In a recent Gadfly, Chester Finn reviewed All Else Equal by Benveniste, Carnoy, and Rothstein. Those authors claim that private schools are very similar to public schools. They base their findings on case studies of sixteen private schools, only some of which are Catholic. Finn writes of the book that, "One interesting (and worrying) point does come through, however: the authors claim that it's as hard (and rare) to remove an unsatisfactory teacher in the Catholic schools they visited as in the public schools."
I have not read this book. Having studied teacher personnel policies in public, private, and, more recently, charter schools, however, I find this statement implausible. Teachers in private schools are usually employed at will or under one year contracts. Thus, it is much easier to terminate or decline to renew contracts of teachers of poor quality. And while some Catholic schools engage in collective bargaining, I am unaware of any that agree to teacher contracts as restrictive as those found in urban public school districts.
Rather than rely on impressionistic evidence from a non-random set of case studies, we can shed light on this matter using nationally representative data from a sample of 2600 private and 8400 public schools in the U.S. Department of Education's 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Surveys. School administrators were asked "During the last school year, how many teachers of the following types were dismissed for poor performance?" Respondents were then asked to list total dismissals of teachers with three or fewer years of experience and teachers with more than three years of experience.
I divided these dismissals by total teacher employment and computed dismissal rates for traditional public, private, and charter schools. The results are reported in Chart 7, p. 13 of an article in the current issue of NCSC Review. The dismissal rate in the private schools (2.6 percent) was over four times higher than in traditional public schools (.6 percent). Moreover, dismissals in traditional public schools were overwhelmingly of untenured junior teachers, whereas in private schools the number of dismissals was actually larger among more senior teachers.
These published results pertain to all teachers. But Checker's comment led me to investigate whether Catholic schools deviated from the overall private school pattern. They did not. The dismissal rate for Catholic schools (2.2 percent) was only slightly lower than for all private schools (2.6 percent). In addition, Catholic schools dismissed more experienced than inexperienced teachers.
In short, the latest federal data show that private (and charter) schools dismiss teachers for poor performance at a much higher rate than traditional public schools.
In fact, the personnel policies of private schools differ from those of public schools along many dimensions. Readers interested in more on this topic may consult the article cited above or Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky "Teacher Recruitment and Retention in Public and Private Schools," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 17 No. 3 (1998)
Michael Podgursky
Department of Economics
University of Missouri - Columbia