EDITORIALS : Fire them up
Posted on Thursday, October 2, 2008
Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —Samuel Johnson
MANY OF US get up in the
morning bleary-eyed, brush our teeth,
start the coffee and, well, generally start bumbling about not because we’re especially fond of the break of day, but because, well, we have to. There’s a job waiting on the other side of town, and the boss is expecting us. So as much as we might like or even love our jobs, one thing motivates us to be on time more often than not:
We don’t want to get fired.
It’s a remarkably effective motivational tool, the threat of losing your job. You have a mortgage and a car payment—and you gotta eat—so you show up on time, treat customers as if they were customers (that is, the reason you’re in business ), adopt a professional tone when talking to the boss no matter how hard it is sometimes, and just plain do your job the way it should be done. And even enjoy it. This arrangement generally works out fine for all concerned.
Now imagine that you couldn’t be fired.
No, better yet: Imagine you run a business and have employees who can’t be fired. Or imagine you’re a customer dealing with an employee who can’t be fired.
Sure, a real professional would still treat you like a king or queen, do his job competently and fairly, and leave you with a smile on your face. But then again, maybe not. It’s all up to the employee. And should you get a sour one.... Tough luck.
Now you know how many a public school principal feels. No, it may not take an act of Congress to fire a public school teacher. Getting an act through Congress might be easier. Congress acts often, and sometimes has to. (Like now. ) But when was the last time you heard of a public school teacher being fired for just plain old professional incompetence ?
Look at what’s going on with the KIPP school up in Washington, D. C., the one that’s called the KEY Academy. It’s been in the papers lately. The school has the highest student achievement for impoverished kids in the whole of the District of Columbia. More than 90 percent of its students there are proficient in math—compared to 32 percent in traditional schools in D. C. (Almost 60 percent at KEY are proficient in reading, compared to 34 percent in the other local schools. )
Here’s one of the things that makes this charter school different from the traditional public schools: If Sarah Hayes, the principal at KEY, thinks a teacher isn’t working out, she can get rid of him.
But if Principal Hayes ran a non-charter public school in Washington—according to Jay Mathews of the Washington Post—her options would be limited to:
—mentoring the teacher, God help her.
—noting dissatisfaction on an evaluation, where it’ll promptly be forgotten.
—recommend a two-year probation period, after which Principal Hayes can then recommend, and only recommend, that the errant teacher not be brought back the following year. (Meanwhile, three whole, irreplaceable years of a child’s education have been lost. )
All of which sounds like a good way for bad teachers to hang around for an awfully long time. Stress the word awfully.
The chancellor of D. C. schools, Michelle Rhee, has also been in the papers lately. She points to the successes at the KEY Academy, and is trying her best to bring some of that school’s policies to the whole district, bless her hopeful heart. She’d like to make it a little easier for schools to keep good teachers and let the bad ones find a line of work where they’d be happier, or at least not as destructive. Which is how things work in the world in which you, we, and just about everybody without a teachers’ union lives.
One of the fundamental reasons that charter schools exist in the first place is to find out what works in the classroom, and export those good ideas to the traditional public schools.
We think we just found another one: Let principals be principals. We might find we’d also let good teachers be goodand bad ones be let go.
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