It would make sense that when a teacher fails to do his/her job they should be fired. After all, that is what happens in any other job when the employee begins to not meet expectations. However, one big obstacle in getting rid of bad teachers is the idea of tenure. Tenure is having the guarantee of your job and the right to keep it for as long as you want. Originally, tenure was meant for college professors but it now has moved to grade school as well. In the movie Waiting for Superman (a film discussing problems in the education system) one of the people states that essentially all a teacher has to do to receive tenure is breathe for two years. No evaluation on how the teacher is meeting expectations and no separation of bad and good teachers. The students suffer from the bad teacher’s conformity and guaranteed paycheck.

            Another reason why schools and districts cannot get rid of bad teachers is because there is no real critique of their teaching. Unlike other jobs, teaching can be done in different ways and there are various teaching methods. This makes it difficult to evaluate teachers or create a universal standard for teachers. According to the documentary Waiting for Superman, 1 in 57 doctors will lose their medical licenses for failure to meet expectations and do their job, 1 in 97 lawyers will lose their law license for the same reason, but only 1 in 2500 teachers will lose their teaching credentials for failing at their job. Thousands of bad teachers are still able to teach students because they have their teaching credential. Often times, this creates a problem known as the “dance of the lemons” in some areas. This is where teachers that are known to be bad are passed on to a different principal and school every year. Because the bad teachers still have possession of a teaching credential they are now able to ruin a different classroom in the school district every year. All of this occurs because there is a lack of an efficient critique on teachers.

            It has also become problematic to get rid of bad teachers because of the huge opposition that teacher unions put up. Teachers unions were first created to ensure equality between male and female teachers. However, many teachers unions now in days try to ensure equality between great and bad teachers (not acknowledging how bad teachers affect students). One way that teachers unions block the firing of bad teachers is through financial means. If taken to court by the teachers union, the school district is faced with the dilemma of using thousands of dollars and wasting valuable time. According to Albany’s Times Union “…the average process for firing a teacher in New York state outside of New York City proper lasts 502 days and costs more than $216,000.” In Illinois, the legal fees for firing a tenured teacher cost an average of $219,504. School districts are already facing financial problems because of the recent recession. Schools cannot afford to throw away money like that. They might not even be successful in firing the bad teacher. Firing a bad teacher is not a favorable financial move for school districts and therefore bad teachers are not fired. 

Bad teachers can affect students in a negative just as a great teacher can impact a student in a positive way. Great teachers inspire students to go beyond what is asked for them and teach them to have an aspiration for the future. But bad teachers show students that they can’t all be successful and bad teachers don’t show their students that kind of positive future they could have. In a wood shop class set up for “special” students who have fallen behind (probably because of a bad teacher) are given different tasks to do than in a regular class.  “The children learn to punch in time cards at the door…in order to prepare them for employment” (Kozol 116). Who said those kids were going to be in a blue collar job that would require them to punch in times? But more importantly, why don’t these students have a teacher that encourages them to become something bigger in life? Bad teachers do not envision their students to achieve great success and therefore their students do not strive to become anything. The students conform to whatever they are trained to be.

These children who have bad teachers throughout the years also fall behind in academics. This makes it more difficult for the students to go onto college or even graduate from high school. According to the documentary Waiting for Superman, a good teacher can cover over 150% of the curriculum during the school year; which means that the teacher has well-prepared the student for the following year as well. But a bad teacher will only cover 50% of the yearly curriculum. The bad teacher fails to maintain the student at grade level and doesn’t prepare the child at all for the next year. Many examples are found in the book Savage Inequalities of students in high school whose reading level is significantly low. Reading levels as low as the second and third grade.

Another affect that bad teachers have on students is that the children learn to not be passionate about things. This hurts our society’s future because we will have a workforce and a society made up of people who are passive about big issues and are not passionate about their lives. We will have people who are not involved in shaping the future and this will create a cycle that never ends.

Poor schools are often time more prone to having bad teachers. Good teachers are wanted everywhere, which means that they receive opportunities at different schools and can freely choose between them. However, bad teachers aren’t in a high demand and so they do not require as much pay as the good teachers because all they want is a job at least. In the Chicago area, lots of these “bad” teachers come in the form of long-term substitutes. “The salary scale, too low to keep exciting, youthful teachers in the system, leads the city to rely on low-paid subs, who represent more than a quarter of Chicago’s teaching force” (Kozol 63). In most cases, the teachers with exciting new ideas are young and recently graduated. This means that they often times (on top of paying their normal bills) have loans to pay for school and they cannot afford to take the low-salaries that poor districts offer. The result is that the youthful teachers go to richer district and whatever is left over is given to the poorer school districts.

Another factor that makes schools more prone to bad teachers is the demographics of the school. If the school is more populated with minority groups there exists a larger chance that bad teachers are there. This could be true for many different reasons. Minorities in “ghettos” tend to have less money, the neighborhood of the school might not be pleasant, or perhaps it is simply racism and discrimination. Desert Trails Elementary students are 62 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black. This school “…ranks in the bottom third of California schools with similar demographics and has been stuck on the federal watch list for failing schools for six years” (hechingerreport.org). When a school has been on the federal watch list for six years it is undeniable that something is wrong. The students are not to blame in this case. In six years many of the students who attended Desert Trails have moved on and gone to other schools, however the school still fails. This is because something at the base of the school is not right. And at the base of each school are the teachers.

Schools that have low testing scores are also prone to have bad teachers. This includes classroom where the students have been labeled as “slow learners” and therefore need a special class. At a school illustrated in the book Savage Inequalities, two different classrooms are described. The first is a class for “gifted” and advanced students and is full of decorations around the walls and the teacher seems energetic and involved with the students. In the other classroom, the students are “slow” learners and the teacher just hands out packets of work. Needless to say, the majority of students in the “slow” class were black and the majority of students in the advanced class were white. The division between these students will always exist if the teachers for these classes continue to be divided at two extremes. 

The San Mateo Union High School District is dealing with discrimination issues. The issue is that Chinese students are discriminated against and put into low performing schools. This discrimination issue was also talked about by Jonathan Kozol about the city of New York. In this city, kids of color were overwhelmingly found in “special” classes that were designed for those who needed extra help. White students were put in either proficient or advanced classes for the “gifted”. This observation has to do with my topic of bad teachers because these bad teachers are usually found in the lower special classes where the color kids are.

At another school, 100 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Desert Trails Elementary school also has a population that is 62 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black. This poverty stricken school is indirectly talked about by Jonathan Kozol in his chapter about East St. Louis. In the East St. Louis area school would get cancelled because of sewage problems and the students (mostly black) would play in grass that was growing from sewage waste. The issue of poverty is seen in both the Desert Trails Elementary example and the example Kozol gives. At both schools the test scores were low and therefore the school was labeled as low-performance. Poverty connects to the topic of bad teachers because the district can’t afford to pay more for good teachers.

Another finding that I was able to find was a chart of 2 schools being compared. The first school was located in Beverly Hills and the other (much poorer) school was located in the nearby city of Alerta. The table showed different areas like the economics of the students but also showed what kind of classes the students were taking. In the Beverly Hills high school many AP courses were offered and the percentage of students who passed those tests was very high. However, in the high school in Alerta, few AP courses were offered and only 1 in 3 students actually passed the test. Jonathan Kozol explains this in his book as well. He talks about schools that offer advanced classes for the “gifted” and how students in those classes are given more opportunities and are treated differently. Those gifted students are prioritized. This variation in classes is connected to bad teachers because the good teachers are put into AP classes because they are usually more qualified.