Our union contract is a road map for getting rid of bad teachers.
I don’t agree with everything in Sherman Dorn’s response to Andy Rotherham on the DC teacher firings. But I do agree with the thrust of his main points.
First, we wait for the Washington Teachers Union to sort through the information to see if any teachers were fired without the five classroom observations required for the evaluations. The grievance mechanism that exists in the union contract is on procedural grounds, and here we’ll see how careful Rhee’s bureaucrats have been.
Then, we wait to see if there are any examples of firings that don’t meet a basic smell test–anyone who had won teaching awards and plaudits but were given low ratings for reasons of favoritism or obviously inappropriate application of student test scores.
Either procedural errors or plausible miscarriages of justice are reasonable grounds on which the union will fight for members and has an ethical obligation.
Nor is that willingness to fight for individual members inconsistent with a union’s willingness to try different methods of evaluation.
My chapter can and does file grievances when we think an individual’s procedural rights were violated in the tenure review process. That says nothing about the standards of review. It says that we’ll fight for the integrity of the review process.
For the “hang ‘em first, try ‘em later” crowd, like the editorial board of the Trib, the notion of a review process is equal to “teacher contracts protect poor performing teachers.”
Go back to Dorn’s point about filing grievances. As a union representing our members we can grieve when the procedural rules are violated. If an administrator had documented evidence of poor performance and the definition of poor performance has been already been mutually agreed upon through negotiated language, we do not and can not stand in the way of the follow up steps that include remediation or termination.
Another way of putting it is that our contract provides a road map for improving or getting rid of poor performing teachers. What we do not have is formal or legal control over getting rid of poor performing administrators who do the evaluations.
