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Wednesday, April 20, 2011 | 2 a.m.
Brian Sandoval
Sun archives
- Sandoval bill would put teachers on one-year contracts, change layoff system (4-16-2011)
- Education reform bills split Democrats, pass Assembly (4-11-2011)
- Budget cuts would be ‘crushing’ for Las Vegas elementary school (4-10-2011)
- Teachers in state budget bull’s-eye (4-10-2011)
- Documentary about education reform spurs discussion (4-6-2011)
- Ensign says Nevada needs to reform education system (3-22-2011)
- Battle continues in state Legislature over teacher tenure (3-20-2011)
The assumption behind Gov. Brian Sandoval’s education reform package is that red tape has prevented schools from getting rid of bad teachers, who are increasingly viewed as the greatest impediment to improving public education.
Simply put, the governor wants to make it easier to fire teachers by ending tenure and removing those who fail annual evaluations.
Testifying Saturday on behalf of the reform measure, Assembly Bill 555, Sandoval’s senior adviser, Dale Erquiaga, noted that 0.3 percent of Nevada public school teachers annually lose their jobs because of poor performance. The national average, he said, is 1.5 percent.
The implication: The current process fails to weed out poor teachers.
Erquiaga argued the process is “too hard” and “too cumbersome,” citing research showing 5 to 10 percent of teachers could be replaced for poor performance.
But school officials say they have the ability to fire teachers, and the goals the governor wants to accomplish require more of a cultural transformation than a legal one.
•••
Over the past five years, 171 licensed personnel, most of them teachers, have lost their jobs to “ineffective classroom performance,” said Bill Garis, Clark County School District’s acting human resources officer. That’s not many for a district with 18,000 teachers, he says.
Teachers, administrators, union activists, business leaders and education reform advocates say the district has a variety of tools and techniques to get rid of bad teachers. Principals may transfer poor teachers to another school. They may place them in less-desirable classrooms or give them especially difficult students to teach, with the hope that they’ll just quit.
It’s not known how many have packed up.
School District lobbyist Joyce Haldeman says many procedural barriers tie the hands of administrators who want to fire incompetent teachers, forcing principals to make a simple decision: Is it worth the time to begin the removal process, knowing that such efforts could be delayed or eventually dropped because of administrative appeals?
“What we currently have is not working,” Haldeman says. “It’s not productive. Because of technicalities it’s not happening. It’s not that it can’t be done. Principals do it here, but it’s not worth the time of principals to go through the motions because it’s not productive.”
As proof, she turns north to Washoe County School District — rather than her own — where she says district officials have publicly spoken of an abusive physical education teacher who they have been unable to get out of the classroom despite the educator’s having shoved a student and left another on a gym floor with a broken leg. Despite their best efforts, administrators have been unable to fire the teacher because of barriers established through decades of collective bargaining arrangements, legislation and an inflexible workplace structure, Haldeman says.
Union officials counter that principals often lack the skill, will, time, patience or training to work with teachers who need developmental assistance.
The reality is that poor teachers continue to teach, she says, and their students, parents and co-workers pay the price, a dynamic that filmmaker Davis Guggenheim characterized as the dance of the lemons in the 2010 documentary, “Waiting for Superman.” Quite simply, school administrators transfer the worst of the worst from school to school hoping they will improve or quit.
The reasons for the backdoor strategy include the length and complexity of the disciplinary effort, with its due process and employee protections.
•••
Whether Sandoval’s education reform package passes or the status quo persists, the hiring and retention of first-rate teachers will depend on effective evaluations.
Assembly Ways and Means Committee Chairwoman Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, says 97 percent of teachers receive satisfactory evaluations. Dozens of teachers testified in the Carson City hearing room and via satellite from a hearing room at the Sawyer State Office Building in Las Vegas, where they were joined by a single legislator, Assemblyman Paul Aizley, D-Las Vegas, a retired UNLV math professor.
Aizley suggested that the implementation of the governor’s proposal, which awaits legislative votes, be delayed for as many as two years so the current evaluation process could be understood within Nevada’s school districts.
