One piece of evidence against this comes from the study Goldstein cites, which found that the teachers who were dismissed were: 1) more likely to have frequent absences, 2) received worse evaulations in the past, 3) have lower value added scores, and 4) have less qualifications. While this policy only applied to newer teachers and thus can’t deal with things like experience or expensive teachers, it is evidence that administrators do consider teacher effectiveness.
The allegation that expensive or experienced teachers would be fired is an interesting one. Why, after all, would an administrator want to fire experienced teachers when experience is a quality that contributes to outcomes? And if teachers are paid in a way that is commensurate with their effectiveness, then why would more expensive and therefore more effective teachers be fired? The problem, as Ravitch surely knows, is that older teachers are overpaid relative to younger teachers. As Michael Petrilli has shown in a piece called “The Case For Paying Most Teachers The Same”, the teacher pay scale is far more back-loaded than in other professional jobs. You can see this clearly in Petrilli’s figure below that compares average teacher pay by age to doctors and lawyers. If there is a risk that administrators will find older teachers too expensive relative to younger teachers, it’s because of this payscale problem. Effectively preventing schools from firing people is a pretty poor way to respond to the problem of overpaid older teachers and underpaid younger teachers.