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By Bess Keller

Some teachers, under a professional cloud, are paid to leave their jobs.

It’s a fact little examined in schools or policy circles, and mostly unknown to the public. But when it does surface, it inevitably raises fears that teachers who should be out of the classroom entirely are helped to new teaching jobs at public expense.

“In general, I am against buyouts,” said Robert J. Shoop, the director of the Cargill Center for Ethical Leadership at Kansas State University. “There needs to be a specific rationale, and in many cases I think it’s the easy way out,” at the potential expense of students in some other district.

Defenders of the practice—administrators, union officials, and their lawyers—do so with a nod to an imperfect world. Most say that legal and social changes related to teacher misconduct have made it harder in recent years for teachers to hide illegal or immoral behavior and get new jobs.

“Buyout” options, many of those involved say, are mostly reserved for teachers who are under suspicion of inadequate performance in the classroom or unprofessional conduct, such as yelling at parents or supervisors. In other instances, safeguards for schools are built in to the settlements, such as teachers’ surrendering their licenses.

Without the agreements, proponents say, districts would use far too many resources—in money, time, and morale—shedding tenured teachers they don’t want. And such teachers who are ready to leave the profession for good or who need a new setting to prove their mettle can make those moves with less wear and tear, the defenders explain.

“It’s not bad they work out these strategic agreements,” said John Bukey, the general counsel for the California School Boards Association. “It’s good for the teacher and good for the district.”

Settlements before judgment are a feature of the overburdened American legal system in general, Mr. Bukey argued. “Bar-member revocations, personal-injury cases, contract disputes, civil rights cases—if they all went to trial, our judicial system would falter.”

Quest for Confidentiality

Like those agreements, many involving teachers include provisions that keep information about the settlement—including the complaints or accusations involved—confidential. But because such confidentiality can help teachers get new jobs and thus potentially put more students at risk, courts and legislatures have put a limit on what can be kept secret. They’ve also offered protection from defamation suits in cases where officials tell prospective employers what led to a teacher’s departure.

The limits and protections vary from state to state, however, and generally apply only where teachers have been accused of sexual or other kinds of abuse toward students, or other substantial breaches of moral character, including possession of illegal drugs.

Buyout Expenses

The costs of pursuing a disciplinary case against a tenured teacher in New York state rose from 1997 to 2004.

Note: Many districts did not supply settlement-cost information in 2004; unreported costs may be higher.

SOURCE: New York State School Boards Association

In California, for instance, a state supreme court ruling established that districts providing letters of recommendation that fail to accurately represent the harm a teacher did to students while on the job are liable for subsequent harm he or she might do. In New York and Massachusetts, alleged breaches of morality must be reported to the state education department, which can lift a teacher’s license. In Michigan, as in many other states, police must be called when a teacher is suspected of sexual misconduct with a student. Prosecution is a matter of public record, no matter the outcome.

“I love to get into our settlements language [a statement] to the effect that in the event of any request by a prospective employee, [there will be only] verification of the dates of employment and resignation,” said Kevin Harren, a senior counsel with the New York State United Teachers, an affiliate of both national teachers’ unions.

Such silence on a strictly voluntary basis, he said, is common among employers of all kinds. “[Prospective] employers are very accustomed these days to not be able to get subjective opinions from former bosses,” Mr. Harren said.

Still, some districts on some matters will not allow a confidentiality provision, he said, because officials believe it is wrong, it will leave them liable, or both.

Mr. Shoop, the expert on teacher misconduct, said in his view such provisions are never justifiable, even when—in cases of unsatisfactory performance or insubordination, for instance—a buyout itself might be.

Settlements Uncommon

Lawyers for districts and teachers, as well as school and union officials, say that while dismissals of tenured teachers through a state’s hearing process are extremely rare, settlements in which teachers receive incentives to leave are also uncommon.

