Last Sunday I highlighted The New York Times' pleasure with AFT President Randi Weingarten's support of the use of student performance in teacher evaluation, and of a more expeditious way to remove poorly performing teachers. Her friend Diane Ravitch felt the press in general was highlighting only a small part of Weingarten's reform package and took it to task in her blog in the Huffington Post
Today, in her paid for column in the Times' Week in Review section, Weingarten herself gives a clear and thoughtful response to her critics and supporters.
Weingarten challenges the notion that the most important thing we have to do in ed reform is to get rid of poor performing teachers. She accurately states that good teachers far outnumber those that need to be fired. What we need to do is to find a way to support, encourage and most importantly improve the good teachers so they become excellent teachers.
I have written in the past of my frustration as a principal in trying to get better than average teachers to become really excellent teachers. The resistance to improve may be a natural part of the above average . It probably exist in other professions but it stands out in teaching. The distribution of the different quality teachers will no doubt be the normal distribution of a bell curve. If we can attract more people to teaching and provide better professional support and improvement, we may be able to move the mean of that bell curve. The reality is that we will probably never have enough really excellent teachers to fill all the classrooms around the country.The answer has to be that we make sure that those kids that need the best teachers get them, and we reverse the distribution in their schools so that the more experienced teachers who have grown in the profession, end up there. The assignment of teachers to particular schools or classroom is frequently controlled by the contract, and seniority determines most of these decisions.
I applaud Randi Weingarten's efforts to make the AFT a partner in school improvement but ask her to take the next step and get her union's support for greater flexibility in assigning teachers to schools and classroom. That should be clear to all!