In St. Louis, teachers union plays role in getting rid of bad teachers
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| Ray Cummings, right, vice president of American Federation of Teachers Local 420, speaks with Richard Simpson, president of the Cleveland High School Alumni Association, and Dorothy Kirner, then 25th Ward alderman, at a St. Louis School Board Meeting in 2006. |
ST. LOUIS • Critics of tenure say it creates an untouchable class of teachers
who can become an impediment to improving public schools.
But in St. Louis, that
protection hasn’t been enough to spare several dozen teachers from losing their
jobs.
Since 2010, more than 100
teachers have been removed from classrooms — through being fired, pushed to
retire or resign — after they were deemed ineffective by their principals.
Forty of those teachers had tenure, according to the district, a status designed
to protect educators from arbitrary firings.
Though the removals
constitute a small percentage of the 1,934 teachers districtwide, they mark a
monumental shift in the St. Louis Public Schools, where decades of bad record
keeping made firing tenured teachers nearly impossible. They also reflect a
broader effort by school district officials to elevate the level of teaching in
the city’s 72 public schools and five alternative education sites.
An unlikely partner in the
process is the teachers union.
“Remember, this isn’t the
union of our mothers,” said Ray Cummings, vice president of the American
Federation of Teachers Local 420.
Several times a week,
Cummings accompanies Jeff Spiegel, a human resources director for the St. Louis
district, to schools where they help principals document teacher performance.
They meet with teachers who struggle with such skills as classroom management
and connecting with students. Some are on the verge of burnout.
They put them on an
improvement plan.
Spiegel, the former
superintendent of Ferguson-Florissant schools, came to St. Louis in 2011 to
work solely on improving teaching in the district. Since his arrival, 340
teachers have received ratings on their evaluations poor enough to put them on
professional improvement plans, according to the district. After 18 weeks, 181
of those teachers showed significant improvement. The rest, for the most part,
were let go.
“You know what? Mediocre
is not good enough,” Spiegel said. “We have to have high performing teachers in
every classroom.”
Cummings agrees.
Rather than fighting the
school district on this, he and other union leaders are in full support. In
fact, union representatives make up five of the nine members of the
administrative panel that has recommended the dismissal of tenured teachers to
human resources.
“At one point, the union
was just there to take care of salaries, benefits and to monitor the contract,”
Cummings said. “Most members feel we should be raising the profession, making
sure the working environment is such we can improve our craft.”
THE ST. LOUIS PLAN
Steps to remove
ineffective teachers in St. Louis were unheard of five years ago, when
Superintendent Kelvin Adams arrived at a school system recently stripped of
accreditation. The task of removing an underperforming teacher was a
time-consuming one filled with bureaucracy, so principals didn’t bother.
“The district was
unaccredited, but a large number of teachers were rated satisfactory,” Adams
said. “The two don’t align themselves well.”
Together, the Special
Administrative Board, union leaders and district staff began crafting a teacher
evaluation system similar to one they’d observed in Toledo, Ohio. It provides
peer counseling for deficient teachers who are flagged by their principals and
express the will to improve. It pairs newly hired teachers with mentors who
help them navigate the urban classroom.
The intent, union and
district leaders say, is to improve teaching — not to get rid of teachers. In
fact, they say, it’s to reduce the number of teachers who leave the district
after the first year out of frustration. And it’s also to throw a lifeline to
struggling teachers who want to be better.
“We do better if we can
salvage teachers than construct a plan to get rid of them,” said Richard
Gaines, vice president of the Special Administrative Board that took over the
district in 2008. “If they could not be salvaged, then help them transfer to
other areas.”
The system they developed
is the St. Louis Plan, now administered jointly by the school district and the
union. Teachers flagged as deficient have 18 weeks to improve or face being
issued a statement of charges and a hearing in front of a hearing officer,
which can lead to termination. (A bill passed by the Legislature this year
would reduce that time period to 30 days if signed by Gov. Jay Nixon.)