In a rare look at buyouts, the Detroit Free Press found for a story last month that in the 62 districts of the Detroit metropolitan area over the past four years, 11 challenges to tenure were brought, while there were 27 buyouts in the same period. Also, according to the paper, seven of the teachers who took the buyouts later showed up on the payrolls of other Michigan districts.

Bill Raabe the director of collective bargaining for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union, said that in the 14 years he spent doing union work in Minnesota, he was involved probably in no more than one settlement with incentives a year. Philip Katz, who recently stepped down as the president of the 900-member Brookline Educators Union, in Massachusetts, recalls three such agreements during his 12-year tenure.

Statistics on resignation buyouts are almost nonexistent because no government agency keeps track of them. Nor it is easy to know how much teachers receive in such settlements or to estimate how much districts save by not pressing for a dismissal hearing.

Lawyers consulted for this story said the buyouts ranged from a few months of health insurance to payouts that, with the equivalent of salary and benefits such as health insurance and retirement contributions, topped $100,000. A survey conducted by the New York State School Boards Association in 2004 found the average settlement cost in cases where charges were filed to be about $50,000.

“Most of the time, it’s less than a year’s worth of salary, especially with younger teachers or those teachers who engage in misconduct,” said Mr. Harren of NYSUT. Sometimes, such as when there is a criminal conviction, no money changes hands, he said. Rather, the district withdraws its charges in exchange for a resignation.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Lawyers on both sides say the agreements are the result of calculations about the cost of pursuing dismissal through a hearing, which in dollar terms is often put at $100,000 to $200,000. The New York State School Boards Association survey found that the most recent average cost of a disciplinary case in the state, excluding New York City, was $129,000, and that the length of time needed for a decision was 520 days.

Those amounts are up from 1997, according to the survey, which might account for the rise in settlements, said Jay Worona, the general counsel for the school boards group. In 1997, about a third of the disciplinary cases in New York were settled after charges were brought; in 2004, it was almost half.

Expenses that districts may incur include not only lawyers’ fees, but also substitute teachers’ pay when a teacher is removed from the classroom and lost time on the job for witnesses such as a principal. With some exceptions, such as a conviction in a court of law, teachers are paid while they are waiting for their cases to be decided.

There are also costs in morale. “Very often these hearings will create hard feelings and animosity that last for a career,” Mr. Harren said.

“Both the union and the district engage in cost-benefit analysis,” said Michael E. Smith, whose law firm represents more than 250 California districts. Among the factors weighed, according to Mr. Smith, is the strength of the district’s case against the teacher.

Some of the hardest cases to win through a hearing and some of the most appropriate to settle, according to several experts, are those in which there is disagreement over the quality of a teacher’s classroom work.

A high school teacher who got a buyout in such a dispute and did not want to be named likens what happened to a no-fault divorce. In deciding to leave, he reasoned that no one was benefiting from an argument over, as he saw it, teaching philosophy. “We were divorced for irreconcilable differences,” said the teacher, who now teaches elsewhere.

Mr. Smith and other lawyers for districts see the problem not so much as the settlements, which can be reasonable solutions for all concerned if districts act responsibly, but with the elaborate job protections that make firing so costly in the first place.

The public may well be impatient in either case. “The majority of noneducators … felt teachers had too much protection,” said Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki, who wrote the story in the Detroit Free Press and said she is still getting reaction. “Many, many readers were surprised by how much it cost, either for [getting a dismissal] or a buyout, especially since we’re a state with a lot of economic problems and schools are begging for more funding.”

Better Solutions Needed

Lawyers for districts and union officials tend to agree that districts should strive to stay out of the buyout business.

“Where the conflict is too deep, there might be reason to buy someone out,” said Joan Devlin, a senior associate director of the education issues department at the American Federation of Teachers. “But it’s a practice to avoid.”

If a teacher is harmful to children, the teacher should be fired or, better, counseled out of the profession, she said.

