5 ms·

All 1,926 public school teachers in Providence fired

54 points by ffumarola 16y ago

ffumarola 16y ago
Just wanted to point this out for those of you who haven't seen this in the news. To combat a $40 million budget deficit, all of the teachers were fired (not laid off). Just curious what other peoples thoughts are. More specifically, what long-lasting implications do you think this kind of policy is going to have on the USA's ability to keep up with the rest of the world? I think I'm speaking more to the attitude that surrounds education and not necessarily this specific instance.
- ubercore 16y ago
  They were given notices of _intent_ to fire. Most of those orders will be rescinded before the school year is over. The law requires that teachers be notified by March 1st of any possible change in employment by the end of the year. The city couldn't predict which schools will be closed or affected, to prevent opening the city to lawsuits, they sent notices to all teachers as a precaution. Also, the city's deficit over the next two years is closer to $180 million, due to falling revenue.
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    They were able to afford tax cuts for people who make over $10 million/year (I'm recalling this from memory from this past summer...). And IMO there are plenty of programs that should be cut before education.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      There isn't much else that can be cut. At the local level, education spending dwarfs everything else. Nationwide, at the local level, more money is spent on education than on police, prisons, roads, welfare and healthcare combined. http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  It's important to note the reason they were fired. As teacher Richard Larkin said, "You [the mayor] want to pick and choose teachers." If they were laid off, the district would be obligated to rehire them in order of seniority. According to the article, "Superintendent Brady has said that the majority of teachers will be rehired". So this is basically about cherrypicking the best teachers, and getting rid of low quality teachers with seniority. Overall, this will probably be very helpful in allowing the US to maintain our lead over (most of) the world.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    So this is basically about cherrypicking the best teachers, and getting rid of low quality teachers with seniority. Probably not. Ask them how they'll determine who the best teachers are? They have no metric today, at all. They'll likely simply use inverse seniority. Hire back the cheapest. This is akin to a company firing people the day before their options vest, just because it saves a lot of money. Maybe good business practice in the short-term, bad in the long-term, as even good teachers will realize that they'll likely be fired if they climb up the salary scale.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      If quality is unmeasurable, you should optimize for cost. This will either save the taxpayers money, or it will reduce the size of layoffs (holding cost constant).
      - jordanb 16y ago
        And this is why you should always hire the cheapest programmers then?
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        It's not that its unmeasurable, but they won't take the time to measure it. The cheapest way is to get rid of teachers altogether. Just let the students go to class and randomly assign grades. The fact that they have no real metrics will mean that perceived quality won't change -- but I think we'd both agree that something would have changed.
- asolove 16y ago
  If I understand the article correctly, this was a difficult but perhaps correct decision. But I don't know the details, so here is what I understood: 1. The school board had to close a budget deficit by getting rid of staff, but they did not have time to get exact numbers. 2. Under the terms of the union contract, they had a deadline to inform teachers if their jobs were in trouble. So they have sent everyone official notices in preparation for only having to eliminate some of them. 3. If they sent layoff notices to everyone, when they found out how many slots they had left, they would have to take teachers back by seniority rather than merit. 4. So they sent termination notices so they could hire back whoever they wanted. Now, as I said, I don't know the backstory. This may be an attempt by a controlling superintendent to get rid of a faction that disagrees with him. But from the facts in the story, it looks more like a union that negotiated a contract more in the interest of the senior teachers than in the interest of the school district or the students. And that because of the limitations in the contract, the board had little choice if they wanted to retain their best teachers.
- damoncali 16y ago
  If states had as much money as they thought they had, the teachers would be sitting fat and pretty. It says more about the idiotic financial management of local government than it does about teachers. (Watch out California - you guys are really fucked). So compared to the rest of the world, I think the US is fine - and by fine I mean in a financial cluster.
