Teacher contract rules on staffing shortchange urban education

According to a report issued by the non-profit organization Nov. 16, “Contractual staffing rules strip urban schools of their ability to hire and keep the best possible teachers, treat new teachers as expendable, and result in poor performers being passed from school to school.”

“Fully 40 percent of all school vacancies were filled by incumbent teachers over whom schools had little or no choice in hiring,” states Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules in Urban Teachers Union Contracts.

“As a result,” the group concludes, “these mandates effectively prevent school principals from focusing on quality, school fit, or the needs of the children in each classroom when making a significant portion of their staffing decisions.”

The study looks at five urban school districts and examines the impact of provisions addressing “voluntary transfer” and “excessed teachers” in their collective bargaining agreements.

“Voluntary transfers” are incumbent teachers with seniority rights who want to move to another school. “Excessed teachers” are teachers whose positions are cut from their school, often due to enrollment or budget changes.

According to the report, staffing rules often require other schools to hire these incumbent teachers, even if they are not the right match for the job. As a result, urban schools often are forced to hire teachers regardless of students’ needs.

“These contract rules thwart any sustained attempt to significantly improve teacher quality -- the single greatest school-based factor in increasing student achievement,” the report says.

Such practices have other unintended consequences, the report points out. For example, administrators often use these rules to pass poorly performing teachers from school to school, rather than terminating them.

Among the five districts studied, which together employ more than 70,000 teachers, only four tenured teachers were terminated for poor performance in one year.

Due to the low success rate of teacher termination proceedings, about 40 percent of the principals surveyed in one district and 25 percent in another admitted that they had urged poorly performing teachers to transfer or sent “excessed teachers” to another school “as a way to get them out of their school.”

Because these rules are based on seniority, the report says, they result in novice teachers being treated as expendable, regardless of their impact on student achievement. “With baby boomers aging out and school systems spending millions on recruitment, these rules place the positions of new teachers in constant jeopardy and prevent schools from implementing and sustaining meaningful improvements.”

“You cannot hold principals accountable for student achievement and not let them pick the team to get the job done. No CEO could run a company that way,” says Michelle Rhee, chief executive officer and president of The New Teacher Project. Restrictive contracts “fail to serve students’ best interests and ultimately fail to serve teachers.”

The report offers the following recommendations:

• Reform transfer and excess timelines. Require priority consideration for voluntary transfers and excessed teachers but have these reviews earlier in the year. Allow schools to consider internal and external hires equally after April 15.

• Reform transfer and excess placement. Stop forcing voluntary transfers and excessed teachers on schools where they are not a good fit for the job. If no schools want to hired excessed teachers, explore options such as the creation of a reserve pool for a specified time period.

• Eliminate provisions that systematically disadvantage novice teachers. Better protect the jobs of essential, high-performing novice teachers.

• Create new evaluation and dismissal processes. Put in place requirements that provide ample protection to teachers but don’t support incompetence.