The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it. If we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once—including low teacher pay, collective bargaining agreements, pension systems, and teacher evaluations. Alternatively, we might just focus on weeding out ineffective rookies.
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!
It seems every day that yet another story hits the headlines about a school banning phones. Of course, the large majority of schools had nominal prohibitions previously, but they left enforcement up to teachers, which meant most students still slipped them out during class, at lunch, and in the halls. Now more schools are opting towards magnetically sealed bags or locking phones away in closets before the first bell rings.
Countless districts, states, and even entire countries have announced and tried to implement such bans. After a few semesters with these policies, researchers have had sufficient time to study their effects, and results from those studies are starting to roll in.
Most recently, researcher Sara Abrahamsson surveyed Norwegian schools to determine if and when they implemented a phone ban and linked that to Norwegian Registry data, which includes “information on each individual’s educational institution, health care take-up at specialist care, including psychologists, and general practitioners (GPs), middle-school grades set by students’ teachers and externally corrected exams, student’s overall GPA, and individuals’ choices of academic or vocational high schools.”
Schools implemented restrictions at different times, and Abrahamsson demonstrates that the implementation of smartphone bans was uncorrelated with either school characteristics such as teacher gender ratios or prior achievement, and uncorrelated with prior trends such as declining mental health or GPAs. These factors allowed for a quasi-experimental design, analyzing 477 middle schools between 2010 and 2018. From this analysis, she comes to five conclusions:
This study comes as researchers debate the broader effects of social media on teenagers. In previous years, it’s become more and more evident that social media is, in fact, a major cause of declining adolescent mental health. Even so, there’s still much debate over how significant of a driver they are and what’s to be done about them.
Just because something is bad doesn’t necessarily justify a strict prohibition. History is riddled with examples wherein prohibitions backfired (the temperance movement) or created unsustainable negative externalities (the war on drugs). Similarly, some school-level campaigns such as the D.A.R.E. program have only increased the rate of the behavior they tried to combat.
In the case of phone bans, however, this latest study is just one more entry to an expanding literature on the benefits of such policies. It’s worth noting that the p-values in this study are small—signifying a uncertainty in its conclusions—but as I’ve written about here before, several earlier analyses showed that limiting phone usage during class increases performance on both standardized test scores and end-of-course exams. As for non-academic benefits, researchers have found that, without phones, students exercise far more at recess, burning off energy, fostering physical health, and promoting later attention in class. In short, phone bans work.
From a personal perspective, I’ve seen the benefits. For a number of years, I volunteered at a summer camp that confiscated phones on day one. Students grudgingly handed them over, complaining that they’d “lose their streaks” (it has something to do with Snapchat). But in short order they were voicing appreciation for the time they could spend sitting in circles chatting with friends, without all eyes staring down. Few had experienced the simple pleasure of getting lost in thought because boredom had always prompted them to grab their phone. By week’s end, every single student—every single one—expressed some hesitation to check their phones when we handed them back. They’d learned to love being phone free.
Something of a pessimist as I am, I find this turnaround on phones a heartening trend. We’ve seen society-wide transformations before, movements that greatly improved the lives of young people. Campaigns against smoking that spread the message of its negative health effects and prompted bans in countless public space, for example, have led to a drastic decrease in smoking rates. A similar decline happened for teen pregnancy after policy initiatives, public messaging campaigns, and rhetoric from various political bully pulpits sought to combat the societal malady.
We can and should see a similar shift for teens and social media. Amid debates about highly technocratic, complex ed-policy initiatives with unclear benefits—mass testing, curricular overhauls, and others—banning phones is a simple, easily implemented, and clear win-win for our students, teachers, and society writ large.
November’s all-but-settled presidential rematch bears many of the trappings of 2020, except that Donald Trump will pick a new running mate. Who will it be? There are dozens of possibilities, though he has sometimes signaled an interest in selecting a woman. Let’s take that as a given, then match it with the Washington Post’s top prospects, and look at five that might fit the bill to speculate on what each might mean for education.
