Sohn: Robinson's apology to teachers is a misfire

Staff file photo by Doug Strickland / Board member David Testerman, left, listens to board member Tiffanie Robinson in a September school board meeting.
Staff file photo by Doug Strickland / Board member David Testerman, left, listens to board member Tiffanie Robinson in a September school board meeting.

Rather than apologizing, perhaps Hamilton County Board of Education representative Tiffanie Robinson should take a bow for being candid when she commented last week on Superintendent Bryan Johnson's proposed retirement incentive plan.

The plan follows the recommendations of a community working group that studied how to produce cost savings while improving student outcomes. One strategy is to reduce the number of schools and teachers and to increase teacher and principal salaries with savings from those consolidations.

Obviously, an early-retirement incentive targets older teachers, though they aren't necessarily better or lesser "quality" teachers. But it is a starting point toward an important strategy that isn't just education-speak chatter.

By school administrators' own admission, one of every three teachers in Tennessee in 2010 was ineffective, but after three years on the job, between 90 and 100 percent received tenure - in essence, lifelong job security.

Between 2006 and early 2010, 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.

Fast-forward to 2018. Hamilton County has a disproportionate number of ineffective teachers - based on statewide assessments of student gains (or lack of gains) in classrooms. The state assessment is made in the same way across the state, but Hamilton County schools were found to have almost twice the number of "least effective" classroom teachers - at 29 percent - as the state's other major school districts and the state average.

In commenting initially on the retirement incentive plan, Robinson told a Times Free Press reporter that "many new CEOs or superintendents come up with ways to sort of weed out some of the older, more expensive and possibly less effective employees who don't align with their vision."

Robinson's message resonated with many parents who understand the benefits of engaged, effective teachers.

Her message was not well received, however, by teachers.

This week, Robinson released a letter of apology. And while she was at it, she threw the newspaper and our reporter under the bus. Her statement opens not with an apology for her words, but "for the article that appeared in the Times Free Press ... . The article left me mortified ... . I was distraught because the comments attributed to me in the story do not reflect my true feelings about our veteran staff members."

Yes, the teachers union does swing a big stick. But parents, Chattanooga leaders, businesses and the paper should expect better of Robinson. Deep in her letter, Robinson acknowledged that she has full responsibility for making her position clear.

But what could anyone find not clear about saying we want a better school system, and achieving that means we must make sure we keep the best teachers and not the worst ones - regardless of age? That should be a core aim of any school board.

Yes, most teachers are dedicated, and most view as a calling the work of sparking a love of learning in children. But some aren't, and kid-glove handling of teachers - especially here in Tennessee and Hamilton County - has held our children back. While teachers' unions and school administrators insisted it was unfair to tie teacher evaluations to their students' gains or flat-line performance, a majority of our students have fallen below grade level.

Tennessee has some of the country's best teacher evaluation data. We've been collecting it since 1995. But we've done little with it. Instead, too many school administrators learned to excel at choreographing the dance of shifting bad teachers from one school to another - usually into communities where parents were powerless to complain effectively.

How about a letter of apology to a generation of those students?

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