Too many bad apples
File under Least Surprising News So Far This Year: At the 94 especially troubled schools on Mayor de Blasio’s special-help list, teachers are twice as likely to be bottom-of-the-barrel. Which is why the mayor should not only be layering on support services and professional development at those campuses, but pleading for the strongest tools to nix teachers who can’t cut it.
After reviewing the records of all the educators at de Blasio and Fariña’s so-called Renewal Schools, the education news website Chalkbeat found dramatically worse teacher quality there than in the public school system at large.
More than 20% fell in the bottom two rating categories of “developing” and “ineffective,” compared with fewer than 10% at schools citywide.
Which is not to say that 20% is the correct number; the true proportion of lemon instructors is almost certainly way higher.
That’s because the ratings were the product of an evaluation system that deemed practically everyone above average after it went into effect in late 2013. Tragicomically, it grades four in five of the teachers at these failing schools to be effective or highly effective.
The clustering of weak instructors means that thousands of poor and minority students face significantly elevated risks of stunting educational malpractice. As such, the findings bolster an ongoing lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of New York’s job protections for teachers.
Regardless, the mayor and chancellor still see removals as a last resort in a school turnaround strategy — and have asked all teachers at only two of the 94 schools to reapply for their jobs.
Instead, they should be pressing for more robust powers to clear dead wood at every struggling school in the five boroughs.
In that regard, Gov. Cuomo did the mayor, the chancellor and the city’s kids a service by forcing through the Legislature a revamped teacher evaluation system that holds the promise of more accurately assessing performance with a more streamlined process for removing the worst instructors.
As the Daily News’ “Fight for Their Future” series recently revealed, in 543 schools citywide — educating more than 265,000 students, the vast majority of them black and Hispanic — fewer than 20% of students passed state reading tests.
Surely all these schools are in desperate need of new blood.
Fariña says principals can clear out staffers who can’t cut it using the sorts of creative tactics she employed as a principal on the Upper East Side in the 1990s.
She ought to fight to bake that authority into the system — not count on a few dozen enterprising principals to work magic.