Part 5 of 7
SALT LAKE CITY – Given the crucial role good teachers play in student achievement, one might expect public school officials to quickly terminate educators who don’t get the job done.
Unfortunately, most public K-12 school districts have teacher unions, and the unions have been successful over the years negotiating collective bargaining provisions – and lobbying for the establishment of state laws – that make it difficult to dump problem teachers.
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This topic was front and center in the recent Vergara v. California lawsuit, in which a judge startled the education establishment by ruling that teacher job protections deny many students their constitutional right to a quality education.
The judge cited a four-year study that showed Los Angeles students taught by a teacher in the bottom 5 percent of competence lose 9.54 months of learning in a single year when compared to students with an average teacher.
That, the judge said, “shocks the conscience.”
The same type of problem exists in Utah.
EAGnews recently inspected collective bargaining agreements in nine Utah school districts that still mandate cumbersome, expensive processes for addressing incompetent “career” teachers and removing them from the system.
The negotiated provisions are focused on giving troubled teachers every possible opportunity to improve, with few obvious time restraints. There doesn’t seem to be much concern about leaving an “improving” teacher in front of students for extended periods of time, regardless of how little the students might be learning.
“You can go from district to district, and everyone knows who the awful teachers are who have managed to stay on forever and ever,” said Brad Smith, superintendent of the Ogden, Utah school district. “The system doesn’t breed, on the part of its leaders, the will to demand excellence. You have this process – cumbersome and elephantine – where it can literally take 2-3 years (to fire a teacher). It’s so painful and expensive that nobody wants to go through it.
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“In (union) contracts the main priority is the protection of a job. The education of the student is a secondary priority. When you invert those, that’s the morally correct priority.”
Blake Ostler, a Salt Lake City attorney who has worked with many school districts on labor issues for decades, said schools that dare to go the distance and fire an incompetent teacher can expect retribution from the teacher union.
“If a school does go through the process and ends up letting someone go due to competence issues, the union will typically lobby the school board to get rid of the superintendent and human resources director,” Ostler told EAGnews. “I’ve seen it happen lots of times. (The school boards) will pay the price, in terms of intimidation.”
Another problem is that due process hearing officers who preside over termination cases are sometimes chosen jointly by the school board and union, according to Ostler. That means the hearing officers may be more concerned about pleasing both masters than they are about removing incompetent teachers from classrooms.
“(The hearing officers) know that if they want to continue to be paid, they need to reach some sort of compromise so both sides will feel they have gotten what they need,” Ostler said.
Bending over backward for bad teachers
The core of the problem in Utah is a state statute that mandates all teachers struggling with effectiveness be given opportunities to improve their skills before they can be terminated.
But individual school districts and their unions have the right to customize that basic policy, and some have adopted contract terms that make it even more difficult to fire bad teachers.
The following is a union-negotiated policy in the Weber, Utah school district, with respect to “teacher remediation and probation.”
A teacher whose performance is inadequate or in need of improvement shall be provided with a written document that clearly identifies deficiencies, available resources for improvement, and recommended course of action that will improve the teacher’s performance. The district shall provide the teacher with reasonable assistance to improve performance.
A teacher is responsible for improving performance by using the resources identified by the school district and demonstrating acceptable levels of improvement in the designated areas of deficiencies. The plan will indicate the length of time for remediation. Teachers on remediation will be placed on probation… and removed from probation when they have successfully satisfied the terms.
This policy, which borrows some language from state law, seems pretty open-ended. Just how much time should an administrator give a bad teacher to improve? Does the local union push for lengthy remediation periods? However long the remediation, it appears students will continue to be taught by questionable teachers. How fair is that to children and their parents?
The Logan City school district has several union contract provisions (also largely based on state law) regarding teachers with “deficiencies.”
The principal or designee of the board shall develop and implement a career educator plan of assistance to correct the deficiencies. The plan of assistance shall identify: (a) deficiencies; (b) resources available to the educator, including a mentor. The plan shall include opportunities for the principal or designee to reevaluate the educator’s performance.
The board shall provide the career educator sufficient time, up to but not exceeding 120 school days, to implement the plan.
If upon reevaluation of the career educator’s performance, the district determines the career educator’s performance is satisfactory, and within a three-year period after the initial documentation of unsatisfactory performance for the same deficiency … the career educator’s performance is determined to be unsatisfactory, and the district may elect to not renew or terminate the career educator’s contract.
Let’s see if we understand this correctly. A teacher with performance problems gets an improvement plan, with a district-paid tutor, and up to 120 days to implement the plan. That doesn’t appear to mean 120 days to show measurable improvement. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of defined timetable for improvement.
But if the teacher slips after initial improvement (for the same deficiencies) within the next three years, he or she can be fired. If it’s a different type of deficiency, we assume the remediation process has to start all over again.
This policy forces district officials to spend an awful lot of time, money and energy coddling teachers who aren’t very good at their jobs. It also requires the school to leave a struggling teacher in a classroom for a lengthy period of time, while the students presumably struggle as well.
