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Last in a series

Thursday, February 06, 2003

By Jane Elizabeth, Post-Gazette Education Writer

Jeffrey F. Moyer taught high school social studies in the Whitehall-Coplay School District in eastern Pennsylvania for years before someone started keeping book on him.

	Nathan Lancaster works with his mother, Leslie, on his multiplication homework at their Ben Avon home. Leslie Lancaster, a former telecommunications executive, knows it can be difficult for any employer, including school districts, to deal with incompetent employees. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

There was the time he showed the R-rated "Silence of the Lambs" to his underage students, according to state Department of Education records. He let them play pingpong in his classroom and kick balls in the hallway.

He often allowed his students to wander the school, state officials charged. Even students who weren't in his class would come to him for a hall pass.

Once, when a student asked about a historical figure, Moyer responded that the person was "some [expletive] in history." He told one boy to drop a pencil on the floor and ask a girl to pick it up so he could see her breasts when she leaned over.

He gave students answers to test questions -- during the tests -- and brought a 2-by-4 to school to threaten a study hall teacher.

	More in today's report Online graphic: Rating teachers: the state's suggested performance criteria for beginning teachers Online chart: Parents' rights: information about teachers that must be made available to parents upon request How a parent can be an advocate for top-quality teachers Join a Town Meeting on teacher quality About the series Day One: Examining the roots of uneven instruction quality in our schools Day Two: A question of quality: Are teacher entrance tests tough enough? Day Three: Do schools hire the best teachers? Probably not Day Four: Minority teachers are a missing ingredient

Such complaints led to two ratings of "unsatisfactory" performance during the 1991-92 school year.

But it would take nine more years and dozens of documents before the state removed the Lehigh County teacher's license, citing incompetence, immorality and negligence.

Why does teacher discipline take so long? And if it takes that much effort to remove the credentials of an educator with such over-the-top bad behavior, will administrators even bother with more run-of-the-mill incompetence?

Moyer was one of only 11 Pennsylvania teachers who have lost their licenses for incompetency over the past decade, according to state records -- compared with the dozen or so teachers who lose their licenses each year in Pennsylvania. Most of those licenses are removed after teachers have been convicted of sex-related offenses or other crimes.

Incompetent teachers often are simply eased out of their schools. Then, they may show up in another district.

"The sentiment is, 'Thank God that person is not at my school anymore,'" said Richard Sternberg, principal at Pittsburgh's Grandview Elementary School and the state's 2001 Principal of the Year.

"Incompetence is probably the most difficult [issue] to prove" when trying to remove a teacher's license, said Sternberg, who also is president of the Pittsburgh Administrators Association. "A really good lawyer could probably show that, just because a teacher got an unsatisfactory review, it was just a snapshot in time" and might not reflect the teacher's overall performance.

While some poorly performing teachers choose to leave rather than face discipline or bad evaluations, others are "counseled out" of the profession by supervisors, union leaders or co-workers.

But many remain on the job, either because administrators ignore their poor work or don't want to go through the hassle of trying to fire them.

A teacher dismissal can be expensive and time-consuming, as evidenced by a recent Milwaukee case that ended up in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

According to court records, parents were complaining about middle school teacher Gema Salvadori as far back as 1991, saying she berated their children and didn't properly grade papers. The school district gave her various "plans of assistance" over the next several years and moved her to another school, but the complaints and bad evaluations continued.

Still, she taught until 1998, when her contract was not renewed. She sued.

Eleven years after the first parental complaints, the case was finally closed when a judge ruled against her last June.

While its insurance carrier paid all but $5,000 of the district's legal fees, "We spent a lot of employee time" defending the case over those years, said Superintendent Gerald Frietag.

School administrators are keenly aware of the ever-present threat of court action in firing teachers.

The Pennsylvania School Boards Association holds seminars on "The Four Ds: Documentation, Discipline, Demotion and Dismissal." Readers of the American School Board Journal and other education publications often see advertisements for legal consulting firms. "Fire him today and you could find yourself in court tomorrow," reads one such ad.

Pennsylvania's school code on the firing of teachers -- which has been revised significantly only once, in 1996 -- gives the following as "the only valid causes for termination" of a teacher's job:

Immorality, incompetency, intemperance, cruelty, persistent negligence, willful neglect of duties

Unsatisfactory teaching based on two consecutive ratings, not less than four months apart

Physical or mental disability that interferes with performance

Advocating or participating in "un-American or subversive doctrines"

Conviction of a felony or the court's acceptance of a plea of guilty or no contest

Breaking state or school board laws.

A lifetime job?

Parents and community residents often have two misconceptions about teacher employment.

One is that "tenure" means teachers can't be fired.

And the other is that a union member can't be fired.

Al Fondy, president of both the local and state chapters of the American Federation of Teachers, said unions only ensure that due process is followed in any union member's dismissal.

"The union should not defend incompetence," he said. "We don't want them teaching either. It's not in our best interest."

However, union members rarely if ever initiate such complaints against poor teachers. In a recent round table discussion the Post-Gazette conducted with several outstanding teachers from around the region, most said they had known of poor-quality teachers in their school districts, but none had ever reported an incompetent teacher.

