Fire Poor Educators - An Act of Kindness

The obvious winners when we rid our schools of ineffective and/or unmotivated educators are children.  At whatever age you are now, think about spending 200 days in a square box sitting at a small desk doing endless worksheets, listening to rules, watching hours of your life slip away.  Students unlucky enough to get weak teachers not only learn less, they spend more time home "feeling sick" raising the absence rate and sitting outside the Principal's office raising time off task while sitting in detention rooms.  An elementary child spends five to seven hours a day with one teacher; a middle school or high school teacher perhaps only an hour, but they may have a hundred to two hundred students per day.

When administrators do their job and weed out the poor teachers they improve all involved three fold:

1) Replace poor teachers with great, or even good ones and the whole environment improves.  When an administrator shifts the quality of one position an entire department can function at a higher level.  Teachers must participate in department meetings, faculty meetings and curriculum team meetings, so please let it be with colleagues who give a damn.  Does the teacher contribute to the dialogue or merely vent about how lazy students are these days?

2) It really goes without saying that spending a year with a great, or even a good teacher, will be a positive experience for students as opposed to hundreds of hours with a poor or unmotivated teacher.  A long, slow year can turn a child off from their intellectual growth forever while a great teacher may motivate a child for life. 

3) Last and often overlooked is the benefit to the teacher being removed.  When an administrator recognizes the wrong person in the wrong profession, he/she actually does the employee a favor.  (Note: of course this is after attempts to improve a teacher's performance, if in fact they want to improve.)  Once a poor teacher is let go, they are free to find a career that fits their talents; one that allows for them to be excited, motivated and ultimately happy.

So the gifts abound when an administrator takes on the admittedly difficult task of letting a teacher go.  The problem I have with this "hard" task is that we (educators) are all too often willing to subject hundreds of students to a poor teacher, but feel uncomfortable about letting one go.   Remember while you're thinking how you can't fire Janet because she goes to your church or Allen 'cause he's in your fantasy football league, a poor teacher is thinking things like:
>  "I just teach so I can have my summer's off".
> "I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, so I decided to teach"
> "I can't stand that kid"
. . . and one of my personal favorites:
> "He's never going to graduate, I'm wasting my time."

I'm not anti teacher, anti education or anti teacher unions.   I am very pro teacher: I love motivated, competent teachers willing to learn for life and with the heart to care for every student regardless of their background.  I am pro public education.  I want every student to have access to a great education that can lift a life profoundly sometimes in unpredictable ways.  I am pro union - they give teachers a voice in a society that values the biggest and best funded voices.  I am anti unions saving burned out or incompetent teachers.

Above all else, I am pro child.  I aspire to see our children have access to enthusiastic, well prepared educators.  In a perfect world, people who don't really care about children and won't do the work necessary to inspire would choose a different profession.  Since a few will slip through and settle lifelessly into a classroom near you, I hope you have an administrator with courage - one who will not turn away essentially breeding complacency and negativity in a school.

When educators demand excellence of each other; when parents of even our poorest children expect experts in the field of education, when the educational leaders of our schools hire, nurture and keep the best of the best, then all children will have a chance to blossom in the garden without weeds - then we'll have an educational system we can be proud of.

PS - Superintendents, get rid of poor administrators; they poison the pool at an alarming rate!