Sure, it’s a parlor game, as policy comes from the Oval Office. But it’s never pointless to scrutinize the VP selection, as it can have considerable effects on the election (think Sarah Palin in 2008). Such scrutiny is further warranted because of both Trump’s and Biden’s ages (Trump will be seventy-eight years old on January 20, 2025). Now to the shortlist:
1. Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY): Few embody the complete transformation from moderate to MAGA as completely as Stefanik does. She went viral for her contentious exchanges with three prominent university presidents during December’s congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. On K–12, Stefanik takes credit for helping to get ESSA signed into law, and has been supportive of a parents’ bill of rights and critical of Democrats who oppose it, berating them as “domestic terrorists.” In her home state of New York, she sounded off on the decision to ban the use of Native American mascots or logos in schools, calling it the result of the state’s “woke” department of education.
2. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (AR): Of all the women in the GOP veepstakes, none has a more public—if recent—record on education. Trump’s former White House press secretary, Governor Sanders spearheaded the passage of the Arkansas LEARNS Act, an omnibus piece of legislation that covers everything from expanding school choice and improving literacy to using test scores to drive interventions and restructuring teacher compensation. Adjusted for cost of living, Arkansas now has the highest starting teacher salary in the nation. For her part, Sanders described the law as “the largest overhaul of the state's education system in Arkansas history.” At the same time, the act’s “indoctrination ban” continues to stir up litigation and controversy.
3. Former Gov. Nikki Haley (SC): Even after dropping out, Haley nonetheless won a decent chunk of the vote in the Pennsylvania primary last month. While she was in the race, her education platform called for shrinking (rather than eliminating) the U.S. Department of Education and establishing a national voucher program. Somewhat bizarrely, she also called for schools to be run more like airports. When she was governor of South Carolina, Haley was an outspoken opponent of the Common Core, while pushing through a reform package to improve reading and technology access.
Haley seems the least likely among this group to get The Donald’s nod, but adding her to the ticket could keep some of her voters from pulling the lever for Biden in an election that’s expected to be tight.
4. Gov. Kristi Noem (SD): If federal education policy is to undergo a MAGA makeover, the governor of the Mount Rushmore State would be right out of central casting. She has vowed to defeat “ascendant anti-Americanism” in schools and signed an executive order to restrict “political indoctrination” in classrooms. Noem has also won praise (and intense controversy) for revamping the state’s (previously very meager) social studies standards, and has reportedly increased K–12 funding by more than 26 percent since taking office in 2019.
5. Kari Lake (AZ): A native of Iowa, Lake is the youngest of nine children and daughter of a public school teacher. Arizona’s GOP senate candidate has an education platform with three planks: (1) eliminating annual state testing, (2) national vouchers for high school graduates to pursue CTE training, and (3) reducing federal bureaucracy. During her unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in 2022, Lake said she wanted to put cameras in classrooms to monitor teachers—likening the idea to police body cams—and for schools to adopt a “patriotic curriculum” consistent with Trump’s call for “patriotic education.”
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To the extent ed policy was even on his radar, the former president largely focused on school choice and some reining in of the federal Office for Civil Rights during his first term, but showed little interest in student achievement. The Heritage Foundation has provided a more detailed look at what the ed agenda might entail this time around. Predictably, this includes abolishing the U.S. Department of Education and creating multiple forms of school choice, but it also calls for new policy priorities like “prohibiting compelled speech” and adding “family structure” to the categories by which NAEP data are disaggregated. The question is if any of these women appears likely to do anything different if they were to find themselves in the hot seat.
There’s also the question of whether any of them adds to the ticket anything that is apt to appeal to voters on education grounds. Sanders might be suitable here, but it’s slim pickings. While she brings more to the table on schooling, everyone on this list is more motivated by politics than by pedagogy. What’s more, with obeisance as the primary selection criteria, Trump isn’t looking for a heady policy partner. Indeed, if he returns, Trump’s VP will be charged with genuflection, not education.
