Central Falls, a failing school in Rhode Island was completely canned by the local school district with 93 teachers and staff losing their jobs.
The school district claims across the board negligence citing an 11th grade math test pass level of 7 percent.
The teachers defend their scores citing the large immigrant population and poverty level of the majority of their students.
Obama has backed the School Board pissing off the 2 largest teaching unions representing 4 million of the voters that mostly sided and canvased with him.
I say it doesn’t seem to be anything new as a school reform strategy. From your link:
Whether and how well the strategy works seems to depend on the school and the district, and I can’t tell how it’s likely to play out in Central Falls. (As a former Rhody resident, I can attest that Central Falls has lots of problems with poverty and its attendant ills, so I’m not surprised the high school’s in trouble.)
classic management redirection of blame. the teachers dont set the testing rules, they dont set the budget, they dont set the guide lines, they do however have to work within them.
the people doing the firing are the ones to blame here.
I don’t know. To answer that, I’d have to know how well mass firings have worked for other schools in similar circumstances, what other types of reform strategies had been previously tried in Central Falls, what the official benchmarks are for school performance bad enough to warrant mass firings, and so on and so forth.
In general, I’d venture to say that mass firings, if used at all, should probably be used only as a last resort. I think it would be very disruptive and counterproductive to START the reform process by saying “Hey, you guys didn’t meet the minimum success standard on last year’s tests, you’re all fired.”
I think it’s most efficient to start out a reform effort by assuming that the people you’ve got, in the places you’ve got them, are capable of improvement. If they fail to improve after being given several chances, then heads should roll (although even then it seems pretty drastic to set ALL the heads rolling at once).
Not enough information to determine what happened there so far, but if the budget and guidelines were similar to performing schools wouldn’t that blame be appropriately redirected to the teachers?
If I understand correctly it is more of, “you won’t have jobs next year” than, “go away and don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.” That is how it usually is with teachers. You have to be pretty bad to get the boot mid year.
As for the whole mess… As a teacher I’ve been moderately interested in following the story, but I really haven’t seen enough information to make a judgment. Have other reforms been tried? Does the school have good teachers, but horrible administration? (A crappy principal can really sink a school.) Are reforms being done at lower levels as well? If a student shows up four or five grade levels behind then you can work miracles and they can still fail the test. Or maybe the teachers really are horrible and put on videos to teach while they read the paper or are coasting through their job or some such. Or the union and the superintendent could just be engaging in a pissing match. The stories I’ve read have been pretty light on detail.
Public teachers are employees of a company which has restricted control over its processes, a budget it doesn’t command and no control over it’s raw materials.
The debate is; teachers are employees of a social-economic system so then to what extent are they responsible for it’s failings?
There was an extensive debate on this topic on Metafilter. A few details:
“Fire the school” means that every teacher is fired at the end of the year, then rehired for the fall. This happens fairly often at some schools where it’s a seniority-busting technique. In this particular school’s case, they’re using an NCLB option that prohibits them from rehiring more than 50% of the teachers fired. Essentially, it’s a way of firing the bottom half of the teaching staff without fighting the individual cases with the union.
The teachers at Central Falls were quite well paid in dollar terms, with the average being around $70k/teacher. The reason they were so well paid comparatively is because they all collected large premiums for overages, or students in their classes beyond the contractually mandated maximum of 30. The district was saving money by reducing teaching staff, then handing over the savings in overage fees. As a practical matter, this means that in addition to the large portion of ESL students and a student body where 95% are below the poverty line, the teachers were highly paid for being heavily overworked.
Prior to exercising the ‘fire the school’ option, the board tried to negotiate mandated extra teaching, tutoring and teacher training time, but refused to pay the union’s overtime requirement of $90/hour (note that this is only for overtime hours, not a general hourly rate). Negotiations broke down and the board took this option. $90/hour sounds like an absurd overtime rate, but these teachers were already teaching more than full loads of classes to more than 30 students at a time, the vast majority of whom were ESL or below the poverty line, and the board was trying to improve test scores by extending the workload. The school’s student turnover also averaged, I think, around 30% a year.
I doubt this will work in any meaningful sense. First, the better half of the teaching body, those the board expects to rehire, have the most professional mobility and least need to stick around a crappy school in a crappy district, so effectively it’s the worst half of the teaching body who will provide many of the teachers for the fall. Second, teaching ESL kids and kids who live below the poverty line takes a special set of skills that only experience teaches, and they’re effectively tossing half that collective experience for new hires that will undoubtedly be young and fresh out of their education degrees. Third, the basic problem with the high school isn’t the teachers, it’s the circumstances: a very poor district filled with a highly transient immigration population doing manual labor that’s disappearing.
The school has a lot of hard structural problems that virtually guarantee low marks on standardized tests. All this accomplishes is making the board look like they’re doing something.
Fuck teachers unions. When I hear the whining about what they are paid “per-hour” it makes my blood boil. They have to decide if they want to act like teamsters or be treated like professionals. They are hardly the only profession that works long hours. I put in many 60 hours a week in my salaried job in high tech.
I’d like the people that educate our children to be one of the best paid professions, but not if they are a bunch of thugs who protect incompetents and hide behind tenure.