More than a dozen teachers testified that they fear the change could make it easier for principals and school districts to get rid of teachers who earn more than younger teachers, particularly in tight budgetary times, an echo of the anti-collective bargaining techniques employed by Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Several noted that budget-constrained school administrators might turn to two entry-level teachers to replace a more costly educator with 15 or 20 years experience. They also worry that postprobationary teachers could lose their jobs to principals who do not like their personalities.
“You could be subject to the whims of a principal in a given year,” one teacher said.
Others spoke of the frustrations felt by young, high-quality educators who are about to lose their jobs to budget cuts because of the last-in, first-out formula that dictates who stays and who goes.
Principals are required to perform nine classroom evaluations for first-year teachers and three classroom evaluations annually for teachers who have passed probationary periods. Instead, the evaluations are used inconsistently, with some principals closely following the rules, while others rarely make the required classroom visits, particularly for veteran teachers.
The first three years of a teacher’s Clark County School District career routinely finds them undergoing a three-page, 45- to 60-minute review conducted by a principal or assistant principal who gauges a teacher’s planning and preparation, student achievement, the learning environment, professional standards and professional responsibilities.
Each category has three to nine subcategories, with teachers graded on a scale of one to four, with four being the highest level. The subcategories are designed to assess a teacher’s mastery of the curriculum and lessons, classroom management and his ability to work with students, administrators, co-workers and parents.
After the successful completion of nine such evaluations, a teacher is eligible to receive a much more limited single-page evaluation through which a principal or assistant principal may offer a brief “performance summary” that might offer a few suggestions for improvement.
The School District has hired an estimated 25,000 teachers during the past decade, the culmination of a 16-year period that saw the its student population double to 309,000. Hire 25,000 people to fill any positions, and even the staunchest advocates of the tenure-style job protections note that you will hire some who are excellent, some who should be fired and many who fill the bell curve of the broad middle.
No matter the outcome of the legislative debate, School District officials say a mix of new teacher and student performance measurements developed with the aid of advanced computerization and national standardized testing will create a more effective gauge of teacher performance, making it easier for principals and vice principals to perform teacher appraisals.
“This will give principals the data they need to determine how effective teachers are,” said Annie Amoia, a former elementary school principal who is the School District’s director of teacher induction mentoring and development.
There is another wild card that could affect Sandoval’s plan to improve teacher assessment. If his proposed budget cuts are adopted by state lawmakers, the School District will not only lose good teachers but also good administrators, the sort who effectively assess the performance of the best and worst teachers. The quality assessments that Sandoval and his staff crave could be hindered by the loss of those top-notch administrators, making it more difficult to remove poor teachers.
“The key to all of this is the execution of the evaluations. The district’s going to say their hands are tied; they can’t do the job,” said Ruben Murillo, president of the Clark County Education Association. “My question is what kind of training has been provided to these principals for the evaluations? What kind of training have they been given to provide teachers with assistance and improvements? When the district says it is too lengthy of a process, it is because they don’t try.”
"Principals may transfer poor teachers to another school. They may place them in less-desirable classrooms or give them especially difficult students to teach, with the hope that they'll just quit."
This is why we need reform. Transferring bad teachers to "less-desirable" schools to make them want to quit? So you screw a classroom full of kids just so you can keep a worthless teacher on the payroll and just continuing the cycle producing a poor performance school? That is the biggest load of BS I have ever heard. It sounds like the union is more concerned with keeping their asses covered reguardless of performance than caring about the actual kids which they are tasked with educating.
Only 0.3 percent of teachers in Nevada lose their jobs due to poor performance. Yet, Nevada has the highest high school dropout rate in all 50 states. Students are the ones who are losing.
There is some merrit to the Govenors argument. In any organization there are always some who are not good at what they do, so one has to assume that is true of the 18,000 CCSD teachers. I wonder how many poor performing CCSD administrators are given pink slips.
The former principal of Mohave was sent packing, to another school. It took the district ten years and a number of failed schools to to figure out this "educator" was a bummer, By the By where is she now in the system, because they NEVER fire one of the administrators they just move them on?
