February 24, 2011
Leader of Teachers’ Union Urges Dismissal Overhaul
By TRIP GABRIEL, NY Times

Responding to criticism that tenure gives even poor teachers a job for life, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced a plan Thursday to overhaul how teachers are evaluated and dismissed.

It would give tenured teachers who are rated unsatisfactory by their principals a maximum of one school year to improve. If they did not, they could be fired within 100 days.

Teacher evaluations, long an obscure detail in an educator’s career, have moved front and center as school systems try to identify which teachers are best at improving student achievement, and to remove ineffective ones.

The issue has erupted recently, with many districts anticipating layoffs because of slashed budgets. Mayors including Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Cory A. Booker of Newark have attacked seniority laws, which require that teacher dismissals be based on length of experience rather than on competency.

Ms. Weingarten has sought to play a major role in changing evaluations and tenure, lest the issue be used against unions to strip their influence over work life in schools — just as Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Ohio are trying to do this week.

Critics say that removing teachers is nearly impossible because of the obstructions that unions have put up. Administrators also bear some blame. Most evaluations are perfunctory — a drive-by classroom observation by a vice principal — and hearings to prove incompetence can be long and costly.

In Ms. Weingarten’s proposal, which she presented at a meeting of union leaders and researchers in Washington on Thursday night, teachers would be evaluated using multiple yardsticks, including classroom visits, appraisal of lesson plans and student improvement on tests.

Teachers rated unsatisfactory would be given a detailed “improvement plan” jointly devised by school administrators and experienced master teachers.

Some improvement plans — like maintaining better classroom order — could last a month. Others would take a full school year. The results would be considered separately by administrators and the peer experts, whose judgments would be sent to a neutral arbitrator.

The arbitrator would be required to decide within 100 days whether to keep or fire the teacher.

Ms. Weingarten said the process represented a major advance over current systems, which do not include detailed improvement plans and often end up in tortured hearings “litigating the teacher’s competency.”

“We have figured out an operational blueprint so people can’t use tenure as an excuse anymore not to engage in legitimate evaluations of teachers,” she said in an interview.

Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, which seeks to narrow the achievement gap for poor students in part by raising teacher quality, said, “The overall proposal is a big step forward.”

But, she added, only school administrators should create improvement plans for a poorly rated teacher; otherwise, unions might use the process to obstruct their removal.

Michael J. Petrilli, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, agreed. “In any other field,” he said, “this would be considered completely nuts that a manager would not have rights and responsibilities to evaluate their employees and take action.”

He added that the proposal did not address the most pressing issue: how to lay off thousands of teachers because of budget cutbacks without losing promising newer teachers.

“Her strategy of making sure all teachers who get a negative review will get a year and 100 days, it strikes me as a delaying tactic,” he said.

Ms. Weingarten responded that if a rational evaluation process were in place, ineffective teachers would be weeded out naturally.

“All these folks now really concerned about layoffs of newer teachers never spent a minute talking about how to keep good teachers in our profession,” she said.