Long before that point, Ms. Devlin and others say, school systems should engage in careful hiring, mentoring, and evaluation. Since every state has a two- to four-year probationary period for teachers before the protections of tenure kick in, they say, districts should not keep weak teachers who have not shown improvement. With a robust system of help for tenured teachers, a district should either be able to bring a teacher up to speed or have all the documentation needed to fire him or her.

Thomas Israel, the executive director of the Montgomery County Education Association, in Maryland, said he can’t recall the last teacher buyout in the 138,000-student district, where he has worked for 18 years. In that NEA affiliate, teachers in trouble for performance are evaluated and helped by a designated peer.

“As a result, we have far fewer contested actions, and those that move forward are ones where the system thinks they have a compelling case and no reason for a buyout,” he said.

As for cases of misconduct, Mr. Israel added, “the system views those harshly, and buyouts are fairly unlikely in those circumstances.”

By Michelle R. Davis 

 

When Chip Kimball took over as the chief technology officer in Washington state’s Lake Washington school district more than a decade ago, he quickly realized that his boss, the superintendent, knew little about technology.

That knowledge gap, says Kimball, meant the district was buying very expensive hardware, like Ethernet switches, when less-expensive technology would have worked. “The tech team was overspecifying switches,” asking for all kinds of capabilities that weren’t really necessary, he says. “Had [the superintendent] known the right questions to ask, he probably could have gotten an indicator of that.”

Now that Kimball himself is the superintendent of the 23,500-student Lake Washington School District No. 414, in Redmond, Wash., the home of the Microsoft Corp., he sees firsthand how important it is for district leaders to understand technology.

“Many superintendents say, ‘I don’t do technology, and that’s why I hire somebody.’ But they get led down the primrose path, and that’s why it blows up on them,” says Kimball, who became the superintendent in June of 2007.

Kimball is one of what appears to be only a handful of district superintendents who have experience as chief technology officers. Most technology experts say superintendents, in general, are sorely lacking in both the basics of using technology and its applications in the classroom and throughout the district.

“The people who are in charge of facilitating schools’ transition to the digital global economy—superintendents and principals—are typically the least knowledgeable about the digital global economy,” says Scott McLeod, the founding director of the Center for Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, or CASTLE, and the coordinator of the educational administration program at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. “It’s scary.”

‘Ask the Right Questions’

But superintendents don’t need to know the details about bits and bytes, experts say. That’s the role of a chief technology officer. What they do need to know is enough about technology to ask the right questions and be able to understand the instructional value of technology—something many technology directors aren’t trained to do.

“They don’t need to know the nuts and bolts, but they have to know when it makes more sense to go to a technology solution instead of a people solution,” McLeod says of superintendents. “They need to know what questions to ask about the school network, but they don’t need to know how it runs.”

“The people who are in charge of facilitating schools’ transition to the digital global economy—
superintendents and principals—are typically the least knowledgeable about the digital global economy. It’s scary.”

Scott McLeod

Founding Director, Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education

A technology survey of 125 superintendents and administrators in five Southern states done last year by Robert J. Hancock, an assistant professor of educational leadership and technology at Southeastern Louisiana University, found that school leaders are lacking in technology training. More than 96 percent of those surveyed said they were unaware of national, state, or local technology standards, and 88 percent said they had not attended a technology-training session for administrators in the past three years.

“With the superintendent as the chief decisionmaker, they’re going to rely on the expertise of the technology director, but often that person is not trained in administration,” says Hancock, who is working to launch the International Center for Technology in Administrative Practice, based at the university, in Hammond, La. “Optimal decisionmaking does not occur, because you might have a superintendent who doesn’t even know how to operate a PalmPilot handing over decisionmaking to an IT person who wouldn’t understand instructional concerns.”

Using technology to a district’s best advantage is an issue that spans every department—and superintendents need to consider that scope, says William R. Thomas, the director of educational technology for the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Education Board. Superintendents, he says, should always “ask the question: How can technology play a role in this? How can it improve student performance, help a teacher do their job more effectively and efficiently?”

