Obama and the trustees say, "Fire 'em all!"

The Central Falls' school board's recent decision to fire all the teachers at Central Falls High School (in Rhode Island, USA) in order to turn the school around may make quite a few people happy. [Check out the reaction from the folks at Newsbusters.] It smacks of dramatic, even heroic, action to save a community from a chronically underperforming school. If all the efforts, all the training, all the money that pours (so the thinking goes) into this school hasn't fixed things, it must be the teachers.

But there is something wrong, something fundamentally twisted about the approach. Before I get to my outrage, let me back up a few steps.

I am in my 19th year as a teacher. I work in a very successful (overseas) school (by almost all measures), but I have worked in some institutions that failed on every professional level I can imagine. I have seen bad teachers teach, I have gritted my teeth as I sat across from them in faculty meetings and I have sought refuge in my classroom work to avoid the many adults who ran the school.

Now a little about the firings...The federal government in the United States has tied federal funding to four possible options for the lowest performing five percent of schools. As described in the Christian Science Monitor,

[Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan] is forcing states to identify the bottom 5 percent of their schools and take one of four actions with each one: closure; takeover by an independent organization; transformation; or turnaround, which calls for firing all the teachers and rehiring no more than half of them in the fall.

Central Falls obviously chose the latter option. We all know the apparent reason why. The school was by most measures not working. But it is still a twisted approach to fixing schools.

But both the architects and the implementers of this policy forget one thing. I would be willing to bet that in almost every case, those fired teachers put more time and energy into the success of the students at that failing school than anyone else (aside from their families) in their lives. They engaged in a seemingly Sisyphean task working within a system they did not make.

The school, the trustees, the Department of Education and President Obama ignore this completely. They do not try to find a solution to the problem of a bad teacher or some bad teachers. Instead they slap in the face every single member of the faculty. They didn't set the funding rate, they didn't build the building, they didn't build the housing, they didn't create a job policy, they didn't establish policing procedures, they didn't create poverty programs. But almost every one of them came to classrooms that reflected those policies, or lack of them, made over many years by many layers of government. Most of them gave everything they could to help fix a bad situation.

And in return, they got fired. Publicly.

Why? Because it's easier to fire 'em all than it is to make a real change and fix a bad tenure system. Because itLOOKS like someone is doing something to a public that wants better schools. Because they don't know how to fix schools that don't work for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with what happens inside the building.

The kind folks at Newsbusters (who also happen to be quite pleased that Starbucks doesn't mind letting gun owners in some areas openly carry their weapons while they sip a latté) may blame teacher unions for tenure rules, but we know they negotiated for those rules with districts and trustees (i.e. they didn't make them).

Get rid of bad teachers - I don't mind. Fix bad schools - I'll be thrilled. Just remember who has been on the front lines while you have been coming up with your plans. Not just the new plan but every other plan that has or hasn't addressed the problems that all end up inside the walls of a school.