A relatively new Stanford University- Associated Press survey is published in today’s Seattle Times in which the main spin presented by the AP is the statistic that 78 percent of respondents say they think bad public school teachers should be easier to fire.
(Not surprisingly, this survey was funded by the Gates Foundation, which is currently obsessed with public school teachers.)
Oddly, the survey was conducted three months ago, on Sept. 23-30, and is only getting released now.
Of course, many of us also believe that bad school superintendents, bad school board members, bad secretaries of education, bad CEOs of banks and corporations that send our national and international economy spiraling into a second Great Depression should also be easier to fire, but no one has surveyed us on that yet.
I’d be curious to know how many respondents could answer the question: What exactly is the process for firing bad teachers? My guess is that most people haven’t a clue what the process is, why it exists, what the responsibilities of school principals are in all this. But the American public has been regaled with the repeated mantra of the ed reformers’ teacher-trashing talking points via the enabling mainstream media that this is a fact, so the public has absorbed it.
Interestingly, though, only 35 percent of respondents believe that “bad teachers” are a significant problem in our public schools. I would agree and add that, even the most rabid ed reformers have failed to prove that we have a rash of “bad teachers” in our schools.
Also, 57 percent believe teachers are underpaid.
And 51 percent believe that teachers should be allowed to strike, even though 80 percent of the respondents have no connection to any type of union.
But it’s when you get to the bottom of the survey that you find some of the most interesting data: a whopping 92 percent of the respondents have no kids under the age of 18 — and possibly no kids at all.
What?
DM7. ARE YOU THE PARENT OR GUARDIAN OF ONE OR MORE CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 18, OR NOT?
BASE: IF NOT PARENT, DK, REF IN Q15 (719)
ALL
RESPONDENTS
===========
YES 7%
NO 92%
DON’T KNOW *
REFUSED 1%
And 73 percent of the respondents live in suburban or rural areas.
DM5. WHICH ONE OF THE FOLLOWING BEST DESCRIBES WHERE YOU LIVE?
ALL
RESPONDENTS
===========
URBAN AREA 25%
SUBURBAN AREA 41%
RURAL AREA 32%
DON’T KNOW 1%
REFUSED 1%
In other words, these are the opinions of people with either no kids at all or no school-age kids, so they may have no experience with or connection to the subject matter of this survey.
And the majority of these respondents do not live in urban areas — where the greatest concentration of public school populations are located.
But wait — there’s more!
Eighty-four percent of respondents identify themselves as Christian.
Eighty percent are white.
And then there’s this detail: the questionnaire includes “Negro” as a racial category.
What year are we in? 1952?
DM18. WHAT RACE OR RACES DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF TO BE?
BASE: NOT HISPANIC IN DM16 (931)
ALL
RESPONDENTS
===========
WHITE, CAUCASIAN 80%
BLACK, AFRICAN-AMERICAN, 13%
NEGRO
AMERICAN INDIAN, ALASKA 2%
NATIVE
ASIAN INDIAN 1%
NATIVE HAWAIIAN *
FILIPINO *
JAPANESE *
OTHER ASIAN *
SOME OTHER RACE 4%
(SPECIFY)
DON’T KNOW *
REFUSED 1%
The nation’s largest school districts are located in urban areas, most American children attend public schools, and a large percentage of children in urban public schools are African American. Does this survey in any real way represent the opinions of these families? I’d say no.
(UPDATE: This paragraph has been updated from its original version, modifying my earlier statement that most schools are located in urban centers.)
So is this a fair sampling of an informed public with a stake in public education?
Or something else.
What exactly is the point of this Stanford University, Associated Press, Gates-funded, strangely-skewed-sampling, education survey?
I’m filing this survey under our new tag of “data-schmata.”
Meanwhile, memo to the Seattle Times: In the interest of accuracy, you need to change your headline to:
Poll: Most white, Christian rural and suburban folk with no school-age kids want easier way to fire bad teachers
An overwhelming majority of white, Christian, rural and suburban childless Americans are frustrated that it’s too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, while most also believe that teachers aren’t paid enough, a new strangely sampled poll shows.
–s.p.
Seattle Education 
@ Frederika: I agree completely that admins are not doing their jobs to counsel out marginally successful and even unsuccessful teachers early on.
Additionally, the next level of management is not doing their jobs to weed out unsuccessful principals. It’s statistically impossible that there are only 2 bad principals out of 90 in Seattle Public Schools.
Also, it’s easy to laugh off Rate My Teachers, but it certainly seems to be accurate in identifying the 10% who need to be counseled out the 10% who are stellar and at the college level, it’s a great tool the kids can use if they register early for their classes and make a beeline for the best.
It’s not so easy in the K-12 system to do the same. In 2008-2009 one of my sons had a HS math teacher that couldn’t (I mean COULD NOT) teach math. He’d been moved around for 10 years and had been on 2 performance improvement plans. All the while, the kids in his classroom suffered – for TEN years. Well, I wound up having a little stand in at the school office after not having any success getting my kid out of that classroom. The student filing mail in the school office looked over to me and said the teacher I was protesting was the worst teacher in the school. I thanked her for her support and frankness. This experience led me to talk to more kids about their teachers – something I’m still doing to this day. Last night, I asked a group of kids at the dinner table to think about all the teachers they had in school over the years and to think about how many they considered terrible. That number was staggeringly high – well over half. I think the kids know. So, my 10% number is probably too low, but for now I’ll stick with it.
