The Berlin Wall of education

The first line in the letter I received from my local school district screamed: “Our children need your help now!” Apparently, the district is facing yet another round of budget cuts from Sacramento and is turning to parents to “raise at least $1,000,000 by the end of March … TO PROTECT TEACHER JOBS.”

To emphasize the urgency of the request, a news release with the dramatic headline “Schools in State of Financial Emergency” from State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson was enclosed with the donation request letter. The news release explained, “There’s simply no other way to describe it: This is an emergency. … We have 174 districts teetering on the financial brink. If this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.”

If you’re the parent of a child in a public school and haven’t received a similar letter yet, I suspect you will soon.

I dutifully sent a substantial check to the Save Our Schools fund. However, the truth of the matter is I don’t want to protect every teacher’s job. In fact, based on the experiences I have had to date, I only want to protect around three out of four of their jobs, but teacher tenure rules make it nearly impossible to fire an ineffective teacher.

Under current California law, the process to dismiss a “permanent certificated employee” consists of about a dozen separate stages culminating in a Superior Court case and then a trip to the Court of Appeal. Even Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines acknowledged, “Too many ineffective teachers are falling into tenured positions — the equivalent of jobs for life.” Not surprisingly, school districts rarely even attempt to terminate a teacher, and then only in cases where the teacher’s behavior is egregious. Sadly, simply being a teacher who can’t teach does not constitute “egregious” behavior. (This explains why between 1995 and 2005, only 112 Los Angeles tenured teachers out of 43,000 faced termination.)

Let me interrupt this litany of statistics with a personal story. Last year, my then-11-year-old son had a young, stellar English teacher. Or, as Jake put it, “Ms. B. was the best teacher I have ever had.” When I saw this bright, engaging, creative teacher in action at Back to School Night, I could see why she won my son’s best-teacher award. Fast-forward to last year’s budget cuts, and this excellent low-teacher-on-the-totem-pole received a pink slip. Her students hastily arranged lemonade stands to raise money to “Save Ms. B.,” but because the teachers union rules value seniority over performance, Ms. B. lost her job while far less talented teachers were retained.

There is this unspoken assumption underlying the teachers union’s fixation with treating unequal teachers equally that it is impossible to objectively distinguish between good and bad teachers. Yet, somehow we have no problem discerning the difference between good and bad doctors, gardeners, baby-sitters, accountants, friends, television shows and spouses. Ask anyone to name the exceptional teachers they were privileged to study under over the course of their lifetime, and I guarantee they will rattle off a list in an instant. Even a bunch of sixth-graders were able to figure out that something about Ms. B. was unique. I find it ironic that a group of people who spend their careers grading others refuse to be graded.

If the majority of teachers are good, and a minority are bad, why raise a stink? Because the evidence that bad teachers damage all of our students is overwhelming.

“If an ineffective teacher isn’t dealt with, children can be harmed. They don’t just bounce back,’’ said William Sanders, a senior research fellow with the University of North Carolina and founder of the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System.

Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an expert on education policy concurs: “Let’s say in elementary school, you have one bad teacher. It’s one-twelfth of a student’s education … and a few bad teachers can put you quite a ways back — so much so that you might have trouble catching up. The difference between a good and a bad teacher is one year of learning in an academic year. A good teacher can get 1.5 years of learning growth; a bad teacher gets .5 years of learning growth. If you get a few bad teachers in a row, a student’s life is altered dramatically.

“Teachers are faced with classes that are very heterogeneous — some students are very behind, and some students are way ahead. … The future of the school is hurt because you mix these students up, and when paired with a bad teacher, they end up dragging everyone to average.”

Our schools play teacher roulette each year, and because it is politically incorrect to say that teachers should be subject to the same rules of employment as the rest of us — reward excellence, fire the incompetent, enact reasonable safeguards to prevent capricious terminations — we let them play.

Today, I am writing another check — to StudentsFirst, an organization started by Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools, dedicated to putting “students’ needs before those of special interests.”

Tenure has become the Berlin Wall of education: a seemingly impenetrable barrier constructed and maintained by the 325,000 members of the California Teachers Association. It is time for the 12 million California public school parents to form a union of our own. It is time to say to the California teachers union: “Tear down this wall.”