Sohn: How many children do 887 'least effective' teachers touch?

A student prepares to board a bus to go home from school (AP File Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)
A student prepares to board a bus to go home from school (AP File Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)
photo Staff photo by Doug Strickland / A clip reading "I make a difference" is magnetized to a board beneath a door labeled "Teachers HELP" inside Hunter Hall, home of the UTC School of Education, on the school's campus Friday, July 22, 2016, in Chattanooga, Tenn.

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For years, we've heard educators - even while they were bemoaning lack of parental involvement and the challenges of teaching children from impoverished homes - extol the virtues of local teachers.

For years, we've been told that teachers need higher pay and more support from involved parents and community leaders because "good" teachers are leaving the schools for better jobs.

For years, teachers unions and school administrators, too, have told us that it's unfair to tie teachers' evaluations to their students' standardized test scores - gains or flat-lines which the state has been measuring, teacher by teacher, since the early 1990s. In fact, teacher evaluations have taken into account the learning gains data since 1995. But taking those numbers into account is all that has happened. Early efforts to tie a teacher's license renewals to those gains or non-gains was dropped after teacher unions raised a ruckus.

As it turns out, that kid-glove handling of teachers hasn't really affected our kids for the better - especially here in Hamilton County.

While we've been fed a line of baloney about how good our teachers are, test scores have fallen at too many schools while school administrators and school principals conducted a highly choreographed dance of shifting bad teachers from one school to another.

Between 2006 and early 2010, only seven teachers in Hamilton County's then-estimated 3,000-member teaching force were fired, or resigned before administrators had the chance to get rid of them, according to an April 18, 2010, Times Free Press story by former staff reporter Kelli Gauthier.

Now another analysis by Times Free Press reporter Kendi Rainwater shows that Hamilton County has almost twice the number of "least effective" classroom teachers - at 29 percent - as the state's other major school districts and the state average.

Where do our nearly one-third of least effective teachers work? As you've probably guessed - in the classrooms of impoverished and high-minority schools. And those students and their schools, by and large, show the least academic gain from year to year.

Students who are not poor here are more likely to attend schools with top teachers.

White students in Hamilton County are less likely to have least-effective teachers.

Four schools have more than 70 percent least-effective teachers on staff. They are Clifton Hills Elementary, Bess T. Shepherd Elementary, East Ridge High and Sequoyah High. Both high schools have a vocational school focus.

Schools with a high number of impoverished students - regardless of ethnic background - are of course the last place where highly ineffective teachers should be working.

And lest anyone think that the students wag the teachers' "least effective" label, consider the following: Only five of Hamilton County's 20 schools with more than 90 percent poor and minority students have 90 percent "effective" or "highly effective" teachers in the classrooms. Of those five, four - East Side Elementary, East Lake Elementary, Barger Academy and Rivermont Elementary - posted academic gains during the 2014-15 school year. This demonstrates that when low-performing students are given highly effective teachers, they make academic gains, which is in line with state and national research.

Candice McQueen, Tennessee's education commissioner, sums it up: "Students' academic achievement over time can be linked to the quality of their classroom teachers, and we know from Tennessee data that students who score at the lowest proficiency level see the largest gains after having a highly effective teacher for two or more consecutive years."

Education experts also point to principals as a key factor, mainly because effective principals recruit and retain effective teachers, while principals who are less effective at leading often create burn-out among teachers.

Hamilton County's interim superintendent, Kirk Kelly, told Times Free Press editors on Friday that the school system is placing a new emphasis on teacher recruiting and training - including an effort to partner with the teaching college of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. The aim is to better prepare would-be teachers and give the school better graduates.

But hiring better teachers will only be as good as the process of weeding out bad teachers.

Kelly says the system does fire teachers for poor performance, though other educators and newspaper observation would indicate such firings occur only for egregious problems - not lack of classroom teaching ability. After all, the Ooltewah principal who was, in complaints and testimony, said to be knowledgeable of hazing problems among the schools sports teams for years was demoted but not fired after a basketball player was raped with a pool cue on a school tournament outing last December.

Certainly the 29 percent of least effective teachers in Hamilton County - that would be about 887 teachers - shouldn't stain all 3,058 of our local educators.

But neither should those 887 be allowed to continue failing - literally failing - the thousands of students whose lives they touch every day.

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