Teacher Quality Improvement: No More Dancing Lemons

Two weeks ago my Thursday started out like any other. I got to work, returned a few e-mails, created a to do list and so on and so forth. By the time lunch rolled around I was downstairs trying to figure out what to eat and spotted the latest issue of the LA Weekly. The picture on the front cover was of a haggard looking woman who I figured was a teacher (she was holding a ruler with a chalkboard behind her) and the caption by her head read, "The Dance of the Lemons". The article itself was about how the firing of teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District is all but impossible. What struck me was the title of the article, the premise and how far we have NOT come in public education.

My main reason for being dumbfounded by this article has to do with the job I had in 1999. Part of my job that year was to organize a panel discussion for a group of would be teachers about the cultural and political realities of teaching in Los Angeles. If memory serves, I had a retired bank executive on the panel, a veteran teacher, an Emmy award winning journalist, a writer from the LA Weekly and another writer who was deemed as the conservative on the panel. I remember I had hand picked the last writer because she had written an excellent piece on how LAUSD found it difficult to fire teachers who were in fact doing a disservice to students. The title of the article was, wait for it, wait for it..."The Dance of the Lemons". The phrase refers to the fact that instead of firing teachers who have proven themselves to be incompetent, districts merely transfer these "lemons" from school to school. This is in part due to some teachers unions who make it hard to get rid of bad teachers. To be fair, some of the blame also falls on the shoulders of the administrators who sometimes miss key deadlines or do not have enough data, in order to fire a teacher. I am not sure what baffles me more, the fact that you can fire someone at McDonald's faster than a teacher can get fired for poor job performance, or that from 1999-2010 we are still dealing with this same problem? Again I say, if I were to get a job at McDonald's and I started pouring mayonnaise on the french fries I would not be able to arbitrate for my job. I would not have an advocate who would want to know if I was counseled on the fine art of not putting mayonnaise on fries. There would be no two week, two month or two year probationary period. I would just be fired, plain and simple. Somehow in public education this can't happen. Somehow our society has seen fit to treat french fries better than American children. I really did shake my head at this article. I shook my head in 1999 and shook it again in 2010. What has changed, I wondered. Well obviously this issue is still with us but many things have indeed changed and there is more to come.

Organizations such as Teach for America and The New Teacher Project have truly re-evaluated the idea of what it takes to run and move a classroom from point A-B and implicit in this, is the type of person that's gets selected to be in both programs. Charter Schools across the country have also adopted different models when it comes to selecting a staff and honing in on the type of person they want to put in front of kids. The Chancellor of DC public schools has put forth an ambitious plan linking student outcomes to compensation. The school board and teachers union wants no part of it and the lemons are crying in their own lemonade but other teachers are anxious to try this new line of thinking. And then of course there is the Obama Administration and Arnie Duncan. President Obama has made no bones about the fact that he cares about kids and he cares about education. He went on TV (to the chagrin of the Republican party) on the first day of school to motivate kids about their education. He has also talked tough about teachers unions and any group or individual that would stand in the way of educational progress and excellence. Both Obama and Duncan have made it clear they support some type of merit pay situation in order to reward excellence and to attract excellence in the classroom. Whether certain entities or individuals like it or not some sort of merit pay system is upon us. This system will also hold administrators accountable. Any type of merit system will have to rely on administrators spending the majority of their time in classrooms and if this fails to happen then the administrative lemons will have to be dealt with. Change is indeed tough but it's coming. It will be bumpy and there will be problems but this type of innovation, this type of new way of dealing with teachers and teacher pay must happen. It is one of the building blocks to reversing the achievement gap. As I thumbed through the article I thought about the coming changes. I thought about the organizations that are slowly but surely going to change the way we deal with teacher recruitment, coaching, evaluation and pay. I started to envision an article a few years from now. My hope is that the article will talk about how the music has stopped and how in the name of educational equity and advancement, the lemons have been asked to kindly leave the dance floor. Here's hoping that day comes soon.