SB 5242 would help school principals protect our kids from bad teachers

Yesterday in The Seattle Times, Jonathan Martin writes that parents of second-grade students in Room 105 at Seattle’s West Woodland Elementary realized their teacher was incompetent.  This teacher didn’t learn the names of the children, bungled attendance, didn’t assign math or reading work, didn’t grade homework, mumbled instead of teaching, didn’t return parents’ emails, and wrote inappropriate words on the blackboard. This teacher had been force-placed in the school by seniority rules that govern teacher assignments.

Parents of Room 105 complained to the school principal, wrote letters to the district and staged a mass walk-out of their children. 

The school principal and district officials ignored the parents’ pleas. Why?  Because they have no choice.  The procedural requirements for dismissing an incompetent tenured teacher are so unreasonable and complex that they require administrators to provide the teacher an excessive number of observations, written reports, second, third and fourth chances, and numerous appeals, costing districts between $200,000 and $250,000 per teacher.  These requirements act as a huge disincentive to school administrators. It is such a big headache, they don’t even try.  

The only recourse a school principal has to protect her students from bad teachers is to wait out the year, and then shift the bad teacher to another school, in the famous “Dance of the Lemons.” But this does not avoid the possibility that a new bad teacher will be force-placed in Room 105 next year.

Mr. Martin’s editorial then argues, illogically, against a bill that would fix this.  SB 5242, sponsored by reform-minded Senators Litzow (R-Mercer Island), Dammeier (R-Puyallup) and Tom (D-Bellevue), would allow school principals to refuse the assignment of bad teachers to their schools.  But Mr. Martin rejects this reform, saying SB 5242 is flawed because it would create district “rubber rooms” full of bad teachers unable to find gainful employment in the district.     

This is inaccurate.  SB 5242 clearly provides that teachers unable to find a principal willing to offer them a classroom may instead be offered another assignment, including a substitute assignment, an instructional support position, a position in a district office, or another position. See Section 1, subsection (4). School districts across Washington employ thousands of people in these positions, as Table 7 of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Personnel Summary Reports shows, accessible here.  

Mr. Martin also says SB 5242 is unnecessary because Washington’s new teacher evaluation law will eventually improve the quality of teachers.  But Washington’s new teacher evaluation law, passed in 2012, has not fixed the underlying problem.  The new law has only refined the evaluation system.  Once a teacher is found “unsatisfactory,” all the onerous requirements for removing her from the classroom still remain.  Mr. Martin argues that Seattle's more refined teacher evaluation system, adopted in 2010, is removing low-performing teachers at a higher rate than before.  Yet the most recent data available show that in 2011-12, Seattle rated only 22 out of 2,790 teachers (0.8 percent) of teachers as unsatisfactory. In 2011-12, all 30 of the teachers at West Woodland were given satisfactory ratings. 

The Education Sector’s new report on Washington’s teacher and principal evaluations, “The Evergreen Effect: Washington’s Poor Evaluation System Revealed” observes that school districts in Washington avoid identifying their weak teachers, and are uncomfortable even talking about the characteristics of poor instruction.  The report also reveals that even under Washington’s new Teacher and Principal Evaluation Pilot, no teachers were found to be “unsatisfactory.”  See page 8. Though the data is incomplete because only volunteers were involved in the Pilot, the finding that no teacher was found to be unsatisfactory by the Pilot affirms the report’s central point.   

Until teacher tenure law is reformed, and the culture of Washington’s schools changes, SB 5242 would provide school principals with a tool they can use right now to protect their students from bad teachers force-placed in their school classrooms. Parents and students deserve nothing less.