What a broken record...wah wah wah. Blame game #1-the teachers, #2-the administrators, #3-the inefficient school district. WOW.....WHAT ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE EDUCATOR OF ALL CHILDREN: THE PARENTS!!!!
Oh, sorry, they're too busy to be involved with their kids.
Sandoval, do a study of the parents. Checkout their credentials, their training, their qualifications to be parents. If they don't measure up get them into remedial classes.
You can have the best teachers in the universe, the finest teaching facilities, the best supervision and the most efficient district in the world, BUT if the parents aren't qualified to be parents then it is impossible to educate their children.
Don't anyone dare say we have to teach what we get; we don't! And if you persist, then lets start investigating involuntary sterilization to limit the damage being done by all the incompetent parenting.
Just a suggestion.
This all begs the question. We don't know what "performance" is, how to measure it, how to attribute it to a particular teacher, or even whether it is attributable to a particular teacher. So, without knowing any of this, we are standing by why politicians -- politicians -- strive for votes and contributions by "reforms" based on sound bites rather than sound logic and solid foundations in research and experience. That there is a "budget crisis" doesn't excuse doing something stupid, like passing our educational failures along to others, worse for our "reform" efforts than had we done nothing at all.
The current evaluation process is not adequate. Identifying "poor" teachers should be an ongoing process, not a three classroom visit by a principle or assistant principle. The current process is a single person's opinion of how well the teaching (and learning) process is taking place. If the principal has a different agenda, the teacher receives a poor evaluation regardless of how well they teach. This is too narrow of a view of teacher effectiveness. Other considerations have to be made. Consider the student and parents, they are also parts of the learning process. If the student and parents are "disinterested", why should the teacher be blamed?
I am currently in my tenth year as a teacher in the CCSD. I have worked at three different elementary schools, all considered "at risk". Prior to that, I had worked for almost 20 years in occupations in the private sector, and in health care. My point of view is different from that of many of my colleagues, given my prior work experience. I would like to add my voice to this discussion and offer a few points for your consideration:
The CCEA (teacher's union) does not hire teachers, not does it write evaluations on teachers. This is the responsibility of CCSD administrators. I have been dismayed to see ineffective teachers who are rated satisfactorily, and kept in their teaching positions. Who pays for this? The students. It's not too good for teacher morale, either.
When we start to pay teachers based upon their students' test scores, I want to know who will be left to work at schools in poorer neighborhoods? Many of my students are parented by their game systems and the television. They are often hungry when they come to school and often haven't slept enough. Many of these 'kids' carry their parents' stresses with them. No one reads to them, or ensures their homework is done. I do everything I can during the school day to try and fill in these gaps, but short of taking them home with me at the end of the day, I don't know how I could possibly compete with a teacher in another neighborhood whose parents have college degrees and better parenting skills.
Teaching at the elementary level is vastly changed. Plan for six subjects per day. In planning for reading instruction, there are three or four different ability levels to consider (and plan for) depending on your current group of students. You must re-teach to the lowest performers (known as "intervention" in the current fashion), and plan activities to challenge your highest students. Same goes for math. Go home at the end of the day and spend a couple of hours grading at night, and spend a good part of the weekend writing lesson plans and grading more papers.
To those who are critical of teachers, I invite you to spend a day in the classroom. Come and see the reality of present-day education (Mr. Governor?).
I will be the first to agree that, yes, there are some who are better-suited for occupations other than teaching. However, I also see many of my colleagues who give their all every day, then go on to their second jobs in the evening and in the summers. They buy shoes and food for their students. I've never noticed those comments in any teacher evaluation.
Who works harder - a good teacher or a bad teacher? The mindless, simpleton types will say that of course the good teacher works harder. That's why they're a good teacher. Right?