Los Angeles Unified School District’s Zones of Choice (ZOC) program began in 2010 as an effort to provide more high school options for a large swath of district eighth graders, combining historical catchment areas in lower-income and lower-performing neighborhoods into larger choice zones and eliminating the default feeder system from middle to high school. ZOC has proven to be an excellent model for researching the positive academic impact of choice. But as a new report published by MIT’s Blueprint Labs shows us, it is also good for examining how parental preferences are shaped.
University of Chicago researcher Christopher Campos conducts a detailed, multi-stage analysis to go beyond the simple “revealed preferences” model typical of school choice research and really tease out what—and who—parents are responding to when they rank their preferred schools. The initial data come from ZOC information and application periods in fall 2019 and fall 2021. (LAUSD spent most of the 2020–21 school year in either full or partial virtual learning; ZOC was functional but highly disrupted.) Approximately 13,000 eighth graders attended a ZOC middle school in each application year under study. Fully 90 percent of ZOC-eligible students were Hispanic (compared to 64 percent in the district as a whole), and 94 percent were classified as low income. The typical ZOC student was entering high school performing roughly 22 percent of a standard deviation behind their typical non-ZOC peer on both math and reading tests. In short, these are exactly the students who stand to benefit most from having access to better options through ZOC.
Campos’s methodology is dense and multi-faceted and defies easy summary. On the school side, he constructs measures of school quality (based on numerous academic factors) and peer quality (that is, the composition of students in receiving high schools according to their individual academic achievement). On the family side, he surveys parents of eighth grade ZOC students prior to them submitting their ranked choice lists for high school in order to determine their beliefs about school and peer quality compared to the actual rankings he devises. On the information side—the real innovation here—Campos constructs a protocol to vary the type and amount of direct information that families receive about school and peer quality for all the schools from which they can choose. This is compared to information received from other families and through other informal sources. Finally, he compares all that pre-choice information to the final options selected, the high schools ultimately attended, and (icing on the cake) the outcomes for ZOC students based on the new understanding of the choices and how they are made.
The results of all these layers of interrelated analyses are also very detailed. Pre-choice survey data show that families tended to underestimate schools’ academic quality, overestimate their peer quality, and that their estimates were least accurate regarding schools they preferred the least. All of these tendencies combined to induce what the report calls “mistakes” on ZOC applications. That is, in a scenario without these biases—pure information about school and peer quality—his models show that parents would rank schools differently. However, families are motivated to choose by the information they receive, right or wrong. Families who received more information, especially those who received it directly from Campos, chose higher-quality schools; those who did not receive direct information but heard about school quality from their Campos-informed neighbors also chose higher-quality schools. It’s not as simple as a quick summary makes it sound, but overall, Campos writes, “the experiment provides robust evidence that when properly informed, families make choices in a way that is consistent with rewarding effective schools and that social interactions are important mediators governing changes in demand.” In previous research, he has noted that ZOC is nearly ideal at offering enough options without overwhelming parents and at providing them with the highest-quality information possible.
While the ultimate aim of this research project is to determine whether ZOC students fare better in their chosen high school, outcome data are limited at this time. Only the 2019 cohort had reached eleventh grade state testing when this analysis was being done, and Campos believes pandemic-mitigation school closures “severely interfered with [their] educational experience.” As a result, no impact of ZOC choices on their test scores was observed. However, survey data showed significant improvements in students’ reported happiness in school, interpersonal skills, school connectedness, and academic effort for the 2019 cohort. Incidents of bullying were also down. These same improvements were reported—at even higher levels—for the 2021 cohort. Campos specifically notes that the academic effort index he constructed from survey responses is more than ten times higher for the 2021 ZOC cohort than the boost reported by the earlier group. He feels it bodes well for an observable test score increase when those students reach eleventh grade, but only time will tell for sure.
Overall, this research—as in-depth and pathbreaking as it is—is not conclusive except to say that parental school preferences are influenced by the information they receive, both from official and unofficial sources. Schools (and indeed policymakers) who are serious about helping families make the best possible educational choices must provide thorough, clear, and digestible information directly to families prior to any application or ranking of schools.
SOURCE: Christopher Campos, “Social Interactions, Information, and Preferences for Schools: Experimental Evidence from Los Angeles,” MIT Blueprint Labs (April 2024).
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