I don’t think we’re going to suddenly get principals who have the competencies or inclination to manage their teaching staff, but while we’re waiting for that to happen, I think it’s worth listening to what the kids and parents have to say. I don’t need Gates’ value-added anything and I don’t think any testing anywhere is going to identify the bottom 10% any more accurately than a simple student survey. If you look at the factors that Rate My Teachers uses, it certainly comes clean as an evaluation tool absent any other evaluation tools. I’ll take that kind of direct assessment of sorts any day on both the the student end or the teacher end, I could go for more direct assessment. I do believe that taking the information and going right to the counselor and principal and refusing to put your kid in those classrooms is the way to go. But I don’t stop there because if I do, then only the kids with no advocates will get that teacher or those teachers.
It only took one call to the teacher that for 10 years could not teach math. I asked him to resign. He did.
Oooo. I just reread Kate’s post. Scary idea of having the PTSA help get rid of teachers. C’mon. Are you a teacher, Kate? One false step with Mrs. McGillicuddy or her son Jonathan, and you’re a goner?
And, I am not at all comfortable with relying on Rate My Teacher as a source of evalution, even in the broadest sense.
I find Kate’s 10% estimate pretty high for most schools–and I am familiar with many, many schools in my little state of Delaware. I would be more comfortable with 5% of teachers in many (but not most) schools as ones who definitely could use some help and attention. Some re-education and re-alignment. Unfortunately, many are ignored by the building admins.
My contention is that teachers do not suddenly go bad, like milk. I contend that marginally successful teachers are allowed to pass on to tenure by admins who are not doing their jobs. If you are not demonstrating genuine competence by the end of year three under probationary status (pre-tenure) then you need to be counselled out of teaching. This ain’t happenin’.
I take unbrage with the term “bad teachers.” I refuse to use it. It is virutally useless in describing the myriad ways that a teacher can be less than satisfactory. This is not just a PC thing with me.
What do the following phrases mean? Bad girl, bad dog, bad weather, bad smell, bad breath, bad news, etc. Get the picture? Bad teacher can mean all kinds of badnesses: ineffective, incompetent, negligent, uneducated, old-fashioned, uncaring, inefficient, disorganized, unprepared–the list could go on and on.
I also refuse to use “bad teacher” because it is a catch-phrase of the ed-reformer crowd–the multitudes of corporate, business, and lawyer types who somehow have convinced themselves, and many others, that they know how to fix public schools. That would, of course, be “bad schools.”
One more thing: If we truly believe that ALL children can learn, which I have always believed and embodied in my teaching–even before it was mandated (LOL)–then surely, we can also imagine that many problem teachers are retrainable, fixable, able to be rehabilitated.
I know of some less than stellar teachers, but in 39 years, there have been damned few of them. I have also worked with a few principals who took the time and did what it takes to first offer improvement opportunities and then to correctly and fairly exit these folks from the profession.
I love this post through and through!
My current idea for one way to “fix” the schools is to give each of them an ombudsman, as well as a caretaker who lives on the premises.
Thanks for asking about the management side of the equation where the responsibility should be but isn’t. There are no reasons why bad teachers can’t be weeded out by management. They just won’t do it.
There are bad teachers. Probably about 10 percent of them are completely useless. One glance at Rate My Teachers will tell you who they are. I’m sure that sounds insane, but I looked at the Roosevelt HS Rate My Teacher sheet and it’s completely accurate as far as I can tell. College kids use it to avoid the bad teachers because they can. K-12 kids are just stuck in whatever classroom they get assigned to. If the teacher rates less than a 2 they’re in that 10% and hopeless. Anyway, the principals could get these folks gone since there is a process – albeit drawn out – for getting them gone, yet they don’t do it.
I don’t want to make believe there aren’t plenty of bad teachers, I just want to rely on the principals to get them gone, but there are lots of bad principals (though only 2 got bad reviews last year out of 90) and of course there’s the bad superintendent and possibly the bad school directors. Management seems untouchable.
I think students & parents could get the bad teachers gone (and the bad management and bad curricula and ….) if they were instructed on the protocol for expediting that instead of having their focus being directed to fundraising. Maybe something the PTSA could get involved in if they got their own heads out of the sand? Why isn’t PTSA a useful organization in this way? They actually defend bad teachers, bad principals, bad curricula and bad textbooks if not directly then indirectly by focusing on issues that are not primary.
Meanwhile, do everything you can to keep kids out of the classrooms with bad teachers. Not just your own, but other kids. That means stepping out of the quiet and polite role and insisting kids get teachers who can teach. That includes insisting on a principal who can manage. With a 2 year education admin masters, you too could collect $125K and be a principal. Yikes.
ROFL! Negro?!
Seriously, though, who is Gates trying to fool now? Oh yeah, the press.
Once again, the press gets handed a press release and just runs with it. What ever happened to real reporting?
Oh yeah, that’s what we do.
Dora
Now, that’s what I call BREAKING NEWS–film at eleven. Just like here in Delaware when middle and upper-middle class suburbanites (a.k.a. white folks) denounce and vote against school referendums–the only way for our schools to get additonal funding. Why should they care–they don’t have kids in school any more–or they never had kids in school.
Fire all the bad teachers. Close all of the failing schools. Give everyone vouchers. That should fix the problem.