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Despite all the heated talk about how to identify and dismiss low-performing teachers, there's relatively little research on how administrators choose whom to dismiss, whether various dismissal options might actually serve to improve performance, and other aspects in this area. A paper by economist Brian Jacob, released as working paper in 2010 and published late last year in the journal Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis, helps address at least one of these voids, by providing one of the few recent glimpses into administrators' actual (rather than simulated) dismissal decisions. Jacob exploits a change in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) personnel policy that took effect for the 2004-05 school year, one which strengthened principals' ability to dismiss probationary teachers, allowing non-renewal for any reason, with minimal documentation. He was able to link these personnel records to student test scores, teacher and school characteristics and other variables, in order to examine the characteristics that principals might be considering, directly or indirectly, in deciding who would and would not be dismissed. Jacob's findings are intriguing, suggesting a more complicated situation than is sometimes acknowledged in the ongoing debate over teacher dismissal policy.

This article takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers who were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With these data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

This paper takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for such dismissals. With the cooperation of the CPS, I matched information on all teachers that were eligible for dismissal with records indicating which teachers were dismissed. With this data, I estimate the relative weight that school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics. I find evidence that principals do consider teacher absences and value-added measures, along with several demographic characteristics, in determining which teachers to dismiss.

In the near future my article with Preston Green and Joseph Oluwole on legal concerns regarding the use of Value-added modeling for making high stakes decisions will come out in the BYU Education and Law Journal. In that article, we expand on various arguments I first laid out in this blog post about how use of these noisy and potentially biased metrics is likely to lead to a flood of litigation challenging teacher dismissals. In short, as I have discussed on numerous occasions on this blog, value-added models attempt to estimate the effect of the individual teacher on growth in measured student outcomes. But, these models tend to produce very imprecise estimates with very large error ranges, jumping around a lot from year to year.  Further, individual teacher effectiveness estimates are highly susceptible to even subtle changes to model variables. And failure to address key omitted variables can lead to systemic model biases which may even lead to racially disparate teacher dismissals (see here & for follow up , here) .

In a series of recent blog posts and in a forthcoming article I have discussed the potential problems with using bad, versus entirely inappropriate measures for determining teacher effectiveness.  I have pointed out, for example, that using value-added measures to estimate teacher effectiveness and then determine whether a teacher should be denied tenure, or have their tenure removed might raise due process concerns which arise from the imprecision and potential outright inaccuracy of teacher effectiveness estimates derived from such methods. I have also explained that in some states like New Jersey, which have adopted Student Growth Percentile measures as an evaluation tool, that where those measures are used as a basis for dismissing teachers, teachers (or their attorney's) might simply rely on the language of the authors of those methods to point out that they are not designed to, nor were they intended to attribute responsibility for the measured student growth to the teacher. Where attribution of responsibility is off the table the dismissing a teacher on an assumption of ineffectiveness based on these measures is entirely inappropriate, and a potential violation of the teacher's due process rights. But, the problem is that state legislatures are increasingly mandating that these measures absolutely be used when making high stakes personnel decisions.

"Recent days has seen a nasty tweet fight break out, as Mayor Bloomberg's proxies - Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, StudentsFirst honcho and former Bloomberg Albany lobbyist Micah Lasher, and former television anchor Campbell Brown - have used the 140 character forum to launch a vicious slander that the UFT protects sexual predators, defending their return to the classroom.  Their argument is that since arbitrators who decide dismissal hearings against tenured teachers are jointly selected by the Department of Education and the UFT, they split the difference in decisions and do not fire teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or sexually inappropriate behavior. The only solution, they argue, is to overturn tenure and give the DoE the power of judge, jury and executioner. The UFT has a position of zero tolerance on sexual misconduct, and we have negotiated in our contract the strongest penalties for sexual misconduct in any collective bargaining agreement in the state of New York. If an adult violates the trust that is at the heart of the educator-student relationship with an act of sexual misconduct or with sexually inappropriate behavior, dismissal is the only appropriate response."

