Originally Posted by knute974
Originally Posted by Old Dad
Contrary to popular belief, tenured teachers can be let go, there is just a specific process that needs to happen including consultation and observing the teacher for progress / lack of progress over a period of 1-2 years. Most administration though fails to do proper observation and is unwilling to put forth the effort or time to follow the process and instead just look the other way.

I have a real issue with the firing process. It just shouldn't be this hard to get rid of an employee. We had personal experience with this process at our school. It was dreadful. We had bad apple teacher who had been a source of concern for years. At a minimum the administration needed three different families to file complaints in the same year. It also took an administrator and a school psychologist who both were retiring and didn't care about ongoing relationships with the union reps. In the meantime, the school counselor was advising parents not to allow their children to loop with this woman because she thought it would be psychologically damaging. Even then, this teacher did not get fired, just shuffled to another school. Disgusting.

What we find is that it is a failure of will on the part of the adminstration, not a failure of ability to fire. Most administrators prefer to avoid the difficult conversations and hate to hurt anyone, so they let the weak teacher stay. They use something called "harassing supervision" to try and bully the teacher out of the building, but they rarely take the steps afforded them to actually fire someone. Typically, part of the reason for this is because they know the evaluation system is so subjective and the teacher has had years of good evaluations prior to this because other administrators also dropped the ball.