Teacher Accountability, Among Other Things

I’m beginning to feel like a broken record, but articles like this invite me to reiterate some critical points.  I really hope folks aren’t looking at the situation in Central Falls and thinking the takeaway is, “Firing teachers is a school turnaround strategy.”  It’s not.

Reconstituting the staff at a school may be PART of a turnaround strategy, but it’s certainly not sufficient to drive change.  Often the culture is so toxic in a failing school that a measure this extreme can be useful to signal a “New Day.”  (And even when all of the teachers are asked to leave a failing school, they should be given an opportunity to re-interview to take part in the transformation, with NO guarantee of a future placement in that school.)  But unless there is a simultaneous change in leadership, rethinking of the academic program, and clearing of the bureaucratic underbrush to enable making decisions closer to children, the academic results are unlikely to improve.

I go back to the Readiness Triangle.  You have to pull multiple levers at once to enable school change.  The instructional staff is one lever, but there are a bunch of others.