- Umalu 16y ago
  I suspect this was done to defeat a union contract that made it difficult to shrink the workforce. The logic behind collective bargaining is "if you don't like it, you have to fire all of us." That's usually a good tactic, as most employers arent willing to do that, but sometimes the bluff gets called. In terms of how this impacts education, it depends on whether this is a trend and how you feel about unionized teachers.
- pluies 16y ago
  > Just wanted to point this out for those of you who haven't seen this in the news. It's also interesting for those of us who live in said rest of the world. Thanks!
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    No problem!
- wyclif 16y ago
  what long-lasting implications do you think this kind of policy is going to have on the USA's ability to keep up with the rest of the world? Excellent implications. The dregs of the teacher pool (and in American public schools, the worst teachers are pathetically, heinously bad) will be sifted out, and the best will be hired back. It will also allow a fresh start for the training of new teachers.
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    And the best teachers will start being more cautious, not crossing any "lines" and trying new things, not angering the superintendent by teaching hot issues, etc. I do not believe one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. Fix the issue, don't put a bandaid on it.
    - wyclif 16y ago
      It doesn't follow that great teachers are more cautious.
      - ffumarola 16y ago
        Agreed, they aren't. But if mass firings happen just so the board can fire whomever they want, it is in a teachers best interest to stay on the administrations side, rather than just teach great. Some of the best teachers are the ones who challenge conventional thinking and bloated process. They piss the administration off (I was lucky enough to have multiple teachers like this in HS). They could have a target on their back right now.
extension 16y ago
This is the key piece of information that explains how this is possible: Superintendent Brady has said that the majority of teachers will be rehired
- ffumarola 16y ago
  Sure, they are politicizing the process. They don't want to deal with union rules so they fired everyone. It also lets them skip out on benefits, I believe. But, think to yourself, for all of the amazing teachers they fired, how many just had the wind let out of their sails? I wouldn't come back as enthusiastic about doing the right thing after getting fired like that.
  - extension 16y ago
    Oh sure, I'm not supporting or criticizing what they did. I was just initially confused as to what a school system was going to do without teachers.
    - ffumarola 16y ago
      Oh, touche. Should have addressed that. Thanks!
- jergason 16y ago
  It appears that they did this in order to avoid having to rehire teachers based on seniority first: Teachers begged the School Board to issue layoffs rather than fire them outright because, under the layoff provisions, teachers are recalled based on seniority. There is no guarantee that seniority would be used to bring back any of the fired teachers. So it looks like there were lots of senior teachers the board wanted to eliminate, not necessarily all of the teachers.
TomOfTTB 16y ago
As others have said this is a ploy to allow the school district to get rid of bad union teachers and I think that's a good thing. People need to start realize this isn't a union issue it's a PUBLIC union issue and the public unions have become a problem. Public unions have not proven themselves in the same way as private unions have. Private unions were (and in some cases still are) a good tool to protect employees against corporate greed run a muck. But as we've seen with our over spending governments the inclination of the government is to be overly generous with people like teachers and that's now being abused. This isn't a liberal/conservative issue. FDR is still the most liberal president we've ever had and even he said public unions were "unthinkable and intolerable". The head of the AFL-CIO was against public unions in the 50s. (Facts taken from the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/47u53dq http://tinyurl.com/47u53dq) Here's the exact FDR quote... "[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable." Isn't that exactly what's happening right now? Look at this quote from the article... "This is a quasi-legal power grab,” said Richard Larkin, a teacher at Classical High School. “You want to pick and choose teachers. Well, we will not be bullied." Isn't picking and choosing teachers exactly what has to be done in order to keep good teachers and get rid of bad ones? How out of control do you have to be when you don't acknowledge the fact that the school should be able to pick which teachers it thinks are best?
- kenjackson 16y ago
