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Op-Ed Columnist
A Serious Proposal

By BOB HERBERT

The president of the American Federation of Teachers says she will urge her members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account and that the union has commissioned an independent effort to streamline disciplinary processes and make it easier to fire teachers who are guilty of misconduct.

In a speech to be delivered Tuesday in Washington, Randi Weingarten plans to call for more frequent and more rigorous evaluations of public schoolteachers, and she says she will assert that standardized test scores and other measures of student performance should be an integral part of the evaluation process. The use of student test scores to measure teacher performance has been anathema to many teachers. Ms. Weingarten is not proposing that they be the only — or even the primary — element in determining teacher quality.

But she told me in an interview over the weekend that she wants to “stop this notion” that her membership is in favor of keeping bad teachers in the classroom. “I will try to convince my members that, of course, we have to look at student test scores and student learning,” she said.

The use of test scores, as Ms. Weingarten sees it, would be part of a new, enhanced process of teacher evaluation that would offer clear professional standards for teachers. It would replace current practices, which in many districts across the country are lax, haphazard and, in the words of Ms. Weingarten and others, often amount to little more than “drive-by” evaluations.

It is not uncommon for teachers to be observed in the classroom just a couple of times a year for only a few minutes each time and then get a satisfactory rating. Under those circumstances, hardly anything is learned about the quality or effectiveness of the teachers. Most teachers are routinely rated as satisfactory, and many are never evaluated at all.

Ms. Weingarten is urging school administrators to observe teachers more closely and more frequently. (The enhanced, clearly articulated professional standards she is calling for are already in use in some districts. There is no need to reinvent the wheel.) Experts trained in best practices and using a variety of objective data, including measures of student achievement, would do the evaluating. Teachers who are struggling would be given an opportunity to improve their performance. If, after remedial efforts, they still did not measure up, they would be fired, whether tenured or not.

As Ms. Weingarten put it, “We would have to say, ‘Look, we helped you. We tried. You’re just not cut out to be a teacher.’ ”

Ms. Weingarten also addresses the fact that it is sometimes scandalously difficult to remove teachers who have engaged in serious misconduct. While emphasizing the need for due process, she bluntly asserts, in a draft of her speech: “We recognize, however, that too often due process can become a glacial process. We intend to change that.”

The union has asked Kenneth Feinberg, the federal government’s so-called pay czar, to develop a more efficient protocol for disciplining — and when necessary, removing — teachers accused of misconduct.

This would be a big deal. Mr. Feinberg is highly respected and widely viewed as independent. He administered the government fund that compensated those who were injured and the families of those who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. He also administered a fund set up in the wake of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007.

He is not the kind of guy to go into the tank for the teachers’ union. (John Ashcroft chose him to lead the 9/11 fund.) It will be very interesting to see whether the union actually goes along if Mr. Feinberg fashions a workable plan to streamline teacher discipline that is viewed favorably by school administrators.

“We look forward,” said Ms. Weingarten, “to working with Mr. Feinberg on this critical undertaking.”

If the union follows through on Ms. Weingarten’s proposals, it would represent a significant, good-faith effort to cooperate more fully with state officials and school administrators in the monumental job of improving public school education. More than 90 percent of American youngsters go through the public schools. The schools were struggling and failing too many youngsters even before the latest economic downturn, which is taking a terrible toll.

My view is that America’s greatest national security crisis is the crisis in its schools.

Ms. Weingarten’s ideas for upgrading the teacher evaluation process are good ones and should be embraced and improved upon where possible by those in charge of the nation’s schools. The point is not just to get rid of failing teachers, but to improve the skills and effectiveness of the millions of teachers who show up in the classrooms every day.