A good principal at every school and a good teacher in every classroom. That's the formula for success Baltimore schools CEO Andrés Alonso has been working to achieve as the city's school reform effort gains momentum, and now that effort has been endorsed by an encouraging report from the American Civil Liberties Union that says that changes in state law could bring improvements even faster.
The study, carried out for the ACLU by the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, calls for changes to help the city to recruit good teachers and weed out bad ones. Among its recommendations are allowing good teachers to transfer from one school to another regardless of tenure, requiring that all teachers receive annual evaluations, and developing better mentoring programs for new teachers and those who are struggling in the classroom.
The report also calls for ending the practice of keeping ineffective teachers who can't find classroom assignments on the payroll indefinitely and for offering financial incentives so that teachers planning to resign or retire notify school officials far enough in advance that principals can recruit high-quality replacements for their jobs.
The ACLU report, which was partially funded by the Abell Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a raft of practical proposals that build on the modest reforms regarding teacher evaluations and tenure adopted by the General Assembly this year. And it notes that Baltimore already gives its principals more authority over budgeting and staffing than most school districts nationwide — as well as greater responsibility for results as measured by student performance.
But for Baltimore to keep the momentum of reform going, it will need to give principals even greater flexibility in staffing decisions that are now governed by state law. For example, Maryland gives teachers until mid-July to tell the city whether they plan to retire or resign. By then, most teachers who are looking for positions have already found jobs, and the best of them have been snapped up by other schools.
The ACLU recommends offering monetary incentives to encourage teachers to notify schools districts of their intentions by April 1 — and penalizing those who don't. It would also prohibit teachers who become eligible for retirement in the middle of the school year from leaving the job until the term ends.
The report also calls for changing the state law requiring that teachers whose jobs are cut because of declines in enrollment at their schools be kept on the district's payroll indefinitely. Usually they fill desk jobs at headquarters until they're hired by another school. But while excellent teachers have no trouble finding other assignments, those who are considered ineffective can languish for years shuffling paperwork in the central office. The report says such teachers should be given a year to find another assignment, then face dismissal.
No doubt some of these measures will be opposed by Maryland teachers unions. The unions signed on reluctantly, if at all, to the reforms on teacher evaluations and tenure passed by the General Assembly early this year in an effort to make Maryland more competitive for up to $250 million in federal Race to the Top school aid funds. The ACLU's proposals go well beyond those measures, but they also represent the direction Maryland education as a whole needs to go in if the state is to meet the educational challenges of the 21st century.
In the meantime, there are steps Baltimore can take on its own to improve the quality of classroom instruction. The city does a good job recruiting new teachers with strong academic credentials, but it does less well retaining them over the long term. Only 65 percent of its new hires are still on the job three years later. The city needs to get a better handle on why teachers leave and devise strategies for retaining more of them.
The system also needs to pay more attention to helping new teachers get their footing. The report says Baltimore must reinvent its teacher mentoring program by employing full-time veteran teachers to work with newcomers in the classroom for their first eight weeks on the job, and also to reduce new teachers' course loads the first semester to give them more time to observe the classrooms of their more experienced colleagues.
None of this is rocket science. Baltimore's school reform efforts have had notable success on the macro level of rising average tests scores and the creation of innovative new transformation and charter schools. But the most important part of the educational process takes place on the classroom level, between individual teachers and students. That is where excellence begins, and there's no reason Baltimore shouldn't lead the state in making it happen.