  As others have said this is a ploy to allow the school district to get rid of bad union teachers and I think that's a good thing. It's probably not. They probably have no idea who the bad teachers are. It's most likley an attempt to get rid of the most senior teachers, regardless of ability. And political -- an attempt to kill organizations that tend to be Democratic (this would be equivalent to trying to dismantle fundamentalist churches, as their Republican leaning). Everyone looks to Finland as this great example of how education should be done, yet it looks nothing like what is being done here. And Finland is 100% teacher's unions. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-higgins/why-do-the-education-refo_1_b_775087.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-higgins/why-do-the-educ...
lionhearted 16y ago
I found this interesting: > Yes: Melissa Malone, Kathleen Crain, Niña Pande, Julian Dash > No: Robert Wise, Brian Lalli, Philip Gould There's a stereotype that men are more in favor of small government and women are more likely to be elementary school teachers than men. Yet, all 3 of the women on the board voted for the dismissal whereas 3 out of the 4 men voted against. Doesn't necessarily mean anything, could be random noise, but that caught my eye at the end of the article.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
simonsarris 16y ago
This is how it worked at my private school in New Hampshire. Every single teacher, regardless of how long they have been teaching there (some more than 30 years) were hired for a 1-year period and then re-hired (or not) for the next year. Every single one of them had to do the same process. It seemed like a very good way to never have bad teachers for more than one year. In my 4 years at HS there were only two bad teachers, and the contracts of both were simply not renewed after their first year.
- ffumarola 16y ago
  That seems interesting. Do you have any information on what they used to "rank" teachers or decide if they were good or not?
  - damoncali 16y ago
    Apparently, if they get laid off rather than fired, time served is the ranking system. Seriously, though, I've seen schools where teachers are evaluated like college professors - by students. Seems to be at least a partial solution.
    - ffumarola 16y ago
      Then you have GREAT teachers getting crappy rankings from students who don't want to be challenged. College is different as people are there on their own accord.
      - damoncali 16y ago
        Hence the "partial".
        ffumarola 16y ago
        I understood the word. I just don't think I'd like that even being a "partial" part of the solution. Do you remember yourself and your peers in middle and high school? Heck, I do, haha.
mcantor 16y ago
Isn't this basically a tenure thing? AFAIK public unions make firing a First-In-Last-Out operation, which means the senior teacher you hired 10 years ago is there to stay until every single other teacher that came after is gone. In my completely non-expert opinion, tenure seems to be a multiplier. From a students' standpoint: A good teacher with tenure is a godsend, because they feel comfortable challenging the system to make sure their job (educating the kids) gets done. Conversely, a bad teacher with tenure is a cataclysm, because they don't really want to be there, the kids don't really want them to be there, and the school administration doesn't really want them to be there, but by God, they're staying, because it's easier to collect a paycheck and hate your job than change your situation. To use a metaphor from Kevin Smith's Clerks, tenured crappy teachers are perennially shitting their pants instead of lifting the lid on the toilet seat.
- sigstoat 16y ago
  perhaps, since you're suggesting it's useful, you can tell me what subjects taught in a K-12 education necessitate the teachers challenging the system? i'd consider perhaps high school literature and history teachers, but beyond that?
  - waterside81 16y ago
    Math? Instead of teaching kids to memorize formulas and just apply to them to contrived examples, teach kids how match actually works in the real world and its applications. Great TED talk on this very matter: http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/ http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    - Civics/Politics - Science (especially in districts that don't want to teach students about the theory of evolution) - "Technology" (I had a computer teacher in HS who said F it and let us play around with hacking our test routers) So we have math, literature, social studies, and science.
moblivu 16y ago
This should be the canvas of the future education system: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
angus77 16y ago
Could someone please explain how teachers' unions protecting "bad teachers" from being fired is in the best interests of the teachers unions? They get accused of that a lot, but I can't see how that would work for them. If my coworkers were making me look bad, I sure wouldn't want to associate myself with them. It seems to me it would weaken the credibility of the union and thus take away the power the union has to back me up.

