Special Report: Are bad teachers protected and are teacher evaluations fair?

In Texas, public school teachers don’t have tenure, but the perception is even the bad ones are still very much protected.

A majority of Texas public schools hire new teachers on one-year-term contracts. At the end of each year, the teacher is up for evaluation.

“Every year the teachers don’t know if they’re going to have a job or not,” said Ysleta Teacher’s Association Arlinda Valencia said.

Valencia represents about 2,300 teachers. She says unlike powerful union states like California and New York, texas doesn’t protect its teachers.

“It’s nothing new to us,” Valencia said. “We’ve always been treated that way. That’s Texas.”

“What a lot of people don’t realize is, in the education code, even if you don’t have a two-year continuing contract, you still have very specific standards that you would have to use that would constitute cause to terminate a teacher,” El Paso Independent School District Superintendent Juan Cabrera.

Teachers are evaluated by the PDAS, the professional, development, appraisal system, which includes 51 criteria reflecting eight areas.Many veteran teachers are frustrated that seniority is the last factor an administrator considers.

Everyone is on an equal footing. They are evaluated after being observed teaching for 45 minutes, and must complete a self-report. Some of the criteria they must meet include:
– active student participation
– management of student discipline
– and improvement of all students academic performance.

“Certainly not all of them will cut the mustard,” Cabrera said. “But like in any profession you try to get the most out of your employees. We know that great teachers make a difference, and we know that not every teacher is a great teacher.”

If an administrator finds a teacher is not meeting expectations, the teacher is put on an improvement plan.

“They give the teacher a whole year to show improvement,” said EPISD Teacher’s Association President Norma De La Rosa. “They send them to staff development, they have them do book work and they have them go see other master teachers teaching.”

Rosa represents 1,600 teachers. She says she can’t protect a teacher who has been placed on an improvement plan and doesn’t improve. But showing a teacher isn’t improving is the administrator’s burden of proof.

“If an administrator really does it correctly, the way they’re suppose to, then at that point a teacher can be terminated for being a bad teacher,” De La Rosa said. “But what happens is because it does take a lot of work to do that documentation, to make sure the teacher has due process in this whole scenario, a lot of administrators don’t want to go to that length to do that.”

That’s where Texas teacher unions come in. A teacher can be identified as needing improvement, but if an administrator doesn’t correctly document the process, the union then has a very good chance of winning the case, and keeping that teacher on the job.

“I’ll tell you, in my experience, I would say 10 percent of the teachers can get out of an improvement plan,” Valencia said. “The other 90 can’t get out. They’re stuck, because after an improvement plan, they’ll put you on another improvement plan, and then they’ll put you on another improvement plan.”

“We’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Cabrera said. “We got to make sure we have process in place to have great teachers in all 400-plus classrooms.”

Out of thousands of teachers, in the last three years, EPISD hasn’t let go of any due to poor performance. YISD confirms in the last two years, it only let go of one.