

Principal LouAnn Zwieryznski has stabilized the staff at Westinghouse Academy in Pittsburgh, a high-poverty school that has struggled with mid-year vacancies. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Policymakers in recent years have focused on boosting teacher quality by designing new teacher evaluations that use student test scores to judge teacher performance.

But teacher evaluation systems are rendered meaningless if there’s no full-time teacher. And that’s the case in many classrooms across the country, especially in high-poverty schools, as reported in this Dec. 5 story.

[High-poverty schools often staffed by rotating cast of substitutes]

“Teacher evaluation is certainly important, and it’s been in need of repair,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor emerita at Stanford who now heads the Learning Policy Institute, an education think tank. “But at the end of the day, it’s whether you can get and keep good teachers, not whether you can evaluate the bad ones out.”

Many readers who have shared and commented on the story have pointed out that the real issue is not too many substitutes, but underlying problems — such as unsupportive administrators and student mishbehavior — that can make high-poverty schools difficult places to work.

Sara Duckett, who left a high-poverty D.C. high school in December 2014, said that she spent too much time in meetings she believed had nothing to do with addressing the needs of her students. She said her instructional coach was spread too thin to help her effectively. The school was too chaotic for teaching and learning, she said, and administrators didn’t listen to teachers’ pleas for change.

“We often felt like we were in the trenches alone,” she said.

And then there’s the role of federally mandated sanctions for schools that persistently fail to raise test scores, said Maria Whitsett, a retired public school administrator in Austin, Texas. Schools can be forced to reconstitute, for example, which means replacing a large number of teachers.

“The reality is that in struggling schools, the professional clock is ticking; teachers and principals alike understand that if student learning, as measured by state assessments, doesn’t improve within a specific amount of time, then they can be forced out of their jobs,” Whitsett wrote in an email. “That certainly contributes to difficulty in retaining qualified staff at struggling schools,”

Naomi Gamorra, a teacher in Paterson, N.J., wrote in an email that her school is “rife with substitutes” because it has not hired enough teachers. At the same time, she said, the school seems overstaffed with high-level administrators. “I don’t understand this,” she wrote.

By late October, seven of her school’s 36 positions — 20 percent of the staff — were vacant, including seventh-grade math and English, she told the local school board. “There’s no instruction in the seventh grade,” she said, according to the Paterson Press. “How are you preparing these children for success?”

Angel Cintron, a former D.C. middle school teacher, has written about another aspect of the sub issue: When you work in a challenging school, it can be difficult to attract substitutes, which means permanent teachers often have to cover their colleagues’ classes. That, in turn, makes a teacher’s job harder — and makes them less likely to stay.

“To perform this role once in a while is not the issue. The issue becomes when you forego your planning period to perform ‘sub duty’ on a weekly basis,” Cintron wrote on his blog last year. “In fact, this year alone, I have had to forfeit a planning period to cover a colleague’s class at least once a week, for the past four weeks.”

Many principals working to turn around persistently struggling schools say their first task is to establish a strong school culture, so that teachers know that they are sending consistent messages to students about what is expected.

Kelly Gwaltney, a veteran educator who is in her first year at Garinger High in Charlotte, N.C., said that the most important thing she’s done is set a vision for improving school culture. Gone are the days of ad hoc and uneven enforcement of rules. Now there are schoolwide policies governing tardies and technology usage, and there is a dress code.

Students used to be allowed to arrive up to 15 minutes late to class without consequences, she said; now, students are running to get to class on time. Teachers can feel that they’re on a team, she said, and they can see that the school is moving in the right direction.

Just two teachers have left since the school year began, down from five at this time last year.