Let's Improve Education By Firing Teachers

Turns out I needed a longer break from thinking about education than I anticipated. But I do have these topics I've been wanting to write about for a while. So here’s the first in … well, who knows – maybe an occasional series of posts on education policy and my experiences as a teacher, this time with more of a wide-angle lens.

Back in May, Nikolas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times with a proposal (developed by the Hamilton Project) for radically improving public education. He says presidential candidates should advocate these three measures:
1) Abolish teacher certification requirements.
2) Make tenure much harder to get so “weak teachers can be weeded out after two or three years on the job.”
3) Offer annual incentives of $15,000 to “good teachers” who teach in schools serving low-income communities

I agree that there are some teachers who should not be teaching, and I agree that the students who need the very best teachers are much more likely to have the least-qualified, least-experienced teachers.

But proposals to get rid of lots of teachers always strike me as quite odd. We do not currently have too many people clamoring for teaching jobs; we have too few. The extent of the shortage varies by state, grade level, subject area, etc., but the shortage exists. California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell stated in a press release this April that California is projecting a shortage of 33,000 teachers a year by 2015.

The shortage is not just a result of lots of teachers retiring. You have probably already heard the much-cited statistic that half of all teachers leave within their first five years in the profession. I’m now part of this statistic. And many of my friends who started teaching when I did are leaving, too. Most of us are still doing something related to education. There are three people (including me) out of my 20-person credential/master’s program cohort who are getting a PhD in education. Another woman in our cohort does curriculum development work now. A friend who got her credential/master’s a year before me went to work for a children’s book publisher. Out of the approximately 40 teachers at my school, 10 left at the end of this past school year. At least two of them are taking teaching jobs elsewhere, but many are planning to leave the profession for good.

With all of us leaving the classroom already, is the answer to the nation’s education woes really to get rid of even more teachers?

Let’s look at the proposal Kristof is advocating:

The Hamilton Project study recommends that the weakest 25 percent of new teachers should be denied tenure and eliminated after two or three years on the job (teachers improve a lot in the first two years, but not much after that). That approach, it estimates, would raise students’ average test scores by 14 percentile points by the time they graduated.

Where would we get teachers to replace the 25% of new teachers who would be “eliminated” each year? I understand that under the proposal Kristof is advocating, teacher certification requirements would be abolished, so I suppose the proposal’s authors are assuming that this would lead to more people applying for teaching jobs.

I don’t have research to back this up, but, just based on common sense, I bet that people who just jump in front of a classroom without any student teaching experience are more likely to leave teaching than teachers trained through a certification process. If you’ve never had a chance to try out teaching, to try out actually being on your own in front of a classroom, how can you know it’s what you want to do? One article on New York City’s Teaching Fellows program, which recruits people from around the country to come stand up in the front of their own NYC classrooms after just 7 weeks of summer training, states that 10% of these teachers leave before the end of their first year. Thirty percent are gone by the end of the third year. Program administrators say these rates of new teachers leaving are the same as other big city school districts’ numbers. I haven’t seen the numbers to prove or disprove this claim. But many Fellows complain that their training was inadequate and that they did not have a realistic picture of what to expect in their classrooms.

Regardless of whether non-credentialed teachers are more or less likely to leave teaching, it seems clear to me that too many teachers are leaving teaching, period. Sure, maybe some of them were ineffective and we’re better off without them, but all of them? That just can’t be. Poor teacher retention is an expensive problem. The costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training a new teacher varies by district. One study tried to add them up, and put the national price tag at $7.3 billion annually. According to this study, Chicago spends almost $18,000 to replace each of its thousands of teachers that leave each year, while the small district of Jemez Valley, N.M., spent $4,366 on each new teacher. Even taking the low figure, that means my school will spend $43,660 (and countless hours of the principal’s time!) replacing the 10 teachers that left this year.

In addition to the costs associated with replacing teachers, think of all the school district (and therefore taxpayer) money that was spent training me and all the other teachers who are leaving. The value of those investments can disappear when we leave. I’m expensive. I got a state-funded tuition remission to pay for my master’s/credential program. I got some student loans forgiven via a state program for teachers. I got fellowships from my university that helped me support myself while I got my credential. I got paid to attend many professional development workshops during my five years as a teacher. This all adds up to tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer investment in me. And while I do intend to make use of this investment and contribute to the profession of education, I won’t be doing what these investments were supposing I would do – teach children in public schools.

Why do we leave? I’ll leave that for a blog post later this week.

But for now, let’s stop trying to improve education by hastening the departure of even more teachers!

(And who, exactly, would determine which 25% of teachers would be "eliminated"? How? I'm assuming these decisions would be left to principals. Perhaps 25% of all new principals should be eliminated within their first two years. And 25% of all new district superintendents. And 25% of all new education policy researchers.)