Allowing disgraced teachers to remain in classroom hurts all of us

Regular readers of The Turner Report know that I am a strong supporter of public education and have been critical of efforts in the Missouri legislature to scapegoat teachers.

That being said, it cannot be denied that public education has its problems and one of those, especially in states like California and New York, has been the inability to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.

The problem is not the tenure law. Anyone who has been around school districts for a long time has seen cases where effective teachers have been targeted by an administrator or a school board member. Tenure is designed to protect the rights of those who have been unfairly targeted. It is not designed to keep incompetent teachers in the classroom.

In Missouri, a teacher must be in the classroom for five years (with the same school district) to be eligible for tenure. Even after the teacher is tenured, it is possible to get rid of that teacher for a variety of reasons. What tenure does is require that the teacher receives due process.

That does not guarantee that there are not bad apples in Missouri schools. Some slip through the cracks. Some remain because administrators do not want to go through the hassle of getting rid of them.

But tenure in Missouri is not an evil keeping horrendous teachers in the classroom. Five years offers enough time to weed out bad teachers or find ways to help struggling teachers improve.

The same safeguards are not in place in California, according to an investigative piece in today's Los Angeles Times.

The article reveals a system in which administrators attempt to fire incompetent and immoral teachers, but are unable to do so, thanks to an administrative board which sides with the teachers more than half of the time...even in the most egregious cases. The article opens with this example:

The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.

He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.

Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy.

"Look," Polanco allegedly said, "you can't even kill yourself."

The boy's classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.

"See," Polanco was quoted as saying, "even he knows how to commit suicide better than you."

The Los Angeles school board, citing Polanco's poor judgment, voted to fire him.

But Polanco, who contended that he had been misunderstood, kept his job. A little-known review commission overruled the board, saying that
although the teacher had made the statements, he had meant no harm.

Someone like Polanco does not belong in a classroom, and it is cases like this that give public education a bad name. Teachers are human and have slips of the tongue like anyone else, but what Polanco said goes far beyond a slip of the tongue.

Shamefully, it is not the only negative example the Times provides in its article.

I would like to see the same kind of investigative reporting conducted by our news outlets in Missouri (and not limited to what takes place in the Kansas City and St. Louis school systems).

At the same time, Missouri teachers need to be proactive when it comes to policing their own. Instead of allowing anti-public education zealots like Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, to work their agendas to the detriment of students and teachers, we need to take charge and ensure that the bad apples are removed from the system.

The following steps should be considered:

-We should start with a largely symbolic step. The public should be able to look up a teacher's record on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. At the present time, you have to have the teacher's Social Security number to see it. These are public records and should be accessible to everyone. If your son or daughter's teacher does not have an adequate degree for the class he or she is teaching, you have every right to know that.

-Instead of requiring teachers' to undergo double or triple fingerprinting like Mrs. Cunningham has suggested (already making it appear that teachers are automatically breaking laws on a regular basis, would it not be simpler to just match up arrests against DESE's databank and immediately red flag a teacher?

-After hearings are completed, require the minutes of those hearings to be a public record, with names of recognizable students blacked out.

-Outlaw deals which allow teachers to resign after committing firing offenses in exchange for not having any kind of action taken against their teacher's licenses. This kind of "passing the trash" gives all teachers a bad name, and is unfair to future employers and students.

-Teachers should also be proactive in seeing to it that struggling teachers either receive the help they need or be moved out of the profession if their classroom performance is substandard and there is no effort to improve. We have to demonstrate that we are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that each classroom has a qualified teacher.

-Finally, it is important that teachers and school districts publicize the steps they are taking or have taken to ensure that children have qualified teachers in their classrooms. In the Joplin schools, young teachers have two-year mentoring programs and each new teacher in the school district receives regular training throughout those years. The learning curve does not end after two years. Regular training is required for all teachers. Other Missouri school districts provide the same kind of support.

It is important that school districts and teachers remain vigilant so that students are not required to sit in classrooms and take instruction from people whose temperament and skills are not suited for the profession. For the students in California to have to put up with the excesses described in the Los Angeles Times article is a disgrace.

Thankfully, in Missouri we put students first.