Above all, superintendents need to have a vision for how technology improves district operations on every level, says Kimball. “If a superintendent doesn’t understand enough about the tools to articulate and create the vision, they’ll never be able to move the system along and prepare kids for the 21st century.”

‘Develop a Skill’

But where should superintendents get their training?

Few administrator-training programs include courses on using technology effectively, and national professional organizations have lagged in tackling the matter, says Don Knezek, the chief executive officer of the Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, which has educational technology standards for administrators.

Technology Tips

To improve their knowledge of educational technology, school leaders should:

1: Check with national professional organizations to see what types of ed. tech. professional-development programs are offered and how they might fit into a busy schedule.

2: Contact technology-oriented education organizations to determine what type of ed. tech. training they offer.

3: Foster a relationship with a superintendent who has a high level of technology knowledge and skills; share tips and ideas.

4: Develop technology skills around a specific task. Pick a project and use technology to complete it.

5: Use a technology expert within your district as a mentor.

6: Understand how technology fits into your overall vision for your district, and communicate that clearly to administrators and teachers.

“There’s no question that professional organizations need to step up,” Knezek says. ISTE is doing some technology-leadership training but not reaching many superintendents, he says.

In his survey, Hancock of Southeastern Louisiana University found that 98 percent of those questioned said their primary professional organization did not meet their technology-training needs.

Keith R. Krueger, the chief executive officer of the Washington-based Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN, says his group is looking closely at what superintendents need to know about technology now, and will publicly issue its findings later this year, when it will release a technology toolkit. So far, Krueger says, focus groups have found that many superintendents think of technology as “not my responsibility.”

“We need to be articulating a clear vision around school reform, or better yet how to transform our school systems,” he says.

But talking about technology isn’t engaging for many superintendents, Krueger says, so those who care about the subject need to find a way to reach the majority. “We need to make the case that technology links to their mission, which is ultimately about learning,” he says. “What does it enable us to do that we couldn’t do before?”

McLeod of CASTLE says his program offers workshops, seminars, and other training for superintendents.

The problem, says Kimball, the Lake Washington schools chief, is that superintendents often don’t have time to take classes or even take advantage of online professional-development opportunities. He believes superintendents who know they’re lacking in technology training need to put pressure on themselves to “become personally productive with technology.”

His advice is for a superintendent to find somebody within the district to be a mentor, or talk to high-performing fellow superintendents to gather information. Kimball also recommends targeting a project and tackling it using technology. That could mean using a superintendent’s blog to communicate with parents or staff members, doing a financial analysis with an Excel spreadsheet, crafting an effective PowerPoint presentation, or creating podcasts of speeches.

“Develop a skill around a task,” Kimball says.

And when it comes to technology, he says, superintendents must model good technology behavior.

“People watch everything a superintendent does: where they sit, what they do,” he says. “They’re also watching what kind of technology a superintendent uses, and how they manage it.”

Michelle R. Davis is the senior writer for Education Week’s Digital Directions.

By JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: January 21, 2008

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests.

The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools, student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap between white and minority students will never be closed. Other school systems, including those in Dallas and Houston as well as in the whole state of Tennessee, are also using student performance and improvement as factors in evaluating teachers.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has known about the experiment for months, but has not been told which schools are involved, because the Education Department has promised those principals confidentiality.

Randi Weingarten, the union president, said she had grave reservations about the project, and would fight if the city tried to use the information for tenure or formal evaluations or even publicized it. She and the city disagree over whether such moves would be allowed under the contract.

“There is no way that any of this current data could actually, fairly, honestly or with any integrity be used to isolate the contributions of an individual teacher,” Ms. Weingarten said. “If one permitted this, it would be one of the worst decisions of my professional life.”

New York invited principals from hundreds of elementary and middle schools with sufficient annual testing data to participate in the program, which will produce an elaborate stream of data on 2,500 teachers.

In 140 schools — a tenth of the roughly 1,400 in the system — teachers are being measured on how many students in their classes meet basic progress goals, how much student performance grows each year, and how that improvement compares with the performance of similar students with other teachers.

