Bad Teachers Matter

Yet another study reveals the difficulty of getting rid of incompetent teachers

Larry Sand December 13, 2016

Last Thursday, the Fordham Institute released a report on the difficulty of removing ineffective teachers from public school classrooms. The results of the study showed that in some school districts it is virtually impossible to get rid of a bad apple. The Fordham analysts used a ten point metric based on three simple questions:

1. Does tenure protect veteran teachers from performance-based dismissal?
2. How long does it take to dismiss an ineffective veteran teacher?
3. How vulnerable is an ineffective veteran teacher’s dismissal to challenge?

They then used this framework to gauge the difficulty of dismissing ineffective veteran teachers in twenty-five diverse districts across the country. The five districts rated “very difficult to dismiss,” are all big-city districts, four of them run by powerful teachers unions – New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The union in Nevada’s Clark County School District, doesn’t have the heft of the others.

The study found three major obstacles to firing teachers. In 17 of the 25 districts, state law allows teachers to achieve tenure and never relinquish it, even if poor performance reviews follow. Also, it takes forever to cut through the red tape involved in a teacher dismissal. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, it can take five or more years to complete the process. And finally, teachers have multiple appeals to their dismissal in many districts........To Read More....