause” is rarely a practical option. Given the red tape and union obstacles, it’s too time-consuming and expensive.
As testimony to that, in the 2007-08 school year, only four DPS teachers were actually fired for poor performance, and that was the most in a decade. That’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the district’s 4,500 teachers. Assuming teachers are as competent as people in other professions, can you imagine any field where so few employees are incompetent?
Rather than endure the procedural and legal gauntlet of dismissing a teacher for poor performance, school administrations are content to be rid of incompetents, without calling them that. After a few months, if they’re unable to find another school that wants them, these “unassigned teachers” have been routinely shunted off to troubled Title 1 schools — even if they’re not wanted there, either. This just kicks the can down the road.
The obvious remedy would be to fire these employees and replace them with better ones. Forget about it. The union will have none of that. These are tenured teachers, which is “eduspeak” for job-secure, like Supreme Court justices. If they can’t be fired or forced on another school, what’s the alternative? In New York City, more than 2,000 such teachers, at a cost of $200 million a year, are currently held in an “absent teacher reserve pool.” That’s an eduspeak euphemism for being paid for not working. (It’s the equivalent of the auto industry’s Jobs Bank, where up to 15,000 UAW workers were paid as much as $100,000 a year for not working, often for years.)
The New York Post reports that 660 teachers in the city’s so-called reserve pool, also known as the “rubber room,” are awaiting disciplinary proceedings while drawing a paycheck. This includes Francis Olivares, an alleged sex offender, who “hasn’t set foot in a classroom for seven years.”
Will DPS follow this path? Denver Post reporter Jeremy P. Meyer apparently couldn’t get a direct answer to that question from district administrators. All they’d tell him is that, “It is not clear whether DPS’s changes will create a similar absent-teacher pool in Denver.” Good Lord, let’s hope not!
There are other remedies, all of which will be opposed by the union. First, do away with tenure. It was originally justified to protect free speech. That was before unions. It’s now an anachronism. How many of you have tenure-protected jobs? Next, institute real merit pay, not weak imitations like DPS’s ProComp. Base individual pay on individual ability and performance, not group performance or seniority.
Make administrators responsible for evaluating the teachers that work for them, just as managers do in the private sector. And evaluate the administrators. Pay excellent teachers more money, pay mediocre teachers less and get rid of the lazy and incompetent ones. Will these evaluations be imperfect and somewhat subjective? Yes. But that works just fine in private enterprise. And it’s a lot better than no evaluations at all.
The only barriers to these measures are political, which are near-impossible to overcome. That’s why substantive reform of public education seems hopeless.
Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.
