We often talk about trying to save the kids who fall through the cracks, but what about the teachers? There are good teachers out there, who truly love teaching and believe that all of their students can learn, but their voices are rarely heard. With the rise of teacher quality organizations (Teach Plus, National Center for Teacher Quality, The New Teacher Project, Educators for Excellence, etc) it’s getting better, but not fast enough.

A blog was recently posted on CNN from a teacher who is in SUPPORT of merit pay, career ladders, differentiated pay, and stronger evaluations. She accurately recognizes the problems within the current education system and embraces healthy competition and the continuous improvement of teachers.

But, she doesn’t discuss the reasons why these things aren’t being implemented any faster.

Policy reformers (BOTH democrats and republicans) are hampered by politics. The unions remain incredibly strong and it feels like one step forward two steps back during the implementation of every (and any) reform. The unions protect the status quo and this teacher (and most of the great teachers out there) challenge the status quo.

Unions are definitely a major issue to this type of reform, but the capacity of principals and teachers are barriers as well.

Principals and other school administrators need strong training to understand how to use data effectively and how to evaluate teachers for 1) evaluation purposes and 2) observations for the sake of creating a teacher’s professional development plan. These are two very different reasons for a principal or teacher leader to observe a classroom and they must be trained to do the actual observation properly, and to know what to do with that information once it’s gathered.

The capacity of teachers is also severely lacking across the country. Many schools of education are graduating teachers who have no real classroom experience, don’t know how to differentiate learning for students, and don’t understand how to manage a classroom. In effect, schools of ed are essentially setting up their own graduates for failure. As reformers, how come we’re not putting more pressure on the schools of ed to better teach their teachers? To track how their teachers do in the classroom, upon graduation? How long they stay in education? Teachers major in education believing that they’ll be taught how to teach, when that’s not the case.

On another teacher capacity note, if we have merit pay and better evaluation systems. Do we have enough good and great teachers to fill the positions of teachers who will be removed from the profession? We can’t effectively implement the solution without addressing the pipeline gap.

This week, The Onion published a point/counterpoint series discussing Teach for America (without specifically citing TFA). For those of you who are not regular Onion readers, it’s basically a fake newspaper and usually very sarcastic – so, don’t take it too seriously. That all said, the series brings up some great issues that should  be discussed, both in support of and against TFA-type programs.

Point: My year volunteering as a teacher helped education a new generation of underpriviledged kids

Counterpoint: Can we please, just once, have a real teacher?

Bottom line: kids need good teachers. There aren’t enough good teachers (with traditional teaching certifications who want to work in low-income/high-need schools), so we need alternative programs like TFA.

Any new teacher has lots of room for improvement, and most teachers don’t hit their stride until they’re a few years in…. but, is a recent college grad who knows the content and received some (albeit intense) training in classroom management and instructional strategies any better than a recent graduate of a teacher ed program who doesn’t understand the content or classroom management? The answer is YES. Numerous rigorous research studies have shown that TFA-trained teachers are equally or more effective than more traditionally trained new teachers. So while this point/counterpoint is entertaining, and does bring up some important issues (i.e. the overall issue of quality teachers, especially in low-income/high-need schools & communities), the real question is: does it really matter where teachers trained? If they’re good teachers, they’re good teachers. (And, we sure need more of them.)

I’ve been wanting to blog about a recent court case from Chicago, but haven’t had a chance to do it yet. Tonight, I see that the Chicago Tribune editorial board beat me to it. The editorial accurately (at least in my mind) explains the issue of removing teachers (due to economic constraints), but rehiring teachers who can teach well vs. rehiring teachers who have seniority, but may not be strong teachers in the classroom.

And yes, I agree that we need strong and accountable principals as much as we need strong and accountable teachers, but when it comes down to the realities of current policy – teacher’s contracts are often much harder to break and change (and allow much more protection for the lowest performers) than any other profession within the education system.

Here’s the editorial:

In any school, no priority — such as employee tenure — should outweigh putting the most skilled teacher possible at the head of every classroom. You won’t find that sentence in an important decision the Illinois Supreme Court handed down Friday. But that’s the de facto impact of a big win for Chicago Public Schools at the expense of the Chicago Teachers Union.

The broad context here is that, in too many U.S. school districts, labor contracts perversely give more weight to the interests of adult educators than to the needs of young students: Seniority clauses protect inadequate teachers just as efficiently as they protect the very best.

The narrower context here goes to the summer of 2010 when CPS, facing a big budget deficit for the next school year, laid off 1,289 teachers. An increase in federal funding offset much of the deficit. In subsequently filling vacancies, though, CPS didn’t give tenured teachers preference; instead the district recalled 715 of the laid-off teachers — but also mixed in new hires of its choosing. The CTU went to federal court, essentially arguing that the district had improperly fired many of its tenured members. After a tortuous path, the dispute landed in the Illinois Supreme Court.

All along that path, the core question remained: Do tenured teachers who are laid off for economic reasons have a right to be rehired as their school district fills jobs? Put another way, can principals hire the best possible job candidates to instruct the children in their care — or does tenure trump teaching skill?

The court found that, across most of Illinois, tenured teachers do have a right of recall: In general, that is, if they’ve been evaluated as satisfactory or better, they have a right to be rehired into vacancies that arise.

In Chicago, though, the rules are different. We would say blessedly different: In its 1995 Chicago school reform legislation, the Illinois General Assembly gave CPS the power to promulgate its layoff and recall procedures. The Supreme Court majority found that the 1995 law “reflects a clear legislative intent to change the statutory rights of tenured teachers in a layoff.” Come 2010, then, CPS principals were free to hire the best teachers, tenured or no. That’s what many of them tried to do.

On Friday the CTU noted the Supreme Court’s finding that enabling principals to hire top-flight teachers doesn’t mean they will: Justice Charles Freeman, writing for the majority, said the Chicago-specific law doesn’t guarantee that, after any layoff, the most qualified or most experienced tenured teachers will be recalled.

To the CTU, “tenured” and “experienced” are synonyms for “most qualified.” Not necessarily. The issue is, or ought to be, which teaching candidate appears best able to help students — given their individual ability levels — make the greatest possible progress that each of them can. So while the union stressed that Friday’s decision “hurts tenured educators,” our view is that it’s a big victory for some 400,000 Chicago schoolchildren.

We’ve long argued that teaching tenure should be harder to get and easier to lose: If you want teachers to focus on their performance rather than on their seniority, end tenure altogether. In the year this dispute arose, Terry Mazany, the then-interim CEO of CPS, told the Tribune editorial board that, “The notion that anyone is granted lifetime employment in this day and age is an anachronism.” The point, we wrote then, isn’t that seniority is bad. It’s that without excellent performance, mere seniority shouldn’t guarantee anyone a job.

For the CTU, this ruling has to sting deeply: the state Supreme Court finds that state law gives CPS leeway — in these circumstances — to let teaching skill trump tenure. Don’t be surprised if the union attempts to introduce the issue during negotiations with CPS on a new labor contract to replace the one that expires this summer.

If so, we hope the CTU has the same success with that topic as it deserves with its request, reported in Friday’s Tribune, for raises amounting to 30 percent over the next two years. Don’t get us wrong, we’d like to see teachers eligible to be paid — much more — according to their performance. Not that the CTU has shown much interest in that heretical concept.

As pleased as we are by Friday’s ruling, we’re also as puzzled as ever by bizarre practices that are so common in the U.S. public education industry:

Why would any district, or any legislature, in any state, let a labor contract stop principals from hiring the best educators they can find? What is the mission of the American public school — insulating adults or teaching children?