54 points by ffumarola 16y ago

Just wanted to point this out for those of you who haven't seen this in the news. To combat a $40 million budget deficit, all of the teachers were fired (not laid off). Just curious what other peoples thoughts are. More specifically, what long-lasting implications do you think this kind of policy is going to have on the USA's ability to keep up with the rest of the world? I think I'm speaking more to the attitude that surrounds education and not necessarily this specific instance.

ubercore 16y ago
They were given notices of _intent_ to fire. Most of those orders will be rescinded before the school year is over. The law requires that teachers be notified by March 1st of any possible change in employment by the end of the year. The city couldn't predict which schools will be closed or affected, to prevent opening the city to lawsuits, they sent notices to all teachers as a precaution. Also, the city's deficit over the next two years is closer to $180 million, due to falling revenue.
- ffumarola 16y ago
  They were able to afford tax cuts for people who make over $10 million/year (I'm recalling this from memory from this past summer...). And IMO there are plenty of programs that should be cut before education.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    There isn't much else that can be cut. At the local level, education spending dwarfs everything else. Nationwide, at the local level, more money is spent on education than on police, prisons, roads, welfare and healthcare combined. http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total http://usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2009_US_total
yummyfajitas 16y ago
It's important to note the reason they were fired. As teacher Richard Larkin said, "You [the mayor] want to pick and choose teachers." If they were laid off, the district would be obligated to rehire them in order of seniority. According to the article, "Superintendent Brady has said that the majority of teachers will be rehired". So this is basically about cherrypicking the best teachers, and getting rid of low quality teachers with seniority. Overall, this will probably be very helpful in allowing the US to maintain our lead over (most of) the world.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  So this is basically about cherrypicking the best teachers, and getting rid of low quality teachers with seniority. Probably not. Ask them how they'll determine who the best teachers are? They have no metric today, at all. They'll likely simply use inverse seniority. Hire back the cheapest. This is akin to a company firing people the day before their options vest, just because it saves a lot of money. Maybe good business practice in the short-term, bad in the long-term, as even good teachers will realize that they'll likely be fired if they climb up the salary scale.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    If quality is unmeasurable, you should optimize for cost. This will either save the taxpayers money, or it will reduce the size of layoffs (holding cost constant).
    - jordanb 16y ago
      And this is why you should always hire the cheapest programmers then?
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      It's not that its unmeasurable, but they won't take the time to measure it. The cheapest way is to get rid of teachers altogether. Just let the students go to class and randomly assign grades. The fact that they have no real metrics will mean that perceived quality won't change -- but I think we'd both agree that something would have changed.
asolove 16y ago
If I understand the article correctly, this was a difficult but perhaps correct decision. But I don't know the details, so here is what I understood: 1. The school board had to close a budget deficit by getting rid of staff, but they did not have time to get exact numbers. 2. Under the terms of the union contract, they had a deadline to inform teachers if their jobs were in trouble. So they have sent everyone official notices in preparation for only having to eliminate some of them. 3. If they sent layoff notices to everyone, when they found out how many slots they had left, they would have to take teachers back by seniority rather than merit. 4. So they sent termination notices so they could hire back whoever they wanted. Now, as I said, I don't know the backstory. This may be an attempt by a controlling superintendent to get rid of a faction that disagrees with him. But from the facts in the story, it looks more like a union that negotiated a contract more in the interest of the senior teachers than in the interest of the school district or the students. And that because of the limitations in the contract, the board had little choice if they wanted to retain their best teachers.
damoncali 16y ago
If states had as much money as they thought they had, the teachers would be sitting fat and pretty. It says more about the idiotic financial management of local government than it does about teachers. (Watch out California - you guys are really fucked). So compared to the rest of the world, I think the US is fine - and by fine I mean in a financial cluster.
Umalu 16y ago
I suspect this was done to defeat a union contract that made it difficult to shrink the workforce. The logic behind collective bargaining is "if you don't like it, you have to fire all of us." That's usually a good tactic, as most employers arent willing to do that, but sometimes the bluff gets called. In terms of how this impacts education, it depends on whether this is a trend and how you feel about unionized teachers.
pluies 16y ago
> Just wanted to point this out for those of you who haven't seen this in the news. It's also interesting for those of us who live in said rest of the world. Thanks!
- ffumarola 16y ago
  No problem!
wyclif 16y ago
what long-lasting implications do you think this kind of policy is going to have on the USA's ability to keep up with the rest of the world? Excellent implications. The dregs of the teacher pool (and in American public schools, the worst teachers are pathetically, heinously bad) will be sifted out, and the best will be hired back. It will also allow a fresh start for the training of new teachers.
- ffumarola 16y ago
  And the best teachers will start being more cautious, not crossing any "lines" and trying new things, not angering the superintendent by teaching hot issues, etc. I do not believe one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. Fix the issue, don't put a bandaid on it.
  - wyclif 16y ago
    It doesn't follow that great teachers are more cautious.
    - ffumarola 16y ago
      Agreed, they aren't. But if mass firings happen just so the board can fire whomever they want, it is in a teachers best interest to stay on the administrations side, rather than just teach great. Some of the best teachers are the ones who challenge conventional thinking and bloated process. They piss the administration off (I was lucky enough to have multiple teachers like this in HS). They could have a target on their back right now.

