Direct placements: 140 lemons dancing on the head of a pin
Thursday, April 17, 2008Written by: Pol Econ Ed
The Denver Post reports this week that Denver Public Schools has 140 teachers who have not found teaching positions in the internal round of job placements, who will become “direct placements.” That is, now that DPS schools have chosen the teachers they want in their schools, these 140 are “left over,” but, according to the union contract, will be forced upon some schools’ faculties. Where they go has been colorfully characterized, in edu-speak, as “the dance of the lemons.”
Some states, most prominently California, have tried to forge a top down solution to this problem (which is a serious problem because often these teachers are assigned to the district schools with the most turnover, which are often serving lots of low-income, at risk kids who really need the best teachers, not the worst).
Other districts have tried to fix this problem in their union negotiations, and there have been some publicity campaigns to make this issue more public to try to force a California-like solution.
The good news, here, is that this DPS direct placement figure is down from 250 last year, or almost a 50 percent drop. DPS says this is because of negotiation and rules changes they have made. And, it does give a sense of scale to the problem. While 140 teachers sounds like a lot, DPS has about 4,500 teachers, so 140 teachers is 3% of the district teaching staff. Indeed, DPS hires in the range of 300-400 new teachers each year, so this figure is much lower than that.
The bad news is that these 140 teachers will end up teaching in some DPS school, probably with lots of low-income kids, and probably not doing an outstanding job.
In addition to trying to push this small percentage of teachers out of the profession, a more “win-win” proposed solution would be to work with these teachers to improve their teaching skills and effectiveness. But, that is expensive and it isn’t clear that we are very good at doing it.
