The New York Times reported that “Michelle Rhee, the reform-minded chancellor who took over the District of Columbia public schools three years ago, on Friday fired 241 teachers, or 5 percent of the district’s total.” This seems pretty extreme and as you can imagine, the teacher unions are all up in arms about it as well. However, if your child has ever had a teacher that was not competent then you know that you want that teacher to quit impacting kids in a negative way. We always want him or her gone. In a district the size of DC I can imagine that 5 percent were incompetent.

I can also imagine that if the standards were higher in most places and if administrators followed through, then more teachers would be fired every year due to incompetence. Before all of my teacher friends light me up on this. You know that you have colleagues that are not cutting it and they are making it harder  for the good teachers to get their job done.

I have no doubt that there may be a teacher or two that were doing better than the numbers indicated. I know that they are working with some pretty raw materials in DC schools. I also know they signed up to teach those kids. If they wanted it to be easy, they signed up for the wrong district. If you sign up to teach in a district with problems, then you still sign up to deliver. Go somewhere you can be effective and where you can make a living the way you want to. In DC, they have high standards and low tolerance. Take Heed.

As well, the unions are up in arms about the teachers not getting a chance to improve and that there was not enough staff development invested into teachers. I am a big believer in staff development since that is what I do for a living. However, teachers are hired to be competent from the first day. Schools offer classes to make them better or to bring everyone onto the same page of new and different initiatives. If you are not cutting it in the basics then there is not enough staff development to make them effective. The other problem I have with the unions being up in arms is what are THEY doing to help this teacher be more effective and in turn, more employable? When I was an administrator who had to fire incompetent teachers I found that some teacher organizations were way more interested in sword rattling than in actually helping the teacher that was paying their dues. When it was inevitable and extremely legal that this teacher was going to be fired they wanted to keep fighting instead of seeing how they could help the teacher. Because I still cared for the teachers as individuals (who did not need to be hurting kids through their lack of competence) I would have to inform them that they had little chance on appeal and they had little time to get the next job if they fought a losing battle. If they were not horribly dangerous to kids I would offer to give them an honest but fair recommendation to another school district. Sometimes teachers are not necessarily incompetent but they fit better somewhere else. However, it is the teacher’s job, not the principal or the district’s, to find the right spot for them to be effective.

As a parent, I would hate to see some of my kid’s teachers get the axe but both of my sons have had teachers that not should not be allowed into a classroom unless they are there to vacuum. We did out job as informed and involved parents to meet with the teacher, to speak to the administrator, and to voice our concern and distrust of the teacher’s abilities. Unfortunately, because of a lack of standards or backbone, most of those teachers are still in place. Almost all of the teachers who have taught my kids have been much better than competent, but each child has had a couple of folks in their educational experience that not only lacked competence, they were detrimental to my children. Even one of those is too much.

What has your experience been as a teacher, a student, or a parent?

J. Michael Hall, M.Ed. is the Founder and President of Strong Fathers-Strong Families, LLC. He has facilitated father-child events in schools and Head Starts for over 75,000 fathers, trained thousands of professionals in education and child care and has written numerous magazine articles and book chapters. He is the father to two teenage boys and husband to a beautiful middle school teacher.

J. Michael Hall, M.Ed.

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