We have to find a way to keep good teachers

WE ARE living in an era of cutbacks.

When economic times get tough, businesses sometimes have to make tough choices about whom or what to cut. You'd think that for a job as important as teaching kids, teacher quality would be the deciding important factor, but it's not even close in the Philadelphia public schools.

A recent visit to Gratz High by Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington, D.C., public schools and now head of Students First, brought a sobering example of this to light. Kristen Brown, a former Philadelphia public-school math teacher, told me and the audience that the math department in her school had to cut a job, and she and the math teacher she carpooled with had the least tenure. A reasonable person might assume that some type of fair and equitable evaluation would drive this tough decision.

But the quality of their teaching versus other teachers or each other wasn't considered. What was the deciding factor? The other teacher had signed in on the attendance sheet a second earlier than Brown on the first day of school, providing greater "seniority."

But this story and countless others capture Rhee's overarching point that schools aren't run to meet the needs of kids but to satisfy the agendas of various adult groups. We have seen this recently in Philadelphia with the report on the Martin Luther King High fiasco, the failures of the School Reform Commission and the reign of mediocrity and buyout of Arlene Ackerman.

Speaking of Ackerman, Rhee is the person I suggested months ago as a replacement for Ackerman when I predicted Ackerman would be leaving in the near future. That drew the wrath of Kenny Gamble and others for suggesting someone divisive as an alternative to the award-winning Ackerman. (How did that work out?)

In an interview with Rhee, we discussed the simplest and biggest hurdle stopping progress in improving teachers - the idea that teaching really can't be evaluated. This notion has infected generations of teachers and even some of the public.

I taught for 18 years, and I have no doubt that teaching is not so unique and exotic that it can't be measured in the same way we measure doctors, lawyers, salespeople and thousands of other people with jobs. Every other profession on the planet has measurements to evaluate employees to some degree. Why do union leaders believe teachers must be excluded? Stop drinking the Kool-Aid and face the world of accountability.

Rhee and I discussed several systems for evaluating teachers that included input from administrators, master teachers, parents and students. We also discussed "value-added" analysis, which employs statistical techniques to project the future performance of students based on their past performance. The difference you find between the projected and actual performance gives us the value added or subtracted by the individual teacher. Rhee supports this as an objective way to help fairly value a teacher's performance.

Bil Gates has written about a similar project under way in seven urban school districts (with nearly 3,000 teachers) that are analyzing teacher effectiveness tied to gains in student achievement. This is where we should be headed.

Rhee and I also agreed that once we identify the better teachers, they should be rewarded with merit pay. If we can pick out the best, why shouldn't they get paid more? Vick and Kafka are both Eagles quarterbacks named Mike, yet Vick is a $100 million man and Kafka a whole lot less. I think the range of teacher effectiveness is just as great.

We all know that in a union environment, when it comes to teacher layoffs, it's "Last in, first out," but how about a system that promotes "Best in, worst out?" That approach benefits kids.

In addition to debunking the myth that teachers can't be effectively or reasonably evaluated, Rhee and I discussed the logical consequence that merit pay should be used to reward the superior teachers.

If you value kids and realize we can't continue to turn out millions of kids who can't compete, then you realize that we must rely on better methods of finding and keeping quality teachers.

It can't be left to analyzing a sign-in sheet to determine which teacher deserves to be let go.