If you really think about it though, you might start to realize that a bad teacher's job, in most cases, is actually very difficult. Here's what I mean. If you're a bad teacher, everything is against you. Your day is an uphill struggle. You have difficulties with the students and the parents. You probably get some level of static from administrators and / or coworkers. Every moment of your day is drenched with the stench of failure and negativity. It would grind on most people. The myth of the lazy, disengaged, complacent *bad teacher* is mostly a myth. Most of the *bad teachers* are the ones who are struggling the hardest.
A good / adequate teacher, on the other hand, has a much easier day. (Yes, there is work and effort required - that's why there's a paycheck.) A good teacher enjoys the students and they students enjoy the class. They are frequently praised by parents, administrators and coworkers. If you count stress and difficulty as *work*, then the bad teacher actually works harder than a good / adequate teacher. Or, at least, you can say that a good teacher's job is, in most cases, easier than a bad teacher's job.
Now, let's do some P. Gibbons style data citation (although, rather than mindless, robotic cherry picking cut and paste work, my data analysis will actually include reasoned and valid inferences relevant to the topic being discussed). Search Google to find what percentage of teachers quit before year 5. You will find all sources cite a number > 50%. Why do >50% quit in the first few years? Pay? Conditions? They had a pretty good idea of the pay and job description before going in. Why would so many spend so much time and money preparing only to walk away in the first few years. Based on my direct observations over multiple decades, I can tell you that many of the people who *resign* are struggling. They are the ones who are not hacking it and they fire themselves - or are pressured into resignation by administrators.
So, it is probably not correct to conclude that, because the district only *fires* .3 percent, that >99% remain, with all those *bad teachers* mixed in.
Rather, a thorough grasp of the situation and all relevant data will lead to a conclusion that >50 % leave in the first few years and that many of the *bad teachers* wash out in that group because being a bad teacher is difficult, stressful, and not worth the payment for most anyone.
Leric...
Well said, man. Well said.
Someone should write a book...
"How Education became the scapegoat for the failures of an entire Society".
The NeoNuts have deftly changed the subject ENTIRELY from "how the hell did we get into this fiscal mess, & HOW DO WE GET OUT OF IT?", to "Let's blame Public Employees in general & Teachers in particular for ALL OF OUR FAILINGS"..."We'll make THEM pay for everything! Literally AND figuratively!"
It's a POLITICAL STRATEGY, not a sincere, well-intentioned desire to modify our existing educational strategies.
And so, now we have B.S. making B.S. calls on how to "fix" things.
Yeah, B.S. is "fixing" things, THAT is a FACT!!!
Are people REALLY SO GULLIBLE?
Yep, they surely are.
Great ideas from some of you...let's just keep the status quo, it seems to be working out just great. I mean, it's much more important to protect the few crappy teachers than it is to ensure that our kids are getting a better education. </sarcasm>
You guys get too involved in the political nonsense. Righties try to use the guise of "reform" to mask their attempts to cut spending and weaken unions. Lefties use the excuse to spend more on the same crap because it's better for "education", which really means it's better for the existing bureaucracy.
I think Obama/Duncan have it right with their Race to the Top program (not political at all, so shut up about that). Yes, allocate much more money, but you've got to work for it. You have to show that you have ideas for fixing the obvious problems.
Teachers, quit with the political firings excuse. Evaluations should be largely based on objective, year over year improvements on test scores. And quit with the "parents" excuse. We all know that's a big problem, but that's essentially passing the buck, and it's much more difficult to make a significant cultural change in parenting than it is to change how employees are compensated.
"Dale Erquiaga, noted that 0.3 percent of Nevada public school teachers annually lose their jobs because of poor performance. The national average, he said, is 1.5 percent."
So 1.2% of the teachers are causing all the problems? Destroying the entire Nevada Elementary School system? Fat Chance.
This is simply an excuse to destroy public education and use taxpayer money to create funding for Religious Schools - Not Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Religious Science, Science of the Mind, Scientologists, etc., and the Heaven's Gate people are all gone. These schools will be Sandoval approved schools.
"What a broken record...wah wah wah. Blame game #1-the teachers, #2-the administrators, #3-the inefficient school district. WOW.....WHAT ABOUT THE PRINCIPLE EDUCATOR OF ALL CHILDREN: THE PARENTS!!!!