extension 16y ago

This is the key piece of information that explains how this is possible: Superintendent Brady has said that the majority of teachers will be rehired

ffumarola 16y ago
Sure, they are politicizing the process. They don't want to deal with union rules so they fired everyone. It also lets them skip out on benefits, I believe. But, think to yourself, for all of the amazing teachers they fired, how many just had the wind let out of their sails? I wouldn't come back as enthusiastic about doing the right thing after getting fired like that.
- extension 16y ago
  Oh sure, I'm not supporting or criticizing what they did. I was just initially confused as to what a school system was going to do without teachers.
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    Oh, touche. Should have addressed that. Thanks!
jergason 16y ago
It appears that they did this in order to avoid having to rehire teachers based on seniority first: Teachers begged the School Board to issue layoffs rather than fire them outright because, under the layoff provisions, teachers are recalled based on seniority. There is no guarantee that seniority would be used to bring back any of the fired teachers. So it looks like there were lots of senior teachers the board wanted to eliminate, not necessarily all of the teachers.

TomOfTTB 16y ago

As others have said this is a ploy to allow the school district to get rid of bad union teachers and I think that's a good thing. People need to start realize this isn't a union issue it's a PUBLIC union issue and the public unions have become a problem. Public unions have not proven themselves in the same way as private unions have. Private unions were (and in some cases still are) a good tool to protect employees against corporate greed run a muck. But as we've seen with our over spending governments the inclination of the government is to be overly generous with people like teachers and that's now being abused. This isn't a liberal/conservative issue. FDR is still the most liberal president we've ever had and even he said public unions were "unthinkable and intolerable". The head of the AFL-CIO was against public unions in the 50s. (Facts taken from the New York Times: http://tinyurl.com/47u53dq http://tinyurl.com/47u53dq) Here's the exact FDR quote... "[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable." Isn't that exactly what's happening right now? Look at this quote from the article... "This is a quasi-legal power grab,” said Richard Larkin, a teacher at Classical High School. “You want to pick and choose teachers. Well, we will not be bullied." Isn't picking and choosing teachers exactly what has to be done in order to keep good teachers and get rid of bad ones? How out of control do you have to be when you don't acknowledge the fact that the school should be able to pick which teachers it thinks are best?