Look at these test score comparisons of education majors vs other majors. It’s really sad to see what is happening to our schools.
To the best of my knowledge, most middle school and high school teachers are not education majors. Certain education courses are required, but their majors are in math, science, language arts, etc. I don’t know what the requirements are in elementary education.
I am familiar with only one teachers’ union and that is the American Federation of Teachers. Where I taught, we did not have access to a union. We could join the National Education Association. That is so far removed from being a union that it is just laughable. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the differences in the websites of the two organizations.
FTR, I strongly support nation wide testing of teachers before they are licensed or certified. And I think that the test that is required should be as demanding as a bar exam. I was required to take the National Teachers Exam before I could teach.
hansel, I agree with most of the insights you have provided. One thing I disagree with:
Don’t assume that good teachers don’t want to teach in difficult schools. Most of us are there by choice. In the schools where I taught, the teachers generally had enough seniority that they could easily have transferred to other schools. I was offered a position at the academic magnet when I was considering a transfer, but I turned it down. One of my colleagues turned down a position as the Supervisor of Language Arts for the State. Our attitudes were not uncommon.
It is programs like No Child Left Behind that may put an end to that loyalty. No one will want to teach in a difficult situation if the odds are against them before they even begin. The irony is that some schools paid teachers in difficult schools additional money in the 1970s because of the extra work and problems the teachers faced.
The following might be a productive experiment just for a few schools for one year. Take the teachers that taught in high performance schools and let students in difficult schools benefit from their excellence in the classroom. And place the teachers from the difficult schools in the higher performing schools so that they can be reinspired and refreshed on what standards should be. Allow them sharpen their skills in working with parents and getting them more involved. Allow these teachers to learn from their experiences.
In the meantime it will be interesting to see how the test scores are in the schools at the end of the year.
I have said before that teachers will never be paid enough. They couldn’t pay me enough to do the job. The motivation has to be from something else.
I don’t believe that’s the answer. I think teachers already have too many certification requirements for a job that’s dependent on experience to do well. We should be making it easier to cycle in as many people as possible into teaching, even if only to try it out for a year, because I don’t think tests and degrees and certifications really prepare one for the job.
We’ve done this in my district, and I think in some cases it’s a good choice: sometimes the institutional problems of a school are so deep-seated, so intractable, so entrenched, that they can’t be fixed on an individual level. Fire everyone, interview and rehire the ones that are competent, but place them in a different schools (so that the poison culture doesn’t follow them), close the school for 2-3 years and then reopen it as something new–a freshman center, a magnet school, an early college–some sort of radical step to shift all the institutionalized crud, the fossilized counter-productive patterns, the defeatist attitudes away.
I strongly disagree with this. Good teaching is not universal, and different students require different skill sets–something that takes years to learn.
We have a brilliant calculus teacher on my campus. Most years she has 100% pass the AP exam, and even the kids in her pre-cal class go to college calculus significantly ahead of their peers (she’s about 9 weeks into the AB curriculum at the end of pre-cal). But she’s useless with freshmen, as she’s happy to admit. She doesn’t understand them, doesn’t see where they are coming from, doesn’t enjoy teaching them. It would do no good at all to force her to teach different kids.
I teach at a “good” urban high school–still 65% free or reduced lunch, still 30% ESL, but not an “inner city school” by any means. I think I could be a successful teacher at an inner city school, or a suburban school, or a private school, but in all those cases it would take me 2-3 years, at least, to get up to speed, to understand the dynamics of the situation, the culture of the school, the values and concerns and priorities and anxieties of my kids. Teachers are not fungible.
I am a teacher. I think all teachers ought to be held accountable for their student’s performance. The other choice is to measure excellence in teaching based on pretty bulletin boards.
But what do we do with a screwed up school? Fire everyone on the grounds of being in the wrong business? Or doubling their resources in order to increase performance? I dunno.
Resources are important of course, but 60 Minutes has a program every season about how some screwed up school was turned around by a crazy nun with a ruler or a teacher who refused to give up. Money can only do so much.
Seven percent passed the math test? Fire them, they are no loss to the system.
Apparently the school is pretty messed up, so some sort of drastic action is required but this whole thing sounds like misdirection to me. If a business is somewhat messed up you can blame the employees - if its totally fucked up, as seems to be in this case, it’s time to fire the management. Really, how does a school manage to get a complete staff of bad teachers without the administration having anything at all to do with the problem?
You have to understand Central Falls, RI. It is a city of less than 1 square mile, with a population 70% immigrant. The major industry in town is drug distribution (it is the destination for drugs being carried up Rt. 95 from Florida).
The student turnover is huge-most students leave before graduation.
The city is so corrupt that once (a few years ago), all the police cars were out of action (the city didn’t have the money to fix them).
One idea the city had was to site a toxic waste incineration plant in the town, another was to built a prison (to take out of state prisoners, on contract).
The school thing is a good argument for not coercing kids into education (that they don’t want); also requiring strong english immersion for immigrants.
The think is, sometimes a school has been messed up for a generation or more–scads of teacher, scads of different administrators. In a case like that, drastic action may be called for.
