Outrageous! Expel These Teachers

They're incompetent in the classroom, but just try kicking them out of school.

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• Michael Crowley
• Parenting Teens
• Parenting Kids
• America's Schools

New York City public school teacher Wayne Brightly did not belong in a classroom. He was the kind of guy New York State had in mind when it decreed that all its teachers had to pass certification tests by 2003. These would measure the instructors' basic skills in English, reading and math, their understanding of teaching techniques, and their expertise in the subject they teach. You might say that when put to the test, Brightly did dumbly. He flunked twice, which got him nervous. So the middle school teacher reportedly had his old friend Rubin Leitner use a fake ID and take the test for him. Even though Leitner was no Einstein himself -- he has a history of mental problems and had once been homeless -- he scored far better on the test than Brightly ever did. The sudden improvement was enough to draw the suspicion of state officials, who uncovered the scam. Brightly was reassigned to an administrative job while Schools Chancellor Joel Klein sparred with the teachers union over efforts to get Brightly fired quickly. But the scary thing is that Brightly had been teaching New York kids for 13 years.

Though most of America's teachers are hard-working and capable professionals, some education experts say there are far too many unfit teachers like Wayne Brightly in our schools. Mary Jo McGrath, a California education law attorney, says school administrators consistently estimate that up to five percent of teachers are so bad they're "doing damage to their students."

"It's a serious national problem," says Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education and an outspoken advocate of education reform. Too many teachers, she says, "are not up to the job."

The fact is, thousands of teachers around the country have repeatedly flunked basic certification tests. Yet because of powerful teachers unions, as well as understaffed schools desperate to hang on to faculty, many of these dullards continue to teach.

• In Florida, an investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune found that a third of the state's teachers, teacher's aides and substitutes had failed certification tests at least once. Nearly 1,400 teachers failed tests 10 times or more. One Miami-area language arts teacher flunked more than 40 tests.
  
  
• In Chicago, an investigation in 2001 by the Sun-Times showed that more than 800 Illinois teachers failed the state's basic skills test over a 13-year period. In the previous year, one in seven Chicago teachers had certificates that temporarily or indefinitely waived competence tests.
  
  
• In Pennsylvania, nearly a quarter of the state's public school teachers struck out on their certification tests in 2003.

It's not like any of these tests are killers. Sample questions from Chicago involve simple grammar and math. One asked teachers to choose whether one day's storms were "worse," "worser," "worst," or "worsest" than another's. A question from Pennsylvania asks teachers to compare four sales commissions -- one percent of $1,000 versus ten percent of $200, and so on -- and pick the largest. A grammar question asks whether you would rewrite the sentence "Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out passionately for the poor of all races," providing choices like "spoke out passionate" and "did spoke out passionately."

"It's common knowledge that our teacher tests are extremely minimal, and a disgrace to the profession," says Sandra Stotsky, a former senior Massachusetts education official.

That makes it all the more scandalous that states aren't getting tough with teachers who whiff these tests. In Pennsylvania, for instance, administrators responded to the mass failures by stressing other factors, such as teacher ratings. (Not that it always helps to have broader criteria: In New York City, where teachers are rated in areas such as classroom management and community participation, there was a 46 percent leap this year in the number of teachers who got failing grades from their principals.)

A few years ago, a newspaper in New York printed quotes from student-evaluation reports written by public school teachers. One said that a student "does not take to many things serious," and another had a "studdering" problem. One teacher wondered about a boy, "Why is he not learning or learning so but so little. How comes his past teachers have been passing him from grade to grade without he advancing or progressing academicly. I will like to know what is causing the mental blockage." You think it might have to do with his teachers?

Yet getting rid of the bad ones means battling teachers unions that ferociously defend the lifetime tenure that many instructors get even at a young age. "It is notoriously impossible to get rid of a teacher. I think more people are put on death row than lose their tenure as teachers through the legal process," says Philip K. Howard, a reformist who currently chairs the bipartisan group Common Good.

According to Howard, in a five-year period in the 1990s, just 62 of California's 220,000 tenured teachers were dismissed. And Time magazine has reported that only 44 of 100,000 tenured Illinois teachers were canned in a seven-year period. Even if only one or two percent of teachers are truly incompetent -- well under the five percent that McGrath claims -- those numbers should be in the thousands.

Firing a teacher can take years and cost the taxpayers plenty. New York City teacher Elihu McMahon was accused of making racially and sexually offensive remarks over a 15-year span. During 12 of those years, he was kept out of the classroom, yet McMahon still earned $700,000 in salary. He was finally fired in 2004.

One California school district spent $312,000 on legal fees to get rid of a single teacher. And when a teacher in the Jacksonville, Florida, area allegedly threw books at her students and claimed that evil spirits had invaded her students' eyes, it took a three-year process of evaluations and bureaucratic wrangling before her teaching license was revoked. No word on the expense of her case, but in general "a professional incompetence case is going to cost you from $200,000 to half a million," says McGrath, who has handled dozens of such cases.

Rather than fight to fire teachers, then, some principals prefer just to transfer them into some other unsuspecting school. Sol Stern, an education reformer at the Manhattan Institute, calls this "a game of passing the lemons."

The good news is that this problem has become a hot political issue. In 2001, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which set the goal of a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by 2006. That's only a target, but what's important is that the law provides an incentive for states to test their teachers. In the past, some school officials have insisted that test results remain secret on "privacy" grounds. But now, at a bare minimum, they'll have to report publicly on their efforts to boost the quality of teaching.

"There will be sunshine. And that will give people an opportunity, armed with information, to do something about it," says Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With luck, that will hasten the day when no child is taught by a Wayne Brightly.

From Reader's Digest - September 2005

 

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