Firing bad teachers.

You reap what you sow, ya know. In a lot of universities, teaching ability is incredibly low on the tenure totem pole. If you don't value it on the front end, you shouldn't be able to punish profs for it on the back end.

As far as public school teachers are concerned, I think a bigger problem with quality teaching is the potential for excellent teachers to get bought out by private schools. That happened several times when I was in High School... we had this great AP Biology teacher who probably taught me more than anyone else those four years. A really hands-on guy, had a farm, lots of animals in the class room, held extra sessions to make sure we were getting it, etc. The next year, he was gone.

From my perspective, you've got a normal distribution of teaching ability that gets truncated, over time, to exclude the top X%. The average teacher gets worse because higher values aren't considered anymore.

actually you know.... it doesn't usually happen that teachers go to private schools from public ones b/c they usually pay less than the public ones. Surprisingly I think it happens more frequently the other way.

Now that you mention it, I recall the teacher moving to "another school, because it paid better." I always just assumed it was a private school, but maybe it was just a public school in a wealthier district?

Yeah, probably a public school in a wealthy district. I'm a teacher and you'd be surprised by the amount of head hunting the wealthier districts do. I've weighed in many times on this but my primary argument is that people seem to have this belief that there are all these excellent teachers who are unemployed and could change lives if they only had the chance.

In my district we had exactly ZERO teachers apply for our open math, science, and special ed positions. We ended up moving a science teacher to math (because state and national testing only cares about math and language arts), we poached a teacher from the elementary school for the other math spot (elementary teachers are easier to find), and we have roving subs in science and special ed.

I am a college student just a couple years removed from my high school experience and have a brother and a sister in high school now.

Just as soon as I could claim my special right as a kind of expert on this subject, a thousand other people could as well and my suspicion is that the debate is deeply influenced by our own personal experiences with schools, and the huge impacts those experiences had on us during our formative years.

So I'd say that the spattering of various opinions on what "needs" to be done, which is always found upon close inspection of the vague agreement on issues like firing teachers probably has a lot of subjectivity on it- everyone has gone to school and in some way is uniquely qualified to talk about schools issues. There is no debate quite like it.

All of that said, your mothers point is very interesting and it agrees much with my own personal (subjective) experience. It would definitely help- I've known teachers who were abundantly more capable than the school administrators but it just so happened that the less qualified people for one reason or another were the ones that took the courses and paperwork etc. to end up with the job.

A lot of great teachers come from other careers or are looking at career changes in the future, and expanding pool of quality teachers will necessarily be drawing on employee pools from the "outside". And even if there are bad administrators (and there are, and those are exactly the people who aren't firing teachers they need to fire), I don't think that problem needs to be represented as a road block that keeps us from firing teachers before it's addressed.

Turn up that turnover metabolism in the hunt for the great ones that will stick. Regardless of the other problems, it needs to be done. Even if there is strain on the schools for finding them, they should be firing people who are unqualified and voluntarily subjecting themselves to the strain to find good teachers.

There is plenty more to say but that comment is long enough.

Two things:

1) It's easy to fire teachers in the Southeast USA. Their schools aren't that great.

2) It's not like there's a large contingent of good teachers who just can't get their break into the field because incompetent teachers are never fired. In many schools (particularly in poor urban and rural areas), the alternative to a shitty teacher is....a shitty substitute teacher until the district can convince a recent graduate that they'll be the one to make a difference.

Ken, that gets at a collection of paragraphs I had written but left out of my comment. As I wrote above, I don't and would never contend that there exists a mass of excellent teachers waiting to be hired- I'm saying that their absence isn't a good enough reason to not fire bad teachers.

The second part of it which I refrained from going in to is an issue I am not very qualified to talk about in detail, but I will offer it up nonetheless. There is a rather hefty barrier in certification and paperwork that is necessary for people to become teachers, that doesn't necessarily produce skilled teachers (the existence of the debate on teacher firing might reflect this a bit).

In all honesty I can't say I know what or how it could be effectively done, but making it easier for people to become teachers would necessarily expand the pool of people available and yes, help make to get better teachers in schools. To be specific, if the time it takes for someone to acquire certification could be reduced, it could help make the career more available to people who are discouraged from entering the field and would have otherwise entered it.

There are shitty substitute teachers all over and the shitty ones probably form a majority of the substitute teachers, but in my experience I've also known brilliant individuals who have substitute taught but simply weren't interested jumping through all the hoops to make a career of it. Which is too bad.

And I didn't know that about the southeast, but it's not easy to fire teachers in the northeast.

Glenstein - your point about how "the debate is deeply influenced by our own personal experiences with schools, and the huge impacts those experiences had on us during our formative years is excellent, and one that I've gone off on many a rant about. While the general tenor of the debate is more sophisticated than the implicit early elementary assumption that teachers actually live at the school, it's sometimes not much better (ie, obviously teachers work only between arrival and dismissal, when the kids are around to see 'em). Sure, most folks intellectually know better, but it's those implicit assumptions . . .

Attitudes formed in the early years are likely to be - naturally - childlike and not very perceptive, and those formed during adolescence, when teachers are one of the main authority figures, well . . .. Interestingly, iirc, people who go into teaching often had a beloved or respected teacher in their past. At the same time, a very good teacher will tend, like any good professional, to make everything look easy and effortless (can't anyone do it?), while a bad/hostile one is likely to leave lingering resentment for the profession. And etc.

It's a very odd thing. Perhaps the closest equivalent is parenting, where there's also a lot of imagined expertise based on, well, having been raised by parents. Except that most people do end up becoming parents themselves, an experience, from what I hear, that can be quite a reality check. And there's not really any political hay to be made by going after parents or families . . .

I really do wish, though, that some of the loudest (and most hostile) pundits could be sent out to teach for a month or so (or until they refuse to show up/get out of bed/stop rocking back and forth muttering to themselves, whichever comes first). Of course, that wouldn't be fair to the kids . . . so perhaps a widely-screened documentary showing the reality of teachers' lives? One can hope.

One thing: while there are a lot of issues involved in teacher ed. and certification, I'm not sure making the process easier - as in, fewer hurdles - is necessarily the best idea. After all, if someone's simply not driven enough to go "jumping through all the hoops to make a career of it" they might not be the best hiring investment, either, especially given the current realities (and the ridiculous attrition rate as is). Like other cases involving annoying drudgery, it's probably screening out some wonderful free spirits who'd make great teachers as a side effect of screening for commitment, discipline, etc.

There are some very interesting recruitment programs around, presumably gathering all kinds of helpful data. One thing I'd like to see is - well, don't get me started, but one thing: more of a quasi-apprenticeship aspect, where newly