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Principal authority is undermined by hiring rules that put the interests of teachers before the interests of schools. |
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Boston attracts teachers with strong academic backgrounds, but does not do enough to aggressively recruit the best teachers early enough in the year. Nearly a quarter of new teachers hired for the current school year were hired in the two weeks prior to the start of school. |
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Teacher evaluations are in need of serious improvement; Only half of all teachers have been evaluated between the 2007-08 and 2008-09 school years, and a quarter of the city's schools failed to turn in a single evaluation over the two previous school years. |
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Teachers do not appear to be held accountable for their job performance with only 41 teachers out of 4,873 found unsatisfactory last school year, less than one percent of all teachers. |
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Boston teachers get high marks for having a much higher attendance rates than teachers in other districts, with teachers using less than half of their allotted sick and personal leave. |
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While teacher salaries are competitive with the surrounding districts, the city devotes too much of its resources to strategies that do not build a stronger teacher corps. For example, Boston spends nine percent ($33 million) of its teacher payroll to reward teachers for post-graduate coursework—even though research has conclusively found that most coursework has no impact on teacher effectiveness. |
