They’ve all but hired a new superintendent for our school district. Googling her led me to her job-jumping status quo. First in Des Moines, then Tucson, but only in Tucson for two years. This is just like the last superintendent we had, who jumped from job to job, and he ran this district… well, into the ground, really. But that’s just my opinion. I must say I have never seen such an exorbitant amount of money spent on such ridiculous things. He spent it all on conferences, luncheons, unneeded administration, and mileage, then fled.

I found out about the new superintendent earlier today, right on the tails of me reading an article from the cover of Newsweek about education reform. They did a beautifully creative cover. In the background, written in chalk a hundred times, were the words, “Fire bad teachers.” Ouch. The article went on to explain that because of the unions, teachers have almost zero chance of termination after they acquire tenure. In fact, less than .02 percent!

I must say, having team taught for five years, I would have to somewhat agree with this article. It’s hard for me to accept that agreement, because I am a liberal, and of course I’m part of the teachers’ union. But at the same time, I’ve seen a couple—and I really mean just a couple—of teachers who really shouldn’t be teaching. If they don’t care about the kids’ education, how are the kids ever going to care? As a teacher of at-risk ELLs, this bothers me tremendously. I need my students to succeed more than I need for their white, middle-class counterparts to, because ELLs have a much higher likelihood of dropping out. So when teachers are ineffective, have poor management, and simply don’t invest care into what they do, it has a huge impact on students whose families might already be wary of the educational system (and teachers) as it is.

With our school district not only having to hire a new superintendent (who might not stick around!) to replace the one who fled, but also facing year four of drastic budget cuts, teachers and support staff are losing their jobs in every school. And who is leaving? Well, the new teachers, the probationary teachers, of course. Not a chance that anyone else would be considered to be put on the chopping block, though I know for a fact that I am not the only one who feels that there would be some different, weaker teachers in our school who should go instead of strong, new teachers whose only weakness are their hire dates.

So I will admit that the system has flaws. What began more than a hundred years ago as an attempt to improve salaries and benefits for teachers has now, in effect, backfired and hurt our children. Just as the Newsweek article pointed out, now that women have more choices about careers, most won’t choose teaching, and most public school districts pick teachers from lower-performing colleges. And so many teachers enter the career having minimal training in classroom management, which is the most important factor for student success.

But what are we supposed to do? Reform an entire system in an attempt to find and keep good teachers and fire bad ones? It is possible, but again I become discouraged by Newsweek’s, and other more conservative media’s, simple answer to this question: base teachers’ pay and rehiring on students’ test scores. This cannot be the determining factor, and here is where my liberal blood boils. Being an ELL teacher, I see how weak students’ scores are on standardized tests for the first several years that they are acquiring English. No teacher, no matter how effective, is going to be able to break down the linguistic barrier that hampers their success without years of language immersion and sheltered instruction. And with the percentage of ELLs increasing every year (this group, in fact, is the fastest growing population of students in U.S. schools), in every state, we need to use more data than test scores to evaluate teachers.

The truth is, there is no easy answer to the question of education reform. But it needs to happen. We need administrators, the U.S. Department of Education, and superintendents to stick with their school districts and to work with teachers (the ones in the trenches) to come up with solutions for reforming teacher evaluation techniques. If you ask effective teachers how they feel about ineffective ones, they are the first and most opinionated about calling out their weaknesses and admitting their need for removal, because those teachers’ ineffectiveness destroys what effective teachers are trying to do: educate our students to the highest level of expectation. And if we are all on board about what’s best for students (good teachers!) then we should all be able to work together to keep the best and eliminate the rest.