News papers, news shows, six o’clock news, ten o’clock news, etc., have all been talking and writing about the Rhode Island school district that was firing its teachers for the “under performing” schools.  Rhode Island is not the only place firing teachers for the performance of students.  Its a phenomena that has been taking the country by storm.

Before the Recession, the idea was to give bonuses to excellent performing teachers, now that moneys tight, we fire teachers that have under performing students.  I’m sure this is just a coincidence on the change from bonuses to firing.  Don’t get me wrong, teachers should be held accountable for their performance. Notice I say “their” performance.

Back in the nineties a university did a study on school performance.  The majority of the study was conducted in the parking lot and the school pickup and drop off lines.  Their hypothesis was that they could identify school performance by the number of sport utility vehicles (SUV) that delivered and picked up kids at the different schools.  They hypothesized that schools that had a high number of SUV’s observed, would also be higher performing schools.

Guess what? The study found a correlation between SUV’s and performance.  They confirmed the hypothesis.  Does a SUV make a smarter student? Of course not! It does say something about the parents. Now the study couldn’t be heavily publicized, because  its just not politically correct.  Rich kids are not smarter than poor kids.  I know this, along with the researchers that conducted the study.

What the study does prove is that the parents are a much bigger factor in school performance than teachers.  Is this politically correct? Why not!  Now I know it would not be politically correct to conduct a study where we take the teachers from the high performing schools and flip flop them with the teachers of the low performing school.  If we could, I would hypothesize that the high performing school would stay a high performing school and the low performing school would stay a low performing school.

So is it right to fire teachers at low performing schools?  I say absolutely not!  When you fire a teacher based solely on student performance, then you are also firing the teacher based on the students’ parents.

School administrators, boards, and legislators its time you start focusing on the illness and not the signs and symptoms.  If you continue to treat the symptoms, you will never cure the illness.  You will end up with great difficulties in filling teacher positions in low performing areas.  Kids will continue to be at the losing end of your failure.

Do we hold parents accountable for their kids performance?  To some degree yes!  If you are going to have kids, you should support them, love them, be a role model, give them structure, support their school, provide consequences for misbehaving, etc. However, there are many other factors that come in to play that is not necessarily the parents fault, but more a fault of circumstance.

Regardless if its parent fault or circumstance, we should focus on filling those gaps and supporting the students.  The consequences can be dire.  Did you know that over seventy percent of offenders in prison never finished school?  Course we could use the current methodology, I guess, and hold the teachers accountable for that too.

Firing Teachers for the wrong reason burns my toast!