Insanity Defense
With the release of the National Center on Teacher Quality report grading states on how well they retain effective teachers and dismiss ineffective teachers comes a timely case study in the St. Petersburg Times.
According to Pinellas County school officials, middle school math teacher Curtis Brown “didn’t prepare adequate lesson plans. Didn’t teach the assigned subject matter. Didn’t use the required teaching software. And didn’t improve despite repeated attempts by administrators to help him.” After jumping through various regulatory hurdles, and with the concurrence of an administrative law judge, the district was able to fire Brown.
As the story shows, getting rid of a teacher on grounds of incompetence is almost unheard of in Florida, but that isn’t the most interesting aspect of the story.
Brown’s union, the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, hired an attorney, Mark Herdman, to represent him. Herdman’s defense strategy was, well, fascinating:
“Herdman, Brown’s attorney, argued in court filings that the district could not prove the teacher was incompetent because its evaluation of him was not based primarily on scores from the FCAT or similar tests, which he said state law requires. Other courts have ruled against districts on those grounds, but state lawmakers made statutory changes a few years ago. Pinellas officials said those changes broadened the types of evidence that could be used to prove incompetence.”
You read that correctly. The union-assigned attorney argued that Brown was not incompetent because the district hadn’t evaluated him based “primarily” on student test scores.
It took about five minutes to find this quote from a policy brief by Arizona State University’s Gene V. Glass for the Education Policy Studies Laboratory:
“Florida teachers have generally reacted negatively to the plan to evaluate them based in large part on their students’ test performance: Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, remarked, ‘It’s a bad pay system based on a bad set of criteria.’”
But let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe bad really means “bad.”
