Tim Daly has done the field a great service with his walk down memory lane about the flawed Obama-era effort to reform teacher evaluations. It’s all the more impressive because Tim himself was a central figure in the movement (along with Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Tom Kane, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others). It’s never easy to acknowledge the failure of something you played a big role in creating. For instance, I still refuse to accept that Common Core was a failure. (Note: It wasn’t.)
As Tim explains, the impulse behind fixing teacher evaluations was a sound one. A key goal was to finally make it feasible to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom. Unfortunately, broken teacher evaluation systems were just one tiny part of the problem rather than the problem itself. The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it.
Indeed, if we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once: low teacher pay, which creates the appearance, if not the reality, of teacher shortages; state laws and collective bargaining agreements that mandate extreme due-process rights for tenured teachers; pension systems that raise the stakes dramatically for the removal of teachers near the end of their careers; and yes, the teacher evaluations themselves.
In my view, we should have recognized early-on that reforming all of this was politically impossible, at least via federal policy. (Washington, D.C. and Dallas came closest—two exceptions out of 14,000 districts that prove the rule.) Therefore we should have focused on the much more achievable aim of improving the feedback teachers receive about their instructional practice, rather than trying to build high-stakes, formal evaluation systems that would inevitably do little good. After all, why would a principal give a negative review to a teacher she knew she was stuck with? It was no surprise, then, when after all the efforts and all the fights, almost every teacher in the country still receives positive evaluations from their principals. Little changed, except that attitudes against testing became even more negative and widespread.
So the bad-teacher problem hasn’t gone away. The question for today is whether that’s fated to be our permanent lot, or whether another run at the issue could be more successful. My view is that the Gordian Knot remains unbreakable, at least for experienced teachers. But I believe we could make significant progress on weeding out bad teachers in their first few years of service, before they get tenure protections or come anywhere close to a pension payout.
Are bad teachers really a problem?
Before proceeding further, it’s worth pausing to ponder whether bad teachers really are a problem. The unions would certainly argue that the vast majority of teachers are committed professionals who chose a public-spirited but poorly-paid career because of their interest in helping kids. I agree entirely! But any field is going to have high performers and low performers, probably in the rough shape of a bell curve. Any decent organization frets about how to move that curve to the right, including by asking the lowest-performers to find another line of work. It’s hardly teacher-bashing to try to do so in K–12 education.
Not that it’s easy in any sector. Few managers enjoy firing people, especially people they work alongside and have come to know well. In the for-profit world, there are strong organizational incentives not to let bad performance fester. But even then, managers need structures and nudges to get them to pull the trigger or an economic downturn to force the issue. Firing people is hard.
Yet it’s really important that we do so, especially in schools. Partly that’s because of the evidence demonstrating that our lowest-performing teachers cause significant deterioration for the students unlucky enough to be assigned to them. Especially since such students are more likely to be low-income kids and kids of color, given the inequitable distribution of effective teachers in many of our schools.
It’s also the case that low performers are a huge morale problem for high performers. That’s surely true in any line of work, but especially in schools. If I teach fourth grade, the quality of my school’s third-grade teachers has a direct impact on how well-prepared my students will be, and thus on what I can accomplish with them. So it is from K through 12.
Bad teachers with tenure: We’re pretty much stuck with them
The bad news about bad teachers is that it’s probably politically impossible to remove them from the profession, at least if they already have tenure and many years of experience. Here’s why.
First, it would mean rolling back due-process protections in place in all but a handful of states so that it does not take years and thousands of dollars to remove a teacher from the classroom. Needless to say, the unions are going to fight such changes tooth and nail. But perhaps in red states, and especially red districts within red states, progress on this front is doable.
But next on the list of challenges is the teacher pension system. Almost every teacher in America still participates in an old-fashioned defined benefit plan, meaning that they get a big payoff if they stick it out for twenty-five or thirty years, and almost nothing if they leave before retirement age. That creates a very strong incentive to be a lifer even if you are burned out and miserable. And for principals, that means knowing that, if you fire burned-out and miserable veteran teachers, not only must they find new livelihoods, but they will also lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in pension wealth.
Given that most principals are nice people who don’t like to fire colleagues they’ve worked with for years, you can imagine that this is going to be hard for them to do. You can also understand why the unions will protect these pension policies to the death. Indeed, Michigan was one of the few states that had switched a generation ago to a defined contribution plan, akin to a 401(k), and one of the first things the teachers unions fought for once the Democrats gained trifecta control in the state in 2022 was to go back to a defined benefit plan as the default. (They won that fight just a few months ago.)
Finally, there’s the challenge of teacher shortages or at least the perception thereof. Principals are loath to let go of bad teachers because they aren’t sure they’ll be able to replace them with someone better. A bird in the hand and all that.
Any labor economist will tell you that the best way to address a shortage is to pay people more. And in a sane world, we would indeed have a system where we paid teachers dramatically higher salaries and found the money by dramatically reducing the number of non-instructional staff and administrators in our school systems. But that is another Gordian Knot of its own!
Briefly: One reason we have so many non-teaching adults in our schools is to compensate for the middling quality of our teachers. We have embraced a system whereby we pay teachers relatively low salaries, which attracts mediocre candidates (on average), and then we hire coaches, instructional aides, and myriad other personnel to try to help those mediocre teachers do a better job with their students.
A completely different approach, one that is more common overseas, is to pay teachers well but keep the rest of the staffing system lean and mean. That means larger class sizes, yes, but also fewer non-instructional personnel, fewer administrators, and in general fewer teacher-helpers.
So how do we get from here to there? Honestly, I have no idea.
Bad rookie teachers, on the other hand, are a solvable problem
So if it’s impossible to do much about ineffective teachers with tenure and lots of experience, what about weeding out bad teachers before they get such protections and come anywhere close to a pension payoff? Here is where there is some good news, which is that every school district in America could make good use of its tenure approval process today, and it would face far less opposition from the teachers unions or anyone else. After all, Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein were able to institute the practice of denying tenure to a majority of teachers on their first try, and that was in New York City with the United Federation of Teachers! If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.
I’m not saying it’s easy. Denying someone tenure still needs to be done fairly and objectively. That would be a good place to use the kind of teacher evaluation systems that we see in leading states and cities, such as Tennessee and the District of Columbia—the type that Tim Daly and his compatriots spent so many years building.
And you still must deal with the “nice principal” problem. Perhaps tenure approval should be something managed at the district level, with a committee of sorts, more like how it works in higher education.
Maybe it would also help if the number of tenured positions were limited. You make it so that principals or district administrators have no choice but to deny tenure to the least effective rookie teachers. Make it a forced choice. And perhaps you could then distribute tenured positions equitably to schools throughout a district, with high-poverty schools getting more than low-poverty ones. Make it an equity play, too.
Yes, we will still face the teacher shortage problem, though the end of ESSER funding—which temporarily allowed districts to hire lots more teachers—and the sharp decline in student enrollment in most districts will take care of that, at least in the short term. We won’t need, and won’t have the money for, as many teachers as we have in recent years.
No doubt, some teachers would receive tenure who would later become burned out and be relatively ineffective. But the research evidence indicates that we can usually tell within the first few years if someone is likely to be a strong teacher. We won’t get this perfect every time, but we should have many fewer ineffectual teachers if we take this approach.
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So there you have it. Unless you are willing to try unraveling the entire Gordian Knot—and have the political will and political strategy to succeed—forget about bad veteran teachers and focus on weeding out the bad rookie ones before they get too much experience in the classroom. It won’t solve everything, but it will make our schools better. Take the win!
