February 11, 2009
San Francisco Schools Aiming to Attract and Retain Quality Teachers
Study Advises District and Union to Build on Recent Successes by Targeting Late Hiring, Forced Placements and Ineffective Evaluations of Teachers
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – As part of an ongoing effort by San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to address the loss of talented applicants and high-quality teachers to other Bay Area school districts, SFUSD collaborated with United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) and The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a national non-profit that works to ensure that poor and minority students get outstanding teachers, on a comprehensive analysis of teacher recruitment, hiring, staffing, transfer, and evaluation in the district. The report concluded that although SFUSD is successful in recruiting a large, high-quality applicant pool, late hiring, ineffective school staffing policies and a flawed teacher evaluation system are causing widespread dissatisfaction among teachers and school principals, and negatively affecting students.
Progress has been made in recent years. Last spring, SFUSD and UESF worked together to pass The Quality Teacher and Education Act, making teacher’s salaries competitive with surrounding school districts and increasing teacher support and accountability. Additionally, an initiative to move the district towards year-round hiring, including offering early job contracts to the highest-quality teachers, was launched in the Fall of 2008.
TNTP President Timothy Daly praised SFUSD and UESF for their shared commitment to change. “San Francisco is by no means alone in the challenges it faces,” said Daly. “Hiring delays, forced placements, meaningless evaluations—these are all common problems. Unfortunately, they are also commonly ignored. We commend SFUSD and UESF for their determination to better understand these challenges and do what’s right for teachers and students. They have done the hard work of creating the diagnosis; now they can focus on the cure.”
The study, underwritten by national foundations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was conducted in the spring and summer of 2008. TNTP researchers surveyed nearly 2,500 current teachers, prospective teachers and principals, and reviewed staffing data and contractual policies. TNTP briefed the SFUSD Board of Education yesterday on the findings, including:
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Late hiring. San Francisco is able to attract a large applicant pool of prospective teachers, but loses quality candidates who grow frustrated with a late hiring timeline;
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Forced placements. Teachers and principals sometimes have no say in teachers’ school assignments, to their shared frustration; and
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Ineffective evaluations. Evaluations are ineffective at assessing performance, improving instruction and dismissing poorly performing teachers.
Late hiring: 1 in 3 new teachers is not hired until August. By the end of the summer, top candidates from an initially large applicant pool have accepted jobs with other Bay Area districts that hire earlier. Fully 3 of 4 principals report having lost a desirable candidate because they could not make a timely offer. Furthermore, the district’s delayed timeline – due to internal transfers, delayed budget estimates and teacher retirement notifications – appears to be out of compliance with state law.
Forced placements: 9 in 10 teachers favor “mutual consent” staffing policies, but teachers are still slotted. The analysis highlights the importance of respecting the consent of both teachers and schools in all teacher placements. Despite overwhelming support for a move to mutual consent, lingering forced placement practices in San Francisco have required most SFUSD schools to accept teachers they did not want or who were not a good fit—hampering their ability to form effective instructional teams.
Ineffective evaluations: Less than 1 percent of teachers are rated “Unsatisfactory.” SFUSD’s teacher evaluation system, which assigns 86 percent of teachers one of the top two ratings on a five-point scale, fails to identify poor performance or recognize excellence. Fewer than half of teachers think their evaluators helped them improve their instruction. Instead of supporting or dismissing poor performers, principals often pass them from school to school. More than half report “consolidating” a teacher or encouraging a teacher to transfer on the basis of poor performance.
The New Teacher Project stressed the seriousness of the problems facing the district, and urged the district and the teachers union to work together – as they have in the past – to find solutions to these pressing issues.
“The struggling economy is making it harder than ever for school districts to get ahead,” said Ariela Rozman, CEO of The New Teacher Project. “But the fact is that San Francisco can’t afford not to reconsider how it hires and evaluates its teachers. Teachers matter more than anything else in our schools when it comes to raising student achievement. Both the teachers union and SFUSD have a shared interest in building a high-quality workforce. There’s a cost for every great teacher who walks away, and it’s not just taxpayers who pay the price—students do too.”
The report makes a number of recommendations to address these issues, including:
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Earlier hiring. Move up the hiring timeline and prioritize high-quality new teachers by allowing consideration of all teacher candidates – both external and internal – simultaneously for any vacancy. Facilitate speedier HR communication with applicants and transferring teachers.
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Mutual consent placements. Establish a system of “mutual consent” hiring, in which principals and teachers must agree that each placement is a “fit.” In Chicago and New York, among other cities, this has increased satisfaction and reduced teacher mobility.
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Effective evaluations. Overhaul the teacher evaluation system, building a new system around the primary goal of helping teachers to improve their instructional performance.
Click here to view The New Teacher Project’s full analysis and an executive summary.
