What if you held a turnaround and nobody came?
A followup to Konz’s piece out of Louisville: The district only got 129 applications to fill 120 slots at turnaround schools, and 50 of those were teachers who were booted in the first place.
posted by Linda Perlstein at
11:08 AM
2 Comments:
So a possible outcome is that the stronger teachers get job elsewhere, the weaker teachers re-apply, and you end up no better off than you were.
It seems to me that this sort of turnaround only works if there are real incentives for strong teachers to apply -- but the reform mindset seems to picture a world where all the poor teachers are in tenured jobs and all the good teachers are looking for work.
Thanks. People outside of schools need a glimpse of the realities that are obvious within school. Every year we hire warm bodies for positions ranging from the classroom to top administrative positions where it is obvious that the newcomer has no chance of being effective. As often as not, they get continuing contracts because nobody else applies.
Our district of $300 million, 40,000 students with 1/6th in charters, and 80 schools should be concentrating on the Long Range Plan that grew out of a 10 year report card on the last reform, as well as a shortfall of $43 million over two years. Our version of Central Falls, an average underperforming school that is majority Hispanic is being turned around, meaning that 80 teachers must be replaced. The plan was to use a technology-rich environment to attract 20-somethings from the state university just down the road. But we need another 8% cutback and we don't have money for our 300 noncontinuing teachers much less hiring outsiders.
The veteran teachers who we should try to recruit for a turnaround, however, have seen this movie before. Why transfer into life in a fishbowl?
Our other federally-mandated turnaround is much tougher politically so we’ve barely started on it. When we got into the details we found that the rules apparently required us to turnaround THREE schools, including the most politically sensitive historically Black school in the state.
Then all of a sudden, budget cutbacks meant that five schools, most involving racial politics, had to be closed. This is in addition to five schools that have to expand their school year and day without time for planning or money. And an undisclosed number of other turnarounds will be mandated. All of this has to happen in the next two months. This is happening so quickly that teachers did not hear until the last day of school that their world has changed and they have to report back on July 19.
So, with just three months of planning and with budgets changing daily, 1/4rd to 1/3rd of the district’s neighborhood secondary schools will undergo revolutionary change. What experienced teacher would volunteer for that worldwind? Worse, why would a competent principal endure all of that?
And worst still, with absolutely no warning a shell bill just became law. Almost no teachers know that they will now be evaluated by test score growth and that they just lost their seniority rights. Barely any principals are aware of the fire they’ve just been thrown into. But they are likely to have a turnover rate as bad as neighboring Texas.
We used to ask, “if you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to redo it? It would be tempting to blame the central office, but that also would be unfair. They are having so much more dumped on their plates than is humanly possible to address. Mandate the impossible and don’t be surprised when the culture of compliance asserts itself. And when asking the impossible of people when they are in the spotlight, you guarantee cover your rear end policies.
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