Survey: Parents want schools accountable, bad teachers fired
By Mary C. Tillotson, Watchdog.org
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that 86 percent of Americans support greater accountability in public schools.
Specifically, they support the ability to fire poorly performing teachers, according to a survey by the Center for Education Reform.
“That’s huge. There’s no other issue that 86 percent of the public can agree on,” said CER President Kara Kerwin.
According to the survey, 37 percent of respondents said public schools can fire poorly performing teachers and 54 percent said they could not.
Evaluations can be helpful to connect teachers with appropriate professional support, said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council for Teacher Quality.
“(Evaluations) can help us make all sorts of better decisions about how we assign teachers, how we target professional development so teachers are getting support, whether it’s a teacher who might be struggling who really needs intensive support, or a really good teacher who with some support could be a really great teacher,” she said.
“High-stakes testing” evaluations are often decried as unfair to teachers — students can have “bad days” on test days, or may be well-educated but have poor test-taking abilities — but “I don’t think anybody thinks that is fair. All the systems being developed are built on multiple measures,” she said.
Other measure include classroom observations that note whether the teacher asks critical-thinking questions and varies which students are called on. Preferably, multiple people, including administrators and highly effective teachers, would observe a teacher to mitigate the effects of an administrator’s personal feelings, she said.
Both schools and teachers need to be held accountable, Kerwin said. For schools, that doesn’t just mean charter schools.
“There’s a lot of hype: ‘We should close all these bad charters.’ Why aren’t we talking about closing or turning around all the schools?” she said.
Factors like parental satisfaction and financial health should be included in rating school quality, she said.
School administrators in private and parochial schools can fire teachers much more easily than public schools, she said. But all schools need to be able to fire poorly performing teachers, she said.
“It’s difficult because of current tenure laws, and the structure of collective bargaining and organized labor, in a profession that should be treated as professional, and not labor,” she said.
In a system where parents choose schools, accountability is built in.
“If schools aren’t performing, they won’t have kids in seats,” Kerwin said. “If parents aren’t happy, they won’t have kids in seats. If schools are underperforming, they’ll close down.”
Many of those surveyed said their state legislators have the most say in education, but 69 percent rate their legislators as doing a fair or poor job, according to the survey.
Almost half — 46 percent — of parents surveyed said they needed more power in decisions about their children’s education. More than half of parents polled said they would move their child to a different school if the current school didn’t meet annual testing standards (67 percent) or if the child wasn’t being challenged (71 percent).
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted by telephone in September and October. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent. The full report can be read here.
