TEACH to THINK (The REST will follow) (DO the RIGHT THING Today for the Kids)

OUR EDITORIAL

Teaching for success

Success of new contract may depend on district’s authority to remove ineffective teachers

Today thousands of Detroit Federation of Teachers union members will pack Cobo Center to hear the details of what is supposed to be a transformational new bargaining agreement. Detroit’s students, trapped in a failing system, cannot wait for incremental changes that don’t change the status quo in the school district.

Detroit Public Schools’ Emergency Financial Manag er Robert Bobb is calling the new contract a “very aggres sive agreement with respect to reform.” We hope he’s right.

Certainly the teachers’ union president, Keith Johnson, deserves kudos for urging his members to embrace some accountability and a deeper commitment to professional development.

There is much to applaud in this proposed agreement. The union is asking its members to ratify a pact that includes teacher eval uations for the first time and a school-based bonus system to get incentives for improved educator performance.

On the cost side, the three-year proposed contract proposes savings of more than $30 million in expenses and $28 million in health care costs.

This is very good news for a school district on the brink of bankruptcy. However, the contract details disclosed suggest the pro posed reforms may not give the district enough authority to remove ineffective teach ers from the classroom in a timely way.

That would be tragic. Detroit’s children are among the nation’s lowest academic achiev ers. Other big cities struggle with high rates of poverty, yet they still produce on average higher-performing children and higher gradu ation rates.

One of Detroit’s greatest barriers to im proving student learning is teacher seniority, which has prevented the district from staffing classrooms with the most effective teachers, rather than those with the most time clocked.

Bobb has supported end ing reliance on seniority, but in a Friday statement by Bobb to The News, that goal ap peared to be watered down.

He laid out a murky process that may or may not rid the district of bad teachers and save another generation of children from losing out on high-quality classroom instruction.

Bobb said under the proposal Detroit will create a high priority school district within the overall district specifically for its chronically failing schools. Teachers who want to teach in such schools must be district-certified. Certifi cation would require a teacher to complete a new professional development program.

Over time, each certified teacher’s perform ance would be evaluated. Bobb says low-per forming educators eventually will become “teachers-at-large” who cannot teach in high priority schools or cannot be allowed to use their seniority to “bump” less senior teachers in other schools as they can do now.

Improving Detroit’s teacher quality — the No. 1 predictor of student achievement, re search shows — largely will depend upon the new contract’s evaluation process. Details of that process have not been released by the district or the union.

Parents, taxpayers and state leaders should ask: Will the school district have the legal power to fire below-average teachers who are cheating their students of a good education?

We hope details of the proposed contract will show that it can do just that.