dismissal process for poor-performing teachers

How to do this? Let’s stipulate first that pay isn’t everything. Teachers are the only
category of people I’ve ever met who routinely say, without irony, that their jobs are so
fulfilling they hardly care how little they make. For many of them, too, job security, good
health benefits and pensions, and free summers offset the low income. But fulfillment
and fringe benefits will never suffice to attract and retain hundreds of thousands of
talented new teachers for poor districts.
There’s no way to get large numbers of top people without paying up. Conservatives
rightly worry that pouring more money into the system will subsidize mediocrity rather
than lure new talent-especially when union rules make it next to impossible to fire bad
teachers. “Dismissing a tenured teacher is not a process,” one California official has said.
“It’s a career.” The effort can take years and involve hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Rather than being fired, bad teachers are shuffled from school to school. In a recent fiveyear period only sixty-two of the 220,000 tenured teachers in California were dismissed.
A grand bargain could be struck between unions and conservatives: make more money
available for teachers’ salaries in exchange for flexibility in how it is spent. For instance,
the standard “lockstep” union pay scale, whereby a teacher with a degree in biochemistry has to be paid the same as one with a degree in physical education if both have the same
number of years in the classroom (even though the biochemist has lucrative options
outside teaching), should be scrapped. Better-performing teachers should make more than
worse ones. And dismissing poor performers-who, even union leaders agree, make up
perhaps 10 percent of urban teachers-should be made much easier.
If the quality of urban schools is to be improved, teaching poor children must become the
career of choice for talented young Americans who want to make a difference with their
lives and earn a good living too. To achieve that the federal government should raise the
salary of every teacher in a poor school by at least 50 percent. But this increase would be
contingent on two fundamental reforms: teachers’ unions would have to abandon the
lockstep pay schedules, so that the top-performing half of the teacher corps could be paid
significantly more; and the dismissal process for poor-performing teachers would have to
be condensed to four to six months.
In Los Angeles teachers currently earn about $40,000 to start and top out, after thirty
years and a Ph.D., at about $70,000. Under this new deal those teachers would start at
$60,000, and the top-performing half of teachers would make $85,000 to $90,000 a year,
on average. A number of the best teachers could earn close to $150,000 a year. The plan
is designed to pay America’s best teachers of poor students salaries high enough to allow
them to put aside a million dollars in savings by the end of their careers.How much would this plan cost? Roughly $30 billion a year, which would lift the federal
share of K-12 spending from seven percent to 14 percent of the total nationwide-only
right, given that on their own poor districts can’t afford the skilled teachers they need.
This federal investment looks modest beside the $80 billion a year that some
representatives of corporate America say they spend training ill-prepared high school
graduates to work in modern industry. The plan could be administered through a program
similar to Title I, which provides supplementary federal funds to poor schools. We might
call it Title I for Teachers.
To find out whether this basic plan is politically feasible, I presented it to big-city
superintendents, high-ranking union leaders, and assorted education experts and teachers.
“I’d endorse something like that in a hot minute,” said Day Higuchi, the president of the
Los Angeles teachers’ union from 1996 to 2002. “Right now L.A. Unified is the employer
of last resort. People who can’t get jobs elsewhere come here. If we did this, we’d become
the employer of first resort. High-powered college students will be taking the job.” Arne
Duncan, the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, told me that now there’s “very little
incentive outside of pure altruism” to get someone into teaching. This proposal “would
dramatically change the face of the teacher profession,” he said.
To gauge the conservative reaction, I spoke with Chester E. Finn Jr., a longtime school
reformer on the right. Finn is the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and
served as an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan Administration. He expressed
several concerns. “The troubling part of this proposal,” he said, “is a 50 percent boost for
just showing up for work, without any reference to whether anybody you teach learns a
damned thing.”
I replied that the offer was designed to make it worthwhile for the unions to accept real
reform in pay and dismissal practices. And the pay increase would subsidize mediocrity
only briefly, because under the new dismissal rules bad teachers could much more easily
be fired.
Finn had his own variation to offer. “If you wanted to make this plan really interesting,”
he told me, “job security and tenure would be traded for this raise. The swap here ought
to be that you take a risk with your employment and you don’t have to be retained if
you’re not good at what you do. If you are good and you get retained, you get paid a
whole lot more money. If current teachers can’t swallow that tradeoff, make this a parallel
personnel system for new ones coming in and for the existing ones who want to do it.”
How might that work? I asked.
“Any current teacher is free to join this new system on its terms,” Finn said, “or to stick
with the old arrangement, in which they have high security and low pay. That’s just a
political accommodation to an existing work force for whom this might be too abrupt