The use of student test scores to measure teacher performance has been anathema to many teachers. Weingarten is not proposing that they be the only — or even the primary — element in determining teacher quality.
But she told me in an interview over the weekend that she wants to “stop this notion” that her membership is in favor of keeping bad teachers in the classroom.
The use of test scores, as Weingarten sees it, would be part of a new, enhanced process of teacher evaluation that would offer clear professional standards for teachers. It would replace current practices, which in many districts are lax, haphazard and, in the words of Weingarten and others, often amount to little more than “drive-by” evaluations.
It is not uncommon for teachers to be observed in the classroom a couple of times a year for a few minutes each time. Under those circumstances, hardly anything is learned about the quality or effectiveness of the teachers.
Most teachers are routinely rated as satisfactory, and many are never evaluated at all.
Weingarten is urging school administrators to observe teachers more closely and more frequently. (The enhanced, clearly articulated professional standards she is calling for are already in use in some districts. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.)
Experts trained in best practices and using a variety of objective data, including measures of student achievement, would do the evaluating.
Teachers who are struggling would be given an opportunity to improve their performance. If, after remedial efforts, they still did not measure up, they would be fired, whether tenured or not.
As Weingarten put it, “We would have to say, ‘Look, we helped you. We tried. You’re just not cut out to be a teacher.’ “
Weingarten also addresses the fact that it is sometimes scandalously difficult to remove teachers who have engaged in serious misconduct. While emphasizing the need for due process, she bluntly asserted, in a draft of her speech: “We recognize, however, that too often due process can become a glacial process. We intend to change that.”
The union has asked Kenneth Feinberg, the federal government’s so-called pay czar, to develop a more efficient protocol for disciplining — and when necessary, removing — teachers accused of misconduct.
This would be a big deal. Feinberg is highly respected and widely viewed as independent. He administered the government fund that compensated victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He also administered a fund set up in the wake of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.
If the union follows through on Weingarten’s proposals, it would represent a significant, good-faith effort to cooperate more fully with state officials and school administrators in the monumental job of improving public school education.
More than 90 percent of American youngsters go through the public schools. The schools were struggling and failing too many youngsters even before the latest economic downturn, which is taking a terrible toll.
My view is that America’s greatest national security crisis is the crisis in its schools.
Weingarten’s ideas for upgrading the teacher evaluation process are good ones and should be embraced and improved upon where possible by those in charge of the nation’s schools.
The point is not just to get rid of failing teachers, but to improve the skills and effectiveness of the millions of teachers who show up in the classrooms every day.
If the union chooses not to follow through on these proposals, its credibility will take a punishing and well-deserved hit.
Bob Herbert writes for The New York Times.