New York City's "Teacher Performance Unit" has gotten a lot of play in the past month among education reform news and blog circles. Part of the reason is that it is in New York City, where any innovation has the potential to affect 1.1 million students. Another part of the reason is that the Teacher Performance Unit--a group of five lawyers and a former prosecutor whose sole purpose is to help the district identify and remove chronically failing teachers--represents one of the nation's most public and aggresive approaches to getting rid of ineffective teachers in public school classrooms.

While it is predictable that groups like the Teachers Unions would be opposed to the policy since the unions' primary purpose is to protect the jobs of their members, some of the rhetoric that has been used to argue against the program has been straight-up surprising. Take for instance the comments made by Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a pro-union research and advocacy group based in DC. He criticized the New York City plan as "adversarial," and "not too constructive in terms of forward progress or improving schools."

Problem is, it's one thing to criticize an idea like the Teacher Performance Unit, it's another thing to offer up a better idea. If Mr. Carroll and the unions don't like the idea of a group of lawyers who research and document persistent incompetence and negligence on the part of a small fraction of the district's teaching staff, what would they prefer? Seems to me there are only two options:

Option A) - The unions and union defenders don't actually believe that there are any incompetent teachers (or teachers who simply don't care about their students) in the city's schools, or,
Option B) - They recognize that far more than 10 out of 88,000 teachers in the district need to be removed for reasons of incompetence each year (just as would be the case in any big company), but they envision a different kind of process to identify and remove those completely ineffectual teachers.

If anyone believes option A, they are either deluded or they don't have a particularly high regard for the importance of educating our children. Schools are just like any other business: some employees are exceptional, some do a solid job, and some are downright wrong for the job. But teaching is one of the few professions in America where you can have tremendous job security regardless of where you fall in the quality spectrum. There is little question to me that a fundamental part of the solution to improving education in America is to improve the quality of our teaching force, which means both getting rid of as many low-performers as possible AND rewarding, recruiting, and retaining as many high performers as possible.

If option B is what folks like Mr. Carroll are suggesting, I wonder what kind of approach they'd suggest to get rid of teachers like the one I wrote about two weeks ago. Should principals, lawyers, and bad teachers sit around a camp-fire, sing Kumbaya, and agree amicably to part ways? I don't know of a firing process that has ever been systematically non-adversarial. Firing people is, by nature, a difficult thing. But it has to be done, because sometimes the only way for a school to move forward and improve is to bring in people who are actually interested in helping kids learn.