In another 140 schools, principals are being asked to make subjective evaluations of roughly the same number of teachers so officials can see if the two systems produce widely disparate results. New York City schools employ roughly 77,000 teachers. In all 280 schools, the principals agreed to participate in the program.

Deputy Chancellor Cerf said that how students performed on tests would not be the only factor considered in any system to rate teachers. All decisions will include personal circumstances and experiences, he said, but the point will be to put a focus on whether or not students are improving.

“This isn’t about how hard we try,” Mr. Cerf said. “This is about however you got here, are your students learning?”

Ms. Weingarten said the system was not needed. “Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective,” she said. “These tests were never intended and have never been validated for the use of evaluating teachers.”

The experiment is in line with the city’s increasing use of standardized test scores to measure whether students are improving, and to judge school quality. A new bonus program for teachers and principals, as well as the letter grading system for schools unveiled last fall, are all linked to improvement in scores. Nationally, too, school systems are increasingly relying on these measures to judge schools.

Virtually all education experts agree that finding high-quality teachers is critical to improving student learning, particularly in high-poverty urban areas, where good teachers are usually more difficult to find. Recent research has found that the best teachers can help struggling students catch up to more advanced students within three years.

But experts are grappling with how to determine what makes a good teacher. Neither graduate programs in education schools nor previous academic records are reliable predictors, they say. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires that districts place a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom, which typically means one who has completed a certification program, but this, too, is not necessarily a good indicator of quality.

“It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard, who is conducting several research projects on teacher quality in New York City, and who is involved in the new effort.

Mr. Kane said there was little evidence that teachers with the “right paper qualifications” were any more effective than those without them. “But most school districts spend very little time trying to assess how good teachers are in their first couple of years, when it is most important,” he said.

Nationwide, more than 95 percent of teachers receive tenure within their first three years of teaching, according to some studies. And once teachers receive tenure, it is extremely difficult to have them removed from classrooms.

In some sense, New York’s effort to judge teachers partly on their students’ improvement is a logical extension of the grading system for schools that was unveiled last fall, although officials adamantly say they have no plans to assign letter grades to individual teachers.

“I don’t think anyone here would embrace the formulaic use of even the most sophisticated instrument — you get tenure if this, you don’t get tenure if that,” Mr. Cerf said.

He added that the new effort was just one of several ways in which the city was exploring how to evaluate and improve teacher quality. In recent months, city officials have begun training new lawyers to help principals navigate the considerable red tape required to remove inadequate teachers.

They have increased recruiting efforts to attract talented teachers to hard-to-staff schools. And they are allowing schools to earn merit bonus pools to distribute to teachers based on test scores.

“This should simply be one more way to think about things,” said Frank A. Cimino, the principal of P.S. 193 in Brooklyn, who said he was participating in the experiment. “It is going to tell you some things you don’t know, but it will miss the other things that go on in a classroom.”

William Sanders, a researcher in North Carolina who was one of the first to begin evaluating teachers and schools based on student test score improvements, said that while such a system could be used to make broad judgments, it was difficult to use it with precision enough to find differences among teachers who are simply average.

“Can you distinguish the top teachers? Yes,” Mr. Sanders said. “Can you distinguish the bottom teachers? The answer is yes, too. But it would be risky to make decisions using information at the classroom level for teachers who are just in the middle. You might miss a lot that way.”

The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors.

Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

The two-page report for each teacher examines information both from one year and over three years. The information also compares the teacher with all other teachers in the city, and with teachers who have similar classrooms and experience levels. The second part of the report measures how well a teacher does with students with different skill levels, showing, for example, whether the teacher seems to work well with struggling students.

Mr. Cerf said officials expected to decide by the “early summer” whether they would use the analysis to evaluate individual teachers for tenure or other decisions, and if so, how they would do so. Such a decision would undoubtedly open up a legal battle with the teacher’s union.