Kevin Drum has the one thing public policy and management professors most want their students to develop: the capacity to think about public problems concretely rather than through the lens of slogans. Having supervised and fired people, he asks a reasonable question: If we make it easier for principals to fire teachers, will they have enough information to be able to fire the right ones? After all, teachers do most of their work out of the sight of other grown-ups, and there aren't really good, accurate, real-time measures of teaching performance.
He's right to be concerned. There's a non-trivial risk that some principals will fire teachers for reasons other than classroom performance. One the other hand, there are teachers whose performance is transparently substandard, people who have retired in place.
Here's a partial fix for that: when a principal bounces a teacher, the teacher should have the right to transfer to any other school in the district with an opening. If bounced a second time, the teacher should still be able to transfer to any school with an opening and whose principal will accept the transfer. Getting rid of a teacher should be made somewhat painful for the principal by always replacing a fired teacher with a rookie. If a teacher bounces twice and can't find a new home, there's a reasonable probability that the world is being deprived of a shoe-store clerk.
Yes, it's possible, especially in a small district, that a perfectly good teacher could be victimized by an old-boys' network among principals. You'd want to figure out a way to prevent a superintendent or School Board member from pressuring a principal to fire a teacher for being a "troublemaker," but there's no perfect system anywhere. The existing problem of retired-in-place teachers is bad enough to warrant fixing, even at some cost in fairness.
Article comments
1 - AC
I hate hearing about provisionary teachers getting fired for such stupid reasons. For example, a first year teacher comes to a school and the principal has a vindictive personality. the principal is a man, has a history, is unhappy and is going through a divorce etc. He comes to work but brings his problems with him. So a new teacher gets treated differently then she deserves because the principal is so occupied with his own life that he doesn't offer her support and guidence. When it is time for her first evaluations, he realizes he hasn't come to observe her. He asks around the school for feedback so he can quickly fill in the evaluation form. So Mrs. Sally, what do you think of so and so, and she comments, oh she is nice, but so quiet, she forgets her students names sometimes, so the principal uses that comment as a needs improvment. Okay so you see what is going on. The principal is getting all these statements and at the end of the evaluation form, there is nothing but needs improvement over the stupidest things. So, he brings her in and fires her, she is just not a match for the school he says. He never observed her and he used other people's opinions to form his opionion of her. That is wrong, he doesn't even know if things were out of context or untrue. This should never happen, it is wrong and a teacher should never ever be fired for that. So wrong. This should not happen to anyone. If it does, I am sorry. Some principals should not even have that position. Being a principal is a job and a mentoring job to new teachers. Not every principal is all that he/she is cracked up to be.