kenjackson 16y ago
As others have said this is a ploy to allow the school district to get rid of bad union teachers and I think that's a good thing. It's probably not. They probably have no idea who the bad teachers are. It's most likley an attempt to get rid of the most senior teachers, regardless of ability. And political -- an attempt to kill organizations that tend to be Democratic (this would be equivalent to trying to dismantle fundamentalist churches, as their Republican leaning). Everyone looks to Finland as this great example of how education should be done, yet it looks nothing like what is being done here. And Finland is 100% teacher's unions. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-higgins/why-do-the-education-refo_1_b_775087.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharon-higgins/why-do-the-educ...

lionhearted 16y ago

I found this interesting: > Yes: Melissa Malone, Kathleen Crain, Niña Pande, Julian Dash > No: Robert Wise, Brian Lalli, Philip Gould There's a stereotype that men are more in favor of small government and women are more likely to be elementary school teachers than men. Yet, all 3 of the women on the board voted for the dismissal whereas 3 out of the 4 men voted against. Doesn't necessarily mean anything, could be random noise, but that caught my eye at the end of the article.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

simonsarris 16y ago

This is how it worked at my private school in New Hampshire. Every single teacher, regardless of how long they have been teaching there (some more than 30 years) were hired for a 1-year period and then re-hired (or not) for the next year. Every single one of them had to do the same process. It seemed like a very good way to never have bad teachers for more than one year. In my 4 years at HS there were only two bad teachers, and the contracts of both were simply not renewed after their first year.

ffumarola 16y ago
That seems interesting. Do you have any information on what they used to "rank" teachers or decide if they were good or not?
- damoncali 16y ago
  Apparently, if they get laid off rather than fired, time served is the ranking system. Seriously, though, I've seen schools where teachers are evaluated like college professors - by students. Seems to be at least a partial solution.
  - ffumarola 16y ago
    Then you have GREAT teachers getting crappy rankings from students who don't want to be challenged. College is different as people are there on their own accord.
    - damoncali 16y ago
      Hence the "partial".
      - ffumarola 16y ago
        I understood the word. I just don't think I'd like that even being a "partial" part of the solution. Do you remember yourself and your peers in middle and high school? Heck, I do, haha.

mcantor 16y ago

Isn't this basically a tenure thing? AFAIK public unions make firing a First-In-Last-Out operation, which means the senior teacher you hired 10 years ago is there to stay until every single other teacher that came after is gone. In my completely non-expert opinion, tenure seems to be a multiplier. From a students' standpoint: A good teacher with tenure is a godsend, because they feel comfortable challenging the system to make sure their job (educating the kids) gets done. Conversely, a bad teacher with tenure is a cataclysm, because they don't really want to be there, the kids don't really want them to be there, and the school administration doesn't really want them to be there, but by God, they're staying, because it's easier to collect a paycheck and hate your job than change your situation. To use a metaphor from Kevin Smith's Clerks, tenured crappy teachers are perennially shitting their pants instead of lifting the lid on the toilet seat.

sigstoat 16y ago
perhaps, since you're suggesting it's useful, you can tell me what subjects taught in a K-12 education necessitate the teachers challenging the system? i'd consider perhaps high school literature and history teachers, but beyond that?
- waterside81 16y ago
  Math? Instead of teaching kids to memorize formulas and just apply to them to contrived examples, teach kids how match actually works in the real world and its applications. Great TED talk on this very matter: http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/ http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/
- ffumarola 16y ago
  - Civics/Politics - Science (especially in districts that don't want to teach students about the theory of evolution) - "Technology" (I had a computer teacher in HS who said F it and let us play around with hacking our test routers) So we have math, literature, social studies, and science.

moblivu 16y ago

This should be the canvas of the future education system: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

angus77 16y ago

Could someone please explain how teachers' unions protecting "bad teachers" from being fired is in the best interests of the teachers unions? They get accused of that a lot, but I can't see how that would work for them. If my coworkers were making me look bad, I sure wouldn't want to associate myself with them. It seems to me it would weaken the credibility of the union and thus take away the power the union has to back me up.