Inspired by an earth-shattering California ruling that struck down teacher tenure laws as damaging to children, a group of families is set to challenge New York statutes that keep incompetent instructors in the classroom.
They are on the side of the angels.
The six families from across the state, including four from the city, call themselves the Partnership for Educational Justice. They have a devastatingly powerful claim that’s reinforced by Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s strategy for improving troubled schools.
Under a 1995 ruling by the state’s highest court, New York children have a right to “a sound basic education,” which the court defined as the “opportunity for a meaningful high school education, one which prepares them to function productively as civic participants.”
Hundreds of thousands of kids are being denied such a chance every year. More than three-quarters of the teenagers leaving high school in the city with a diploma lack the English and math skills to succeed in higher education or a job.
Clearly, the schools have moved the kids along an assembly line that has left them unprepared to “function productively” in society. Just as clearly, the courts have an obligation to vindicate the children’s rights by declaring unconstitutional school policies that hold kids back.
Bad teachers top the list. Numerous studies confirm that teacher quality is the single largest in-school factor determining how well a student will do. Years in good teachers’ classrooms, and a child is prepped for success; years in the classroom of terrible teachers, and a child’s education — and life — is set back.
An East New York family that is joining the legal challenge vividly saw the impact of teacher quality when a daughter thrived under an effective kindergarten teacher while her twin languished under a lemon.
That lemon and others are virtually guaranteed to keep their jobs because of outrageous enshrined employment protections for classroom teachers.
The standards for proving incompetence are impossibly high. The process for waging a termination effort is so long and convoluted, most principals refuse to bother. The arbitrators who decide teachers’ fates approve dismissals only when teachers are beyond all hope of rehabilitation.
Over a period studied between 1997 and 2004, proceedings to remove teachers on grounds ranging from incompetence to insubordination stretched out for an average of 520 days, with incompetence cases dragging on for 830 days.
As for the outcome, the city Department of Education brought 774 termination cases against tenured teachers from early 2012 to early 2014, securing a grand total of 49 firings.
Much of this was supposed to change under a newly passed teacher-evaluation law that, in theory, expedites the removal process when a teacher flunks two straight ratings. But the first statewide run, not including New York City, comically rated 92% of teachers above-average. And in the city, Michael Mulgrew’s UFT has found clever ways to stack the deck against getting rid of incompetents.
In an interview with Daily News education reporter Ben Chapman, Fariña — who, as a principal in the 1990s, aggressively overhauled her staff — signaled a more aggressive tack toward replacing bad teachers in low-performing schools with more talented ones.
“We have to get away from a quota system of how many teachers can be rated in any one category, but we still have to hold principals accountable for making sure that the ones that are not effective are not there,” she said.
Add that statement to the evidence that tenure laws are an obstacle to providing a sound basic education — evidence that should strike those laws down in court.