In a post over a year ago, I discussed the common argument that dismissing the "bottom 5-10 percent" of teachers would increase U.S. test scores to the level of high-performing nations. This argument is based on a calculation by economist Eric Hanushek, which suggests that dismissing the lowest-scoring teachers based on their math value-added scores would, over a period of around ten years  (when the first cohort of students would have gone through the schooling system without the "bottom" teachers), increase U.S. math scores dramatically - perhaps to the level of high-performing nations such as Canada or Finland.* This argument is, to say the least, controversial, and it invokes the full spectrum of reactions. In my opinion, it's best seen as a policy-relevant illustration of the wide variation in test-based teacher effects, one that might suggest a potential of a course of action but can't really tell us how it will turn out in practice. To highlight this point, I want to take a look at one issue mentioned in that previous post - that is, how the instability of value-added scores over time (which Hanushek's simulation doesn't address directly) might affect the projected benefits of this type of intervention, and how this is turn might modulate one's view of the huge projected benefits. One (admittedly crude) way to do this is to use the newly-released New York City value-added data, and look at 2010 outcomes for the "bottom 10 percent" of math teachers in 2009.

Okay! Okay! I know teachers do not have tenure in the pure definition of guaranteed lifetime employment that was available in some higher education institutions long ago. Instead, teachers have fair employment and dismissal procedures that protect them from dismissal for arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory reasons after completing a probationary period. I have been following with interest the legislative battle in Virginia over the "tenure" issue. It has been a very partisan battle with only a few Republican senators--those with firsthand information from relatives who are teachers--refusing to go down a road that appears punitive and unnecessary in this non-collective bargaining state. These senators' instincts are right, and let me provide some points to support them. First, the reason that the original laws were passed was to protect good teachers.

If principals are given the power to dismiss teachers, will they dismiss the least effective ones?

Perry Zirkel filled in for Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post blog, The Answer Sheet, a couple days ago and wrote a provocative post about the law v. lore in teacher tenure. Perry (who I love is jumping on blogging - what a perfect medium for him) makes some great points that the law of teacher tenure is not as ironclad against dismissing teachers as most educators assume. I teach this to my future administrators all the time. Perry also makes a good point that litigation resulting from dismissal cases frequently goes the district's way. Certainly, as is almost always the case, the law is geared to support the school in these cases. So, as is always the case with Perry, he makes some great points and actually points to data to back it up.  But, I have 2 small issues with how Perry frames this issue and a different recommendation as to how to achieve the desired result. 

What has happened in the past two years? Let's see: Race to the Top promoted the idea that teachers should be evaluated by the test scores of their students; "Waiting for 'Superman'" portrayed teachers as the singular cause of low student test scores; many states, including Wisconsin, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio have passed anti-teacher legislation, reducing or eliminating teachers' rights to due process and their right to bargain collectively; the Obama administration insists that schools can be "turned around" by firing some or all of the staff. These events have combined to produce a rising tide of public hostility to educators, as well as the unfounded beliefs that schools alone can end poverty and can produce 100 percent proficiency and 100 percent graduation rates if only "failing schools" are closed, "bad" educators are dismissed, and "effective" teachers get bonuses. Is it any wonder that teachers and principals are demoralized?

Although most new teacher evaluations are still in various phases of pre-implementation, it's safe to say that classroom observations and/or value-added (VA) scores will be the most heavily-weighted components toward teachers' final scores, depending on whether teachers are in tested grades and subjects. One gets the general sense that many - perhaps most - teachers strongly prefer the former (observations, especially peer observations) over the latter (VA). One of the most common arguments against VA is that the scores are error-prone and unstable over time - i.e., that they are unreliable. And it's true that the scores fluctuate between years (also see here), with much of this instability due to measurement error, rather than "real" performance changes. On a related note, different model specifications and different tests can yield very different results for the same teacher/class. These findings are very important, and often too casually dismissed by VA supporters, but the issue of reliability is, to varying degrees, endemic to all performance measurement. Actually, many of the standard reliability-based criticisms of value-added could also be leveled against observations. Since we cannot observe "true" teacher performance, it's tough to say which is "better" or "worse," despite the certainty with which both "sides" often present their respective cases. And, the fact that both entail some level of measurement error doesn't by itself speak to whether they should be part of evaluations.*

This post includes a few more preliminary musings regarding the use of value-added measures and student growth percentiles for teacher evaluation, specifically for making high-stakes decisions, and especially in those cases where new statutes and regulations mandate rigid use/heavy emphasis on these measures, as I discussed in the previous post.

The New York City teachers' union has long called the process used by the city's Education Department for reviewing and dismissing struggling teachers partisan and unfair. But now, as part of an agreement reached Thursday, the Education Department and the United Federation of Teachers will put into effect an evaluation system that will bring independent observers into the city's classrooms to monitor the weakest teachers.

Parents and teachers at Public School 261 Philip Livingston, a popular Boerum Hill elementary school, have been trying to get Success Academy people to stop handing out fliers in front of their school during dismissal. The network is known to be an aggressive marketer - it blankets neighborhoods with fliers, and subway stations with posters - but P.S. 261 parents and teachers saw it as poaching. ---Schoolbook

The reliability of value-added estimates, like that of all performance measures (including classroom observations), is an important issue, and is sometimes dismissed by supporters in a cavalier fashion. There are serious concerns here, and no absolute answers. But none of this can be examined or addressed with anecdotes.

Note that the four dissenters on the Council on Foreign Relations' task force are never quoted in the news reports. Their dissent needs to be read. But what struck me, aside from the make-up of the committee, was the sponsor. Would they publish a task force report on Russian/U.S. relations written by people who had no background experience or expertise on the subject? Someone like me-although I suspect I know as much about that subject as their experts do on American public schooling. (I follow it.) But why is it that they think education belongs on their plate? I suppose that it's seen as one of our weapons for defeating our foreign enemies. Besides, as Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy, points out: "Everything the report recommends is already being done ... It's Joel Klein beating the same old drums in a different forum.'" Klein's reported rejoinder: "But it's not happening at the level we're needing ... we need to do it in a much more accelerated way." That sounds like a prescription for dismissing the democratic process-which is deliberative and thoughtful-conducted at the level appropriate to changing the way young people are raised-close to home. Or at least no further away than the Constitution permits. That's bad enough. After all, nearly all of the states adopted the several hundreds of pages of the new Common Core curriculum. How many do you believe read ANY of it?

Scowling at a lengthy document from the city detailing its proposal to close John Adams High School in Ozone Park, and reopen it with about half the teachers replaced next fall, student Symone Simon gives the packet of papers a dismissive flick of her wrist and issues a harsh verdict of Mayor Bloomberg - he has failed her and her classmates, who want their instructors to remain put. "The mayor says 50 percent of the staff that works here is not doing their job, but there has been a 17 percent increase in graduation rates to 64 percent over the last three years," said Simon, a senior and one of the editors at John Adams' school newspaper. "I've seen people grow so much here - that's what our teachers do for us. They're like our other parents." John Adams High School is one of 33 that the mayor wants to close in the city, including eight in Queens. First proposed in his State of the City address in January, the plan to close the schools will be voted on April 26 by the city Panel for Educational Policy - often known as a rubber stamp for all the mayor's schools plans because it has never rejected anything Bloomberg proposed. Queens Borough President Helen Marshall's appointee to the PEP, Dmytro Fedkowskyj, has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the school closures, as have other borough presidents' appointees.

Three of Connecticut's "Big City" mayors had a commentary piece published in today's CTNewsjunkie.  They should have remembered the quote "It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt" before they put their names on to today's piece entitled "Small Investment, Big Payoff".   (also linked below as well) Unless of course what they are referring to the price whoever wrote this piece paid to get them to sign it. It would be far better to believe that this piece was ghost written by the charter school lobbyists and the mayors didn't read it before they signed it than to think they would ever be so dismissive and insulting to the needs of their constituents.

I often hear the following argument: Improving teacher quality is more cost-effective than other options, such as reducing class size (see here, for example). I am all for evaluating policy alternatives based on their costs relative to their benefits, even though we tend to define the benefits side of the equation very narrowly - in terms of test score gains. But "improving teacher quality" cannot yet be included in a concrete costs/benefits comparison with class size or anything else. It is not an actual policy. At best, it is a category of policy options, all of which are focused on recruitment, preparation, retention, improvement, and dismissal of teachers. When people invoke it, they are presumably referring to the fact that teachers vary widely in their test-based effectiveness. Yes, teachers matter, but altering the quality distribution is whole different ballgame from measuring it overall. It's actually a whole different sport.