Teachers who waive tenure
rights enter the St. Louis Plan. They receive coaching for up to one year. But
if they don’t show improvement, a nine-member review panel may recommend
termination.
The collaborative approach
between union leaders and district administrators provides a glimpse into the
role teachers unions may eventually play on a national level, after years of
attacks from reformers determined to eliminate tenure and open more union-free
charter schools.
In 2008, the American
Federation of Teachers surveyed a sample of its members and found that a
majority preferred their union to tackle teacher quality. Sixty-six percent
wanted their union to prioritize good teaching over job rights, and 22 percent
felt the opposite. The rest were either unsure or wanted both priorities to be
equal.
U.S. Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan has highlighted the St. Louis Plan at conferences on
labor-management collaboration.
Partnerships similar to
the one in St. Louis are beginning to appear in a few places, such as Hillsboro
County, Fla., and New Haven, Conn. In Missouri, the teachers union in North
Kansas City has contacted St. Louis officials about the collaboration.
But by and large, the
partnership is unique.
“If this is happening in
St. Louis, that’s unusual,” said Terry Moe, professor of political science at
Stanford University, and an expert on teacher unions.
THE PLAN AT WORK
Terrance Howell, a
first-year teacher at Hamilton Elementary, said the mentoring he received
through the St. Louis Plan gave him feedback he needed to improve his reading
instruction, classroom management and navigation of the school district’s
bureaucracy.
Without a mentor, “It
would have been chaotic,” Howell said. “I really wasn’t prepared for my first
year here.”
But the partnership isn’t
without detractors. Some teachers complain that they now pay dues to a union
that has failed to stand up for them. They say union leaders are enabling
school administrators to use performance as an excuse to get rid of teachers
for arbitrary reasons.
“They’ve created the
stigma that the older teachers need to be fired,” said Velma Bailey, a special
education teacher who lost her job last year at Yeatman Middle School.
Cummings says this isn’t
true.
“Older members might
expect an adversarial relationship with management,” he said.
Some teachers flagged as
deficient say they ultimately benefited from the St. Louis Plan, but that they
were treated unfairly by principals with whom they didn’t get along.
MaryBeth Chavez was
considering a career change in 2011 while teaching high school math at Clyde C.
Miller Career Academy.
“I had been beat down so
bad thinking I was not worth anything as a teacher anymore,” Chavez said. But
spending a year with the consultant teacher revived her.
“She made me see that I
had it in me to give and see where my weak points were and help me through
those weak points.” Chavez now teaches math at a different school. “I’ve never
been happier teaching.”
But Chavez and others are
nevertheless uncomfortable with union leaders working closely with principals
and district administrators on teacher performance issues. The union has a
fiduciary responsibility to have their backs, they say.
And sometimes personality
conflicts between principals and teachers can get in the way of a fair
evaluation.
“I do think it’s a good
thing, but how teachers are forced into it can be very problematic,” said
LaTosha Hayes, hired in 2006 as a fourth-grade teacher at Mallinckrodt Academy
of Gifted Instruction.
In 2011, her principal
gave her a bad review — the first in her career, Hayes said. The principal had
previously led her son’s school, where she and Hayes had their first
disagreements.
“It became I could do no right
and everything wrong,” Hayes said. “I knew it was personal.”
The amount she learned
working with the consultant teacher was invaluable, Hayes said. Having
successfully completed the St. Louis Plan, she now works at Gateway Elementary.
The St. Louis Plan does
have a cost. To provide first-year and struggling teachers with mentors and
consultants, 15 teachers leave their classrooms for three years to work in this
role. This will cost $1.65 million for the 2013-14 school year.
Funding comes from a 2012
agreement that gave the district a windfall in desegregation funds. One of the
players who forged the agreement was Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St.
Louis chapter of the NAACP.
“It was a very reasonable
investment for a very critical need,” he said of the St. Louis Plan. “Whenever
we can take teachers within the district and improve their ability to teach our
kids, it is smart and humane to give them the help they need.”
