Skip to main contentPortland Public Schools officials say there's one dropout rate they hope goes up.
They're ratcheting up efforts to get rid of incompetent teachers, but the results so far have been modest.
Last March, PPS didn't renew or extend contracts for a dozen out of 3,000 teachers and other licensed professionals in the district—0.4 percent of its work force.
Yet compared with the previous two years, even that small fraction marked a big increase. In 2009, PPS ended contracts for only five teachers. The year before, in 2008, PPS denied just one teacher an extended contract.
"Principals and the human resources department have focused more intently on both supporting teachers and working them through a process if they're not getting the job done," says Zeke Smith, chief of staff for Superintendent Carole Smith. "We know that effective teachers are critical to successful student achievement."
The renewed effort to weed out weak educators from the district's teaching staff comes on contentious political terrain.
Discontent over the state of public education in Oregon played a central role in this week's election. Both major-party nominees for governor, for example, hammered voters with messages about the state's inadequate school system. Overall, Oregon graduates just 66 percent of its high-school students. Portland's high-school graduation rate is even lower—53 percent.
And PPS's efforts are happening at the same time the district and its teachers union, the Portland Association of Teachers, have vowed to improve the process for assessing teacher quality.
That's an effort outside advocacy groups like Stand for Children have supported for years.
In February, when PPS and the teachers union finally settled on a new contract after two-plus years of negotiations, the two parties agreed to initiate outside talks to update the method for evaluating teachers. That process hasn't changed in 30 years. At its worst, a teacher up for review gets a perfunctory visit from a principal who then fills out a form that asks the same questions it asked in the 1980s.
The goal of the new group is to agree to a fresh form for judging teacher effectiveness by the end of the current school year. However, the two sides have met only once—for the first time last week—on this contentious topic.
A poor performance evaluation marks the first step in the process for getting rid of a bad teacher. It's also the point at which the district and the teacher can agree to a plan for improving his or her performance in the classroom.
Rebecca Levison, president of the Portland Association of Teachers union, says her side wants the new group to focus on the opportunities for enhancing teacher quality.
"It's not an I-gotcha model," Levison says of the evaluation she would support.
Oregon does not grant public schoolteachers official tenure, which is to say, teachers aren't entitled to their jobs forever. In 1997, the Legislature enacted Senate Bill 880 specifically to abolish tenure.
It is still difficult, however, to get rid of underperforming teachers in Oregon and across the country, as evidenced by the fact only 1.4 percent of teachers lose their jobs each year in the U.S., according to the federal Department of Education. Union officials note that many more teachers are counseled out of the profession by colleagues before things get to the point they have to be fired.
Today in Oregon, two categories of teachers work in public schools—probationary teachers and contract teachers. Probationary teachers have three years to test their mettle. If, after that period, administrators decide they're unfit for the classroom, their contracts may not be renewed.
A teacher who passes the probationary period is considered a contract teacher. The process for getting rid of teachers in that category is more cumbersome. If they're asked not to come back to work, their contract must be "non-extended." Even then, a contract teacher has a year to improve before she can be removed from a school.
To see Portland Public Schools' evaluation process, go to wweek.com/evaluation.
WWeek 2015