Saturday, March 13, 1999
Teachers get tough on peers
Master group recommends 17 be fired
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Master teachers Friday recommended firing 17 colleagues from Cincinnati Public Schools.
If a panel of five master teachers and five administrators agrees, recommendations will go to the superintendent and board of education for action.
Another eight teachers “with performance problems” quit or took long-term sick leave during the evaluation, according to Cincinnati Federation of Teachers President Tom Mooney.
It's all part of the Peer Assistance and Evaluation Program that CFT initiated in 1983.
Mr. Mooney said no firing recommendation has been re jected by board members, yet the program is among proposed budget cuts.
Master teachers also recommended another nine teachers, who were given a second chance during the past year, be “released” from the program.
Intensive help from colleagues helped all nine measure up, according to Wellyn Collins, who oversees master teacher efforts and teaches part time, and another five were released in December.
“We are not hatchet people,” Mrs. Collins said. “We worked with these people over the year to help them improve.”
Mr. Mooney refused to name the troubled teachers, saying he is committed to peer review but CFT might have to represent some of them if they pursue a grievance.
Typically, Mr. Mooney said, teachers' classroom problems fall into broad categories:
• “They can't control kids long enough to teach.”
• Grasp of subject matter is inadequate.
• Teaching methods “don't work” and students can't pass state-mandated proficiency tests.
Mr. Mooney said 13 of the 17 recommended for dismissal are interns, new teachers with college degrees but no state licenses. The rest are veterans whose problems resisted intervention.
The eight who left voluntarily were six veterans and two interns, Mr. Mooney said.
He said master teachers evaluated 223 colleagues this year and rated 32 less than satisfactory. They included 15 who are to be coached for a year before a decision is made on their status.
Mrs. Collins said master teachers' documentation on the 17 recommended for firing will go to the peer review panel next week. Then:
• Teachers will be offered an opportunity to argue their cases.
• If panelists reject the dismissal recommendation, the teacher returns to the classroom unless Superintendent Steven Adamowski overrules the panel. That is rare, Mr. Mooney said.
• If the panel affirms the dismissal recommendation, a teacher can appeal to Mr. Adamowski. That has never succeeded, Mr. Mooney said.
• If there is no appeal, the panel's firing recommendation goes through Mr. Adamowski to the board.
Arbitration is allowed but it is unlikely that the union would take up the case because master teachers' recommendations are respected, Mr. Mooney said.
He said master teachers have recommended 71 dismissals in the past 15 years and of three that went to arbitration, one was reinstated.
In those 15 years, Mr. Mooney said, principals reviewed more than twice as many teachers and recommended 25 dismissals, according to Denise Hewitt, co-chair of the review panel.
She said none has been recommended for dismissal by a principal since the 1994-1995 school year and none was expected by the deadline Friday. Calls to school board on Friday were not returned and no one who could be reached would comment.
Peer review has gained wider acceptance in recent years. In 1997, the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, agreed that teachers should be allowed to rate the performance of fellow instructors and aid in their dismissal.
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