IN DEPTH: NY Daily News Calls for Contract Reform Editorial
New York Daily News, September 8, 2005 A New York Daily News editorial calls for reforms that will empower principals with the authority to effectively administer their schools. It demands that principals "gain the right to recruit the best teachers, reward meritorious service, and, when necessary, dismiss incompetents with much streamlined due process."
The article echoes the ideas presented in an earlier Daily News editorial by Common Good Chair Philip K. Howard: "Bureaucracy can't teach--or distinguish good teachers from bad. Legal guidelines should be no more detailed than they are for any effective organization. Schools are a uniquely human enterprise. Real people must make the needed judgments. Teachers must be liberated to run the classroom. Principals must have the freedom to manage schools. Give everyone the freedom needed to fulfill their responsibility."
The new editorial makes 3 specific proposals that should be applied not only to New York City public schools, but to schools around the country:
Enable principals to recruit top teachers who meet the needs of individual schools
Contracts usually give teachers seniority transfer rights that allow those with the most experience to claim open positions, "regardless of whether they fit the needs and culture of particular schools." Last year, "fully 55 percent of the principals surveyed by the New Teacher Project...said they were assigned at least one subpar instructor." Principals, like Ira Weston of Paul Robeson High School, are often reduced to subterfuge in order to keep some of the talented, less experienced teachers or to force out incompetents. "'Suppose I hire a fabulous teacher and the person works for two days and then an excessed teacher comes to bump him,' said Weston. 'What I might do is kill the position and try to keep the teacher on as a substitute or hide him somewhere until the excessed person finds another job.'"
Tricks like this would no longer be necessary if principals were vested with the kind of decision-making power they need to improve the quality of teaching in their schools. (See what principals in New York City currently have to go through to fill a teacher vacancy.)
Deploy more senior, highly skilled teachers where children need the most help
As the Daily News notes, "the seniority transfer system has fostered a decades-long migration of experienced teachers out of struggling schools, most in poor neighborhoods...Eliminating seniority transfer rights would stanch the hemorrhaging from the neediest schools. And establishing premium pay for master teachers who agree to work in low-performing schools would further slow, if not reverse, the brain drain."
Empower administrators to weed out inept teachers
The process of firing an incompetent teacher in New York City can take at least two years and mountains of paperwork. The final decisions are made at trial-like proceedings before arbitrators who rarely decide against the teacher. The editorial notes that the "arbitrators have established that only the grossest incompetence merits dismissal, and they have protected the jobs even of teachers who endanger students."
Similar reports from Los Angeles show that principals are reticent to even begin the complicated dismissal process, opting to "just deal" with the inept teachers. "Over the last decade, the Los Angeles Unified School District has attempted to dismiss just 112 permanent teachers--or about one-quarter of one percent of the district's 43,000 instructors. Some teachers were fired, but most resigned or retired before the process was even complete." Principal Faye Banton of Edison Middle School in south LA says that she can "quickly identify her weakest teachers," but she "can't dismiss them without a drawn-out fight." ("Measure Shakes Teacher Stability," Duke Helfand and Joel Rubin, LA Times, August 8, 2005)
Click to read the editorial.
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