More than half of the teachers pushed out of seven underperforming schools in Boston last year now work at other low-achieving schools across the city that are also under pressure to improve, according to a Globe analysis.
The 96 teachers are among 186 who departed from the schools last summer after Superintendent Carol R. Johnson asked them to reapply for their jobs, a move that angered many of those instructors and led to a dizzying movement of teachers through the city.
In many cases, principals at the underperforming schools filled vacancies by luring away talented teachers from other city schools, which then often filled their new openings with teachers who had left underperforming schools.
Johnson initiated the staffing changes in an effort to reenergize the underperforming schools and also to help the city land more than $20 million in federal school turnaround grants. To qualify for the money, at least half of the city’s 12 state-designated underperforming schools had to dismiss at least half their staffs.
The move seared into the public psyche the idea that schools were rife with bad teachers, and raised questions about whether reshuffling teachers would benefit the underperforming schools to the detriment of other schools.
It’s not clear what the impact has been in moving staff out of the underperforming schools and into other low-achieving schools. The first official barometer will be MCAS scores from this spring, which will not be available until the fall.
Johnson emphasized that no one should draw quick conclusions about teachers merely because they came from an underperforming school.
“Just because a teacher didn’t return to a turnaround school doesn’t mean they are ineffective teachers,’’ she said.
Only 21 teachers received an unsatisfactory evaluation from those schools last year, according to the School Department.
“We are going to work very hard to give teachers who are underperforming support, and also make sure we have appropriate and adequate documentation,’’ Johnson said.
Several principals of these schools did not respond to a request for an interview, but a few parents and administrators willing to talk said they were pleased with teachers hired from underperforming schools.
The Sumner Elementary School in Roslindale, whose standardized test scores rank in the bottom 20 percent statewide, hired three teachers from the underperforming Blackstone Elementary School in the South End. All three stay late at school on their own time, said Frances Campbell, the Sumner’s assistant principal.
One teacher, she said, helped to create a program that trains parents to use technology and sends them home with a refurbished computer, while the two others help students learn to speak English after school.
