I can’t say that there is a good way to measure teacher performance. In fact, most professions have this problem of how to measure and reward performance. We’ve all heard the stories of someone getting promoted because he/she was on a visible project even if that person is incompetent. Its a hard process to get right but if you don’t try, you won’t ever succeed.

I agree that there are many variables to making teacher performance measurement work. There are also a lot of variables to sending someone to the moon. Yet we sent someone to the moon but we haven’t found ways to control the teaching variables. I find the whole topic interesting. As a practitioner of statistical controls, I think that a PhD dissertation could easily be done to come up with a method to monitor the “quality” of a teacher’s output over the course of a schoolyear.

A side benefit of having a real measure of a teacher’s quality of output would be the ability to measure whether new teaching stratagems work or don’t work. I think that feedback is lacking, too.

The fact of the matter is that New York City has over a million students. Last year I taught about one hundred of them. If I’d had it my way I would have taught far fewer so that I could give students who receive absolutely no attention at home a lot more positive attention at school. Instead my instructional day broke down to about two minutes per child.

The union and the state have been trying to improve education for a very long time. With that effort has come a lot of legislation that, while well-intentioned, is now bunk and needs to be cleaned up. While I don’t believe in private education for all, the school system needs to reflect our societal structure better than it does. That is to say education should be a blend of capitalism and socialism, as is the United States. Right now public education is purely a social program. Because of that it is difficult to hold teachers AND students AND parents accountable, when all three must be.

Accountability does scare a lot of teachers in the city because it is an incredibly difficult place in which to teach. If held to the most rigorous standards of academic achievement, many (perhaps most) teachers would not pass. I certainly wouldn’t. Unfortunately the fault is not only a single teachers, but all teachers before that given teacher, the parents and the community.

There are certainly teachers that need to go, and it should be easier to get rid of them. Another problem comes with incompetent principals. Again, there are 1,500 schools in NYC. It’s a big system. I’ve met an incredible amount of teachers who point to bad administrators as the weak link in a school, and I’m prone to believe them because I know they are good teachers. Unfortunately their records don’t show it because of those administrators. Who is held accountable then? How many systems need to be put into place to keep those people accountable? What will the problems be with those systems?

Perhaps the point is that there are not enough good people to go around in a system like this one. It’s a rough place to work and teach and most people don’t enjoy working with for little pay, little respect and a lot of headaches. Perhaps when the populace of this city and this country begin to take public education seriously again teacher quality will improve. Until the day when public teachers are no longer bad-mouthed as a rule and are instead heralded as professionals with the most important job around (and are trained properly to fill those roles), these issues are not going away.

Thank you.

“Rags, I never said it would settle it. Try not to be such an obvious moron.”

No, Mike, I said that was good enough for me. Not you.

I might ask, why would you make such a silly response? But I’m on to you, “Mike”; I know that you’re really Hugh Laurie, pretending to be a complete ass (just like on not-Oprah) so that you can show how ridiculous it is to defend the drunks etc. who end up in the Rubber Rooms.

Brilliant, “Mike”.

The problem in NYS is that it is almost impossible to fire a teacher for incompetence, no matter how well documented. Insubordination is a different matter.

Here’s how a typical situation goes down. A teacher is documented over the course of several years, with time-intensive classroom evaluations done periodically, along with time-intensive counseling/training sessions to help the teacher improve. If the teacher doesn’t improve, then you are looking at a time-intensive expensive process to actually go to a 2030a hearing. If by some miracle the hearing officer agrees that firing is appropriate, the teacher can challenge the outcome, first up the internal administrative chain to the State Superintendent, and then to a regular court.

In almost every case, someone eventually decides that the “punishment” of firing is too harsh and downgrades the firing to a suspension and/or fine. Meanwhile, the teacher continues to receive his/her salary throughout the proceedings.

It is no wonder that administrators and districts decide that alternatives, including the rubber room, are simply a “cheaper” way to go, as long as the incompetent teacher is kept away from the classroom.

The same reasoning applies to incompetent administrators, too. Tenure simply makes it too hard to get rid of the dead wood without a lot of effort, which oftentimes doesn’t work anyways.

But that, I am guessing, is not really where the problem lies. The current situation exists because there are a number of teachers perceived to be inadequate or undesirable for whom there is inadequate documentation of their inadequacy. Teachers for whom you, me and the lamppost would all agree, teaching is not a good fit. But we don’t have any documentation because, short of “buggering the bursar,” as Michael Caine’s character put it in Educating Rita, we give everyone a good evaluation. It’s easier than putting the time and effort into structuring a mix of the subjectivity of learned professional and the objectivity of results.

As Mike points out, the folks convicted of cocaine possession are not (or ought not be) the problem. We already have the means to yank the licenses of convicted felons. If they remain on the payroll, shame–that one’s too easy to fix. I don’t think even the union would dispute the fact that someone without a license does not have a right to a classroom, or a salary.

My suspicion is that the rubber room is full of other undesireables–troublesome folks who just don’t “get it” with regard to relationships with students, parents or colleagues, or folks whose content grasp is shaky, or those content to just “phone it in” with regard to their work. In the absence of ongoing and meaningful forms of evaluation, these drones continue year after year until an opportunity presents to down-size them or someone wins the gotcha game and can make a case for firing. Not only is this bad for the teachers (and the students thereof) in the rubber rooms, it is bad across the whole spectrum of educators. From the newbies who desperately need a firm hand to see that the develop sound teaching practices, to those who are merely tired and in a rut. Evaluation ought not be seen as the way to get rid of bad teachers, although in the worst cases it enables that through universal documentation systems, but as a key to continuous improvement. How many of those tired teachers in the rubber room might have been recoverable ten or fifteen years ago? How many might justifiably been let go ten or fifteen years ago if push had come to shove?

Solid evaluation systems allow for push to come to shove, if responsibly implemented. Meandering blindly and them bemoaning the inability to get rid of the worst cases is neither responsible nor efficient. Ongoing means of evaluation ought to be regarded as needed forms of “due process.”

As I said above, it’s the process (scheduling and coordination) that makes even a simple hearing take so long to happen. That is, just to get a certified copy of a conviction record in front of an arbitrator who then makes his/her ruling takes almost a year to accomplish. Why a district can’t in the alternative go in front of a judge instead doesn’t make sense from a due process point of view, but again, it’s a matter of state law.