http://www.thetoledojournal.com/news/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=81367&sI...
School board candidate Chris Myers says that if elected, he will work to dismantle the Toledo Plan, the controversial teacher hiring/firing program that critics say is racist, sexist and keeps Toledo Schools’ increasingly diverse classrooms filled with white female teachers.
Mr. Myers, at a news conference last week, said he wants evaluations of new teachers to be done by school building principals, the district’s human resources department and the district’s teacher union, the Toledo Federation of Teachers. Currently, the TFT has sole control.
“I’ve always been disturbed at [the fact that] the determination of who gets hired and who doesn’t is in the teacher union’s hands,” Mr. Myers said. “Policy-wise, it’s not good for a school district.”
Hiring decisions are made by the TFT, a consequence of the Lawrence Dynasty that since the 1980s has largely controlled Toledo Public Schools’ policy. Installed by former TFT president Dal Lawrence, the Toledo Plan has been sustained by his wife, current TFT President Fran Lawrence.
The Lawrences, who are white, live in an affluent Caucasian suburb in Sylvania Township, far away from TPS’ central city schools.
Mr. Myers, while not calling the Toledo Plan racist or sexist, said the program allows for bias on the part of evaluators of first-year teachers assigned by Ms. Lawrence. Under the current system, an evaluator – typically a white female teacher – observes and makes notes on a new teacher and then recommends to a board whether that teacher should be fired.
The recommendation goes to TPS’ nine-member Internal Board of Review (IBOR), where the TFT has five seats, including one held by Ms. Lawrence, and controls the vote outcome.
“This brings more accountability because the principal and HR [human resources] are much more accountable than one union-named teacher,” Mr. Myers said about his proposal. “They would look for what they wanted to look for. The HR department would look for their own characteristics, the principals would look for their own, and the [TFT] mentors would look for their own, and all those different pieces would be put together.”
Under Mr. Myers’ proposal, the IBOR would be eliminated and hiring decisions would be made on a three-way vote.
Critics of the Toledo Plan say building principals have little to no input regarding which teachers are assigned to their schools. Some building principals, speaking to The Journal off the record, say the critics are correct.
Mr. Myers said the only part of the Toledo Plan he wants to keep is the “mentoring” portion. A former prospective teacher for TPS, he said he appreciates the value of a veteran teacher helping a newcomer. He said he doesn’t like that the mentor largely determines whether a teacher is permanently hired.
“That’s what would be a flaw in the current system that Toledo Public Schools has,” Mr. Myers said. “I don’t know if it’s institutional discrimination. It may be just a conflict in personalities. It may be a conflict of perspectives on teaching.
“But regardless, they got caught up in what some of the major problems in the plan are.”
Mr. Myers referred to a Latino male teacher and an African American female teacher who were bounced out of the TPS on the recommendations of their Lawrence-appointed mentors, decisions that were upheld by the IBOR controlled by Fran Lawrence.
The two teachers – Mario Martinez and Gloria Sturdivant – took TPS to court over their firings, challenging for the first time since it was instituted the constitutionality of the Toledo Plan and of their own union, the Toledo Federation of Teachers, dictating whether they should be fired after they had paid dues to the union, ostensibly for representation. Both resolved their suits with large settlement payments by Toledo Public Schools.
Only once in the history of the Toledo Plan has a Lawrence decision been overturned. That occurred after the Martinez-Sturdivant legal case began, when former TPS superintendent Dr. Eugene Sanders did not concur with Ms. Lawrence’s IBOR not to permanently hire Rodney West-Estell to teach at the Lincoln Academy for Boys.
The TPS board concurred with Dr. Sanders’ decision, by doing so making Mr. West-Estell the only African American male teacher at the school with 99 percent African American male enrollment.
Ms. Lawrence responded, in written commentary to her union members, by saying TPS had established a lower tier with which to measure the ability of certain teachers. Critics of the Toledo Plan called Ms. Lawrence’s two-tier comment racist. Jack Ford, then Toledo’s mayor and a beneficiary of TFT political support, called a news conference to declare Fran Lawrence a good person and in no way racist.
Ms. Lawrence had written: “Management is about to establish one set of performance standards for Hispanics and whites, and a lesser standard for African Americans as a concession to the Urban Coalition.”
Mr. Myers’ proposal to dismantle the Toledo Plan likely won’t win him the support of many TFT members. But most of them, like Mr. and Ms. Lawrence, live outside Toledo and can’t vote in this November’s election.
At his news conference, the candidate also called for a new merit-pay system. Currently, teachers are given pay hikes based only on longevity, not performance.
Merit pay, Mr. Myers said, is “going to assure the quality of teachers in the long run.” In 1998, when he student-taught at TPS, he came across “one of the worst teachers I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“I’m sure that teacher went through the Toledo Plan at one point,” he said. “But that teacher needed some help at that point. And the merit pay would help improve those teachers who, after a while, start coasting and not caring as much.”
Low starting salaries and no ability to increase salary through classroom performance caused him to accept a position with the University of Michigan, where today he is a Webmaster, rather than try to hire on with TPS, Mr. Myers said.
“If I knew that I could make what I’m making now in three years of work by teaching, working hard and getting good results, I would be teaching,” he said. “[Merit pay] would make it attractive for the teachers who want to work hard and want to earn more and want to get good results. I’m sure there are a lot of teachers out there who are frustrated with the slow pace of pay.”
Under his proposal, all new TPS hires – including building administrators and service workers – would be put under the plan. The merit-pay plan would be optional for current employees.
Mr. Myers said merit-pay performance benchmarks would have to be agreed upon by the teachers, the principals, the administration and the school board. “Everyone would have to come to the table,” he said.
Mr. Myers said that as a board member he would also work to “streamline” TPS’ hiring process. He said the TPS bureaucracy is slow to hire while “progressive districts ... do their hiring in the late spring and early summer.”
“Better teachers will not wait until fall to get hired,” he said. “Calling teachers the day or two before school starts is unacceptable.”
