NORWALK, Conn. – The school reform movement has been a long, painful and frequently frustrating battle.

Passionate parents and other citizens throughout the nation have worked hard, particularly over the past five years or so, to pressure lawmakers into implementing logical reforms that will allow schools to make students, rather than unionized employees, their top priority.

They call for tougher evaluations, more accountability and fewer job protections for teachers. They want schools to have the power to keep the best possible teachers at layoff time, regardless of their level of seniority.

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They want more school choice options so kids from any neighborhood can receive quality instruction, and failing public schools will be pressured to improve or close.

They want the right to monitor school district labor negotiations, to make sure school boards don’t cave in to unreasonable and expensive union demands.

But at every turn their efforts are opposed by self-serving teachers unions, whose leaders pay lip service to the idea of improving academic outcomes, but still fight to protect the status quo. And if lawmakers approve reforms the unions don’t like, they challenge the new policies with lawsuits that can take months or years to resolve.

There’s the lawsuit seeking to block Wisconsin’s groundbreaking Act 10, which is currently headed to the state’s Supreme Court. There is the ongoing lawsuit to destroy the private school voucher system in Louisiana.

The list goes on and on.

But dedicated reformers should not be discouraged. The fact is that all the bloody battles have resulted in a great deal of progress. That’s sometimes hard to measure, because education policy is a state-by-state issue, and most people lack the time to monitor changes being implemented across the nation.

But many positive reforms have been implemented in recent years, with many in unlikely and union-friendly places like Los Angeles and New York City.

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That’s particularly true when it comes to empowering local school administrators to identify and remove ineffective teachers, according to a recent story “Removing Weak Links from K12 Classrooms,” published in the February edition of District Administration.

“Changing state laws and the rise of evaluations have given (school) administrators more flexibility in removing tenured teachers, a task that had long been nearly impossible,” wrote author Alison Denisco.

“More states are tying student achievement to teacher evaluations and renegotiating contracts. Recent laws in states like Wisconsin and Florida have ended collective bargaining and tenure, weakening the power of unions to keep ineffective teachers in schools. And the rise of digital curriculum and online testing makes it easier than ever before to identify teachers whose students consistently perform badly.

“All of these factors are empowering administrators to dismiss ineffective teachers who are setting students behind academically.”

Teacher performance now matters

Ironically, it was the union’s greatest hero, President Barack Obama, who probably gave the teacher accountability movement its biggest boost.

That’s because the president insisted that states tie student progress and test scores to teacher evaluations if they hoped to compete for millions of dollars in Race to the Top money, or gain a waiver from the hated No Child Left Behind law.

State leaders desperate for more education dollars, or seeking to escape the tough standards imposed by No Child Left Behind, were more than happy to meet the president’s demands.

As a result, thousands of school districts now have more power to address teachers who are not getting the job done.

As Denisco wrote, “In 2009, only four states required teacher evaluations, and no states used evaluations to make tenure or dismissal decisions, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. Today, 27 states and the District of Columbia require annual evaluations of all teachers.

“Some 25 states and the District of Columbia require teachers with poor evaluations to be placed on an improvement plan. And 22 states and the District of Columbia have policies that give administrators permission to use persistent classroom ineffectiveness as grounds for dismissing a teacher, according to an October 2013 report from the NCTQ.”

A very good example comes from the extremely large and deeply troubled Los Angeles Unified School District.

Los Angeles teachers who receive a poor evaluation are required to enter the Peer Assistance and Review program, where they are assigned to work closely with high performing teachers. If they still receive poor evaluations for two consecutive years, they can be dismissed.

LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy has won the respect of parents and the wrath of the unions by aggressively using these tools to remove bad teachers, according to Denisco.

“In 2009-10, only 10 tenured teachers out of approximately 30,000 in the Los Angeles district were fired,” Denisco wrote. “But in 2010-11, the year (Deasy) took over, a whopping 94 tenured teachers were dismissed due to misconduct or poor performance.”

These days the L.A. school board handles about 12 dismissal cases per month, an has backed the superintendent on all of his recent recommendations to terminate, according to David Holmquist, the general counsel for the school district.

Deasy’s aggressiveness led to massive union protests, but it’s also put student learning back on the top of the district’s priority list, according to Holmquist.

“There is the expectation that kids can’t wait, and every hour of instruction is important,” Holmquist was quoted as saying. “Our superintendent has famously gone into classrooms and found ineffective teachers and removed them.”

Other examples

School districts in numerous other cities and states have also changed laws and rules to make it easier to terminate poor teachers, according to the article.

In New York City, for instance, it’s become more difficult for teachers to receive tenure status and the job protection that comes with it. Principals recommending teachers for tenure must now support their recommendation with evidence of teacher effectiveness, student learning and contributions to the school, according to the article.

In 2006-07, 97 percent of tenure recommendations were approved. In 2012-13, only 53 percent were approved.

In 2011 Florida state officials abolished tenure and teachers now work under annual contracts.  More veteran teachers who are deemed ineffective are given one year to improve. Those who are hired after July of this year can be dismissed at the end of any school year, without the automatic right to an improvement period.

The new policy has had a noticeable impact in the Miami-Dade school district. In 2010-11, only 10 out of more than 20,000 teachers were dismissed for performance reasons, the article said. In more recent school years about one-third of the one-year teacher contracts are not renewed, which means there is significant turnover and a serious effort to weed out the weak links in the classroom.

Act 10 in Wisconsin did away with the long and expensive arbitration process that was necessary to fire teachers. Under the old system it often took up to two years and $100,000 in legal costs to remove a tenured teacher. Now Wisconsin teachers are under annual contracts and school districts are given the freedom to come up with their own personnel policies.

In the Northland Pines school district, for example, tenured teachers who aren’t making the grade are given detailed improvement plans and are closely monitored for one year before a decision on their status is made.

It’s interesting to note that the district has not fired a single teacher since the passage of Act 10. Many teachers have seen the writing on the wall and acted accordingly. Some have resigned, but others have improved and saved their jobs because they realized the union and their tenure status could no longer protect them, according to District Administrator Michael Richie, who was interviewed for the story.

While many school districts across the nation are employing similar improvement programs to give failing teachers a final chance, it’s important that the improvement process be limited so that those who do not show quick improvement can be removed, according to Holmquist, the L.A. school district general counsel.

Quality instruction is too important for students, and they shouldn’t be exposed to overwhelmed teachers for very long.

“If you’ve given employees the chance they need to improve and they fail to improve, you have a duty to act,” he said.

Thanks to many new laws and rules across the nation, school officials finally have the power to do just that.