Oh, sorry, they're too busy to be involved with their kids."
Right on, retired teach.
You ought to be required to actually have been in a CCSD classroom or ANY USA classroom in an urban setting for a specified period of time before you are allowed to pass judgement on "the system"... you would change your tune in a New York Minute.
improveLV...
Another fallacy.
NO ONE is "protecting" crappy teachers.
They happen, just like crappy writers, crappy cops, crappy accountants, and so on.
The notion that they are somehow LEGION and schooling our kids (poorly) is really funny...ha ha ha.
Our "experts" are barking up the WRONG TREE.
As SunJon points out:
"So 1.2% of the teachers are causing all the problems? Destroying the entire Nevada Elementary School system? Fat Chance."
It's a POLITICAL GAME, and YOU are being SCAMMED.
Thanks for the concern, gmag, but I assure you, I'm not just passively believing some politician, "reformer", or special interest group.
Not sure about you, but I've had bad teachers in the past, and depending on the subject, one bad teacher can do a LOT of damage. More importantly, I've also dealt with the CCSD on numerous occasions, and while I've come across some outstanding teachers, I've also come across some that have literally told me that there's no hope for these kids, and their goal is just to make sure the kids don't commit any crimes while they're in their classrooms. If someone feels that way, and their kids are consistently underperforming, there's no reason for this unnecessarily long due process. And yes, the administrators that are responsible for monitoring those situations should absolutely be reprimanded or released. In my experience with the district, there's more ridiculous administrative roadblocks, carried out by incompetent, lazy, or bad intentioned (as in, "I don't care if you're trying to do something for the school/district, I don't want to spend the 2 minutes to approve your idea, even if you're paying for it") administrators than there are bad teachers. But the latter does exist.
gmag, one could argue that YOU are the one being scammed by your political leaders, and the special interest groups that support them. Or you know the scam, and you're in on it. If you don't acknowledge that there are more problems with the system than bad parents, then you're either naive or part of the problem.
The objective should in eradicating welfare educational services all together, replacing teachers with programs, schools with homes, classrooms with computers/electronic devices which deliver the very best educational services to everyone interested in learning -- anytime, anywhere and in any language.
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The latest way CCSD is putting some "accountability" onto the teachers is the new INFORM system of cherry-picking test result information out of massive clouds of testing information (this is an extremely simplified explanation of it).
While attending a training for this with a colleague, it became interesting to view 3 years worth of test information of a student side-by-side. Some of the anomalies were rather striking, for example, a group of students had fabulous test scores with one teacher in first grade, then the scores were lower, but consistent the two following years. One could wonder, if, by chance, that certain teacher might be doing something for all these students (some students can barely count or read and write in English language arts on a daily basis). When students' test scores are a part of the proposed teacher evaluations, stuff like this is disconcerting, to say the least. Most teachers are honest, hard working, and have integrity. INFORM will definitely be a type of watchdog on many levels. It is a great tool for grabbing information fast and being able to analyze it for interventions, although it does NOT replace the daily Q & A in the classroom where a teacher gets the gist of where a student needs the pats on the back and the extra help.
Again, if gaming/resorts, mining, and big box store industries were taxed even the national average here in Nevada, we would not be going through this same conversation every time the Nevada State Legislature meets! DUH
I don't think that's true, Star. I think mining needs to pay up, we need to allocate more for education, but we STILL need to reform how the education system works (or doesn't work).
The problems in this state are the PARENTS. I would love to see the statistics on students performance based on their parents education level. Not income level, but education level. And if you don't understand that it starts with the parents, then I bet your kids fall under the category of underperforming.
Common sense solution #99 no one wants to hear but would be terrifically effective should it be implemented:
toss the illegals over the right side of the proverbial wall.
1) lessens the financial burden on legalized, working real american citizens, spreads more of the wealth around among those of us who pay our taxes and therefore makes it easier to fund the school districts and to be able to "afford" our teachers and therefore also lessens the strain on the idea of weeding them out which is really just a euphamism for thinning the herd because we can't fund it
2) improves education results. How do you expect to educate and pass someone who not only does not speak the language but has no interest in doing so?