	Patsy Tallarico, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, says unions don’t want poor-quality teachers in the classroom. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette)

Teachers can get tenure after three years, up from the old standard of two years. Patsy Tallarico, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, knows that some people believe that tenure gives teachers "a lifetime job."

They're wrong, he said. Tenure "tells you how to fire someone," while allowing newer, non-tenured teachers to be more easily dismissed.

In many school districts, two "unsats" -- teacher slang for unsatisfactory evaluations -- are needed to begin the process of either rehabilitating or terminating a teacher.

Unions in some states have begun working with administrators to create a process that both sides can agree on, said Stanford University education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond. Often in those new approaches, struggling teachers work with "mentor teachers," and if they don't improve within a specified time, the union agrees not to challenge the dismissal.

"The union's interest is due process and the opportunity to improve" and this system gives them both, said Darling-Hammond.

Pittsburgh teachers have a similar system using what they call ITL teachers -- instructional teacher leaders. They also have an "induction" program for new teachers that includes several after-school training sessions at the union's South Side headquarters.

Induction programs are required by the state, but how extensive they are is up to each district. Theoretically, the system keeps new teachers from becoming bad teachers; and if they do, retrains or removes them.

But, acknowledged Tallarico, "There aren't quality programs in every district."

Teacher rot

Just as inexperienced teachers don't necessarily mean low-quality teaching, experience doesn't necessarily translate to high quality.

In fact, several studies have concluded that after the first few years, teaching experience seems to make little difference in student achievement.

A 2000 study of teachers in five states showed that elementary school teachers with more than 25 years of experience had students who scored significantly lower on national tests than students who had teachers with six to 10 years of experience.

One reason for this trend could be, said Darling-Hammond, that "that older teachers do not always continue to grow and learn and may grow tired in their jobs."

Some parents believe that too often, "burned out" teachers are allowed to stay in the classroom. If enough parents complain, those teachers sometimes are assigned to lower-level courses or a position where they'll have less student contact and therefore provoke fewer complaints.

"I think some of these older teachers need to get out and retire and let the younger generation get in there and have a chance to work with the children," said Babette Guballa, a parent whose children have attended Catholic schools and schools in Clairton and West Jefferson Hills districts.

While she's met some excellent older teachers, Guballa said, "My daughter shows much more excitement about the class if there's a younger teacher with fresher ideas."

But new teachers in Western Pennsylvania are a relative rarity. Laura Wennecker's children, now in Pittsburgh middle and high schools, have never had a teacher with less than 10 years' experience.

She doesn't mind. "Experience is really good," she said, because she believes those teachers know how to manage a classroom and be creative when challenging students to do their best work.

Good teachers often can be the best judges of bad teachers.

	Sallie Peck, a math teacher at Dorseyville Middle School in the Fox Chapel Area School District, wonders if twice-a-year evaluations are enough to judge a teacher’s quality. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

The poor teachers "are the [ones] who race the school bus out of the parking lot," said Sallie Peck, a middle school teacher in the Fox Chapel Area School District and a Teacher Excellence Foundation award winner. "Peer pressure doesn't work very well because they really don't care."

Rosalie Dibert, a 38-year Pittsburgh teacher, has mentored enough student teachers to know who's going to excel and who will barely become mediocre.

"You have some folks coming out [of college] who are just so passionate about teaching," she said. "They want to know every little nuance of teaching and suck it up like a sponge. There are other people who come with moderate skills and they're satisfied with that. Those are sad."

Those teachers won't leave or get fired, Dibert said. "They still have a job teaching kids. They're not going to be awful." But, she said, "They're never going to love it. They're never going to light a fire."

Like many parents, Leslie Lancaster of Ben Avon has known teachers with such chilling reputations that parents dread the beginning of the school year. She knows of one teacher, for instance, who publicly humiliates and otherwise terrorizes her students "and she's been there for 20 years," she said. "Everyone knows, and no one wants to deal with it."

Jeanne King, whose children have attended Baldwin and West Jefferson Hills school districts, believes it's inappropriate for parents to demand particular teachers for their children.

But there's a downside: The least desirable teachers can be placed where they'll cause the least outrage. One year, "because I didn't complain, [her child] got the lousiest teacher," she recalled.

But her theory, echoed by several parents interviewed for this series, is that children need to learn that "life is not a bed of roses. You have to work with what you can get."

Lancaster, a former telecommunications company executive, knows how difficult it can be to deal with a longtime problem employee.

"We'd carry this dead weight," she said of her business. "I would so desperately want to fire someone, but there was no documentation" about a history of incompetent behavior, she said.

It falls to administrators to document the performance of failing teachers. But Darling-Hammond noted that the education system has never been set up to allow principals to closely monitor their employees' performance.

In business, she noted, the rule of thumb for the "span of control" is one supervisor per seven employees; in education, principals sometimes oversee the work of 100 teachers.

Even if a principal manages to sit through annual teacher evaluations, it's not necessarily enough.

"Anyone can be good twice a year," said Peck.

Jane Elizabeth can be reached at jelizabeth@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1510.