Michelle Rhee got into the news quite prominently twice in the past. The first time, it was because in her tenure as chancellor of the Washington, DC school district test scores soared dramatically. The second time it was when those soaring test scores were shown to have involved widespread cheating -- and cheating by the administrators, not simply by the students.
Now, she has a commentary in the September 12th TIME on the policy of firing the most recently hired teachers first. She says that, when cuts have to be made, the least competent teachers should be let go. Most of us would agree with that. Now, what is her policy to accomplish that? She doesn't tell us. Instead, she sets up a false dichotomy between firing the worst performers and firing the least senior. Her group is on a national campaign to end LIFO -- Last In First Out. We are supposed to believe that if teachers didn't have any seniority rights, then -- somehow -- the ones fired would be the least competent.
Chicago has actually put her hypothesis to a test. Despite a union contract, ignoring the provisions of the contract, the Chicago Public Schools have canceled the appointment of a good many teachers. Among the teachers let go have been some with the fairly-rare National Board certification. Only a small percentage have had the lowest of three evaluations -- despite the fact that the people deciding on the cancellations have been, for the most part, the same people as were doing the evaluations. Teachers with lower evaluations have been kept in the same departments.
To depend on principals and school administrations to automatically prefer the best teachers contradicts the experience which people working in schools have, even the experience which the rest of us had when going to school. Teachers are in charge of learning; they see which students have learned and which have not, which lessons got across to most of the class and which did not, every school day. Principals and other administrators have other worries. They are in charge of keeping the school looking orderly. That involves keeping the students under control, but it also involves keeping the teachers under control. The books have to balance; the floors have to be swept; the violence has to be kept to some minimum. The equipment has to be kept functional.
Some years ago, when my wife was a music teacher in a Chicago high school, she had accumulated enough local seniority to be assigned a beginning piano class. Instead of pianos, the students played elaborate keyboards with no speakers. The sound went to the students earphones, and the teacher could select which student's playing went to her earphones. Well, a part on one of those keyboards broke. The department chair decided that it was during Beth's class and that she should have prevented that -- or, at least, detected it at the time. I can't really argue with that; when Beth is concentrating on teaching, she can miss a lot of what else is going on around her. She would teach only general music from then on, rather than being trusted with that expensive equipment.
The next year, the teacher of second-year piano told her that it was just as well. He had problems teaching the course to a class mix of her former students and the other teacher's former students. Hers knew -- in his estimate -- twice as much.
Now my point is not that teaching twice as much piano to students is more important than preserving the equipment. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. My point is that this one teacher was the first -- and probably the last -- person in the school system to find out how much she had taught. She knew what her students learned, if not the comparison, but only teachers knew. Nobody else even asked.