"Principals may transfer poor teachers to another school. They may place them in less-desirable classrooms or give them especially difficult students to teach, with the hope that they'll just quit."
Gosh, do you suppose this could be a part of why poor students in poor neighborhoods do not do well in school? Nah; couldn't be!
"Over the past five years, 171 licensed personnel, most of them teachers, have lost their jobs to "ineffective classroom performance," said Bill Garis, Clark County School District's acting human resources officer. That's not many for a district with 18,000 teachers, he says."
The CCSD is really weeding out the bad eggs at the staggering rate of 0.2% per year.
The teacher evaluation process whereby the principal sits in on the classroom while a teacher is attempting to teach. Obviously, when the "boss" is watching, the worker will do their best. Why not solicit input from the customers, the parents, for at least 40% of a teacher evaluation. Create a series of standards and ask whether or not the standards are met, in the customer's opinion; just check boxes; no comments allowed. In the real work world (private sector), customers are routinely surveyed for an employee's performance.
Firing 171 teachers in CCSD in one year would be less than 2 percent of all teachers in the district. Spread it over 5 years and you've got me saying big deal. There is no way over 99 percent of CCSD teachers are good to great let alone above average.
Even the left-of-center Center for American Progress calls for reform on teacher tenure http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2... (see page 30 for a comparison of which state fires the least and which state fire the most teachers. Only 3 states fire fewer teachers for poor performance than Nevada).
Having interviewed several principals in the district, they tell me the process of firing a teacher is not worth the hassle unless the teacher is an otherwordly kind of incompetent. One principal told me that writing bad reviews of a teacher forces you into time consuming mediation and its easier to write a good review and dump the teacher on another school.
Tenure has to go.
I personally liked the teachers who testified "I don't do it for the money BUT" followed by a statement how they wanted more money, wanted to get paid for things unrelated to student achievement, or wanted to keep their higher salaries than younger teachers even if that teacher was better. One teacher wanted all three after repeating several times she's not teaching for the money. In other words "I'm not it in for the money, but I'm in it for the money"
Patrick: Knock it off. Sneering about teachers who actually want to get paid for doing their job is childish. The fact of the matter is that teachers put up with a lot of crap from people like you who bash them on a daily basis, parents who don't get involved in their child's education, crazy regulations that require meaningless, but time consuming paperwork, and people trying to take away their not-so-great pay, and they do it for the very reason that they care about the students and hope to provide them with the education they need to succeed in life.
We must ENABLE CCSD administration to swiftly and efficiently remove teachers they consider INEFFECTIVE. They DON'T NEED ENDLESS DOCUMENTATION, HEARINGS, AND APPEALS for teachers with only a few years in the class room. And teacher CONTRACTS MUST EXCLUDE PAYMENT TO THOSE FOUND INEFFECTIVE. No taxpayer money to pay them to retrain.....
On the other hand, if a teacher was EFFECTIVE FOR YEARS and is having some sort or problem now..... p.s. to all the teachers who feel victimized: TRY ANOTHER PROFESSION. Do you think that ANY profession is held in high esteem? Individuals are--those who PERFORM WELL OVER THE LONG TERM. Have you ever heard of a GREAT AUDITOR? A great inspector? A great tax collector? A great garbage collector?
Patrick: With regard to principals who find it too much of a hassle to follow procedures to fire incompetent teachers, too bad for them. They should still be doing their jobs. As a teacher, it was a huge hassle to try to retain students who simply couldn't make it in the next grade, but I followed every step, including dealing with principals who fought me every step of the way (not sure why...maybe it made them look bad?). It was a complete pain in the neck to do it, but I could not simply throw up my hands, crying "it's too much trouble," and pass them on to the next teacher. Quit giving principals a pass for not doing their jobs.
MR. BOSTON: Nobody is arguing that parents do not have an impact. But we can't decide who becomes a parent. If teachers cannot teach children to read and write, we must stop paying them.