Then there’s the state law, copied in the Weber collective bargaining agreement, which dictates the precise manner in which a teacher can be terminated:
When it’s determined that a teacher’s contract will not be renewed for the following academic year, the district must notify that teacher in writing at least 60 calendar days prior to the end of the contract, or June 30.
In the absence of timely notice, a career teacher is deemed to be re-employed for the succeeding contract term…
In other words, if there’s some sort of accident, like a lost letter, the defective teacher gets to come back and be a defective teacher for another year.
Kenneth Grover, the director of secondary education in the Salt Lake City school district, said he’s witnessed that type of thing happen over the years.
“The argument is, administrators have tools at their disposal (to fire bad teachers), but it doesn’t always work out that way,” Grover said. “They might accidentally miss some window of opportunity, and suddenly they’re back to square one.”
Salt Lake’s double-remediation process
Consider the following series of policies, regarding struggling teachers, from the Salt Lake City district’s union contract:
When the principal believes a teacher needs assistance to improve his/her teaching performance, the administrator shall work informally with the teacher using classroom observations, feedback and informal suggestions for improvement. The principal, in consultation with the association (union), may form a team … which would continue the process of remediation if necessary.
Frequent written and oral feedback should be given to the teacher, but no record of this process shall be on file in the teacher’s personnel file.
If the principal … determines that performance assistance has not solved the problem, remediation shall be instituted… A remediation team shall be formed to maximize the help given to the teacher in the remediation process.
The remediation team shall develop a remediation plan in consultation with the teacher within five district scheduled working days after the first remediation team meeting. If the remediation team determines there is insufficient time to begin effective implementation of the remediation plan before the end of the school year, remediation shall be postponed until the beginning of the following school year with no monetary penalty to the teacher.
The remediation shall have a flexible time line ranging from 30 to 60 working days… The remediation team shall meet at least once a month to review teaching performance as observed by members of the team.
At the conclusion of the remediation process a meeting with the teacher and members of the team shall take place … If remediation is successful … the remediation process shall be terminated. After three years of satisfactory performance all references to the remediation process shall be removed from the employee’s personnel file.
If, after successfully completing remediation, a teacher reverts to previous patterns of poor performance within three years, that teacher shall be placed immediately on remediation. A return to patterns of poor performances after two remediations shall result in termination.
Just how long might this process take? First there is the informal performance assistance period, which doesn’t seem to have a defined timeline. Then there is the first remediation process, which can take up to 60 days. Already, between the two processes, it would probably kill close to a semester.
If remediation works, the teacher is off the hook. There doesn’t seem to be language addressing what would happen if it fails. But if the poor performance repeats itself within three years, the teacher is entitled to yet another remediation period before being fired.
All of that adds up to a lot of wasted days for the students of unfit teachers. How far must schools bend to be fair to bad teachers before crossing the line of gross unfairness to students?
The Northwest Middle School example
Northwest Middle School in the Salt Lake City district is a great example of the importance of having quality teachers in every classroom.
Between 2010 and 2013, the school went from being one of the worst academically performing middle schools in the state to one of the best, according to media reports. The percentage of students proficient in math increased from 39 to 79 percent. Science proficiency improved from 38 to 58 percent and the average reading level increased from fourth grade to seventh grade.
Much of the improvement was accomplished with the replacement of about half of the 45 teachers in the building.
That process was not easy, given the union contract language that calls for two full remediation periods before a teacher can be fired.
Northwest Principal Rachel Nance, who was assistant principal through most of the transition, said administrators were determined to address all underperforming teachers, regardless of how difficult it was.
She said they used every tool at their disposal, including a district policy that no longer exists, which forced all teachers in their first three years to reapply for their jobs every year.
They were also willing to go through the double-remediation process with veteran teachers, with the goal of “coaching them up or coaching them out,” according to Nance.
“Most of them left because they realized they no longer fit in here,” Nance told EAGnews. “From our perspective, it’s about administrators not wanting to go through the tough process. It is difficult and ugly to have to tell someone who may have been teaching for 15 years that they may need to move on.”
Nance said she believes that teachers should have some sort of due process before they can be terminated. She said remediation is sometimes necessary for teachers who haven’t been called on to produce positive results in many years.
“The problem is that we’ve gone so many years without holding teachers accountable,” Nance said. “Research shows kids can overcome having one bad teacher for a year, just so they have two good teachers in a row.”
But when asked if it’s fair to students to leave an underperforming teacher in a classroom for an extended remediation period, Nance said “no.”
When asked if it would be much easier to manage a teaching staff, and guarantee that the right teachers are in front of the right students, without all the union rules, she said, “Sure, that’s the easy answer.”
Since schools only exist to serve the needs of children, that should be the only answer.
Tomorrow: Lazy, apathetic school boards allowing teacher unions to ignore verification rules
Part 6: Lazy, apathetic school boards allowing teacher unions to ignore verification rules
Part 7: Bizarre Utah teacher contract provisions: Do they really have to put this stuff in writing?
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