By Malcolm Peabody
April 1, 2009
This month’s prize for being disingenuous goes to George Parker, the Washington Teachers’ Union president, for his statement quoted in the March 18 Current, defending tenure for D.C. teachers: “All tenure does is give the employee due process.”
Due process, defined by the teacher contract, is a labyrinthine set of provisions that have defeated the most tenacious principals who have attempted to navigate them. Under the current union contract, if a teacher has been in the school system for three or more years, the “professional performance evaluation process” must be initiated for due process. This requires a “pre-observation conference” with the teacher and then a “classroom observation,” after which the teacher will be rated according to skills and performance. Fair enough. Almost always, a teacher will be rated as needing improvement, rather than unsatisfactory, and will then go through the “improvement process” for 90 school days. Then the teacher is re-observed and re-rated.
You might imagine that such an extensive process would constitute reasonable due process. But not in D.C. Public Schools. If such a teacher is rated “unimproved,” the principal does not have the authority to let that teacher go. Instead, the unimproved teacher is entitled to another cycle of conference, observation, rating and “improvement process” for another 90 school days.
Have they had enough due process yet? Not according to the D.C. teachers union. If they’re still rated as “unimproved,” they are entitled to a third cycle of the process for yet another 90 school days. Since the average length of an academic year is 180 school days, this effectively means an unimproved teacher could remain in the classroom for two academic years! Moreover, each of these steps must occur at precise times which, if not adhered to, can force the principal back to the start of the process. And if a teacher files a grievance, it can interrupt the process at any of several points. It’s easier to fire teachers who’ve been in the system less than three years.
Faced with these hurdles, principals find it much easier to persuade teachers to transfer to other schools, where other principals have to deal with their lack of improvement. Where, a reasonable person might demand, is the benefit to the city’s children in this “due process”?
One wonders why any school board would have signed a contract with such onerous provisions — until one appreciates the enormous power teachers unions gained in the late 1960s when they began to participate in the political process. Using union member dues to finance campaigns and union staff and teachers to do outreach, they became extremely successful in electing local officials. They have been particularly influential in school board elections, where the vote count is much lower. As a result, on many occasions, their representatives have effectively been on both sides of the negotiating table.
Nationally, the teachers union is one of the three or four most powerful lobby groups. As an example, one out of every six voting members of the last Democratic convention were members of a teachers union.
What makes the current negotiations with the D.C. teachers union so interesting is that Washington is the first major U.S. city where the union monopoly over public education has been broken by the rise of public charter schools — which now enroll 35 percent of the student population. Indeed, Parker is perhaps the first leader of a teachers union to publicly recognize the new landscape and counsel his members to be ready for more accountability or charter schools will take more of their jobs.
However, if sacred tenure and seniority rights are lost in D.C., it would begin to undermine teachers union positions nationwide, which is why Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, is heavily involved in these negotiations.
Winning this battle is absolutely essential for advancing reform in D.C. Public Schools. Without the right to hold teachers accountable (which means eliminating tenure and seniority), principals cannot create school cultures strong enough to overcome the street culture their students bring in. Our charter schools are able to establish strong cultures because principals have full control over both staff and budget, and the results are clearer to see. Such authority is less important in suburban schools, where family sociology is much stronger and expanding bureaucracies can still absorb the lemons among the faculty members. However, in D.C., where over two-thirds of the children are from single-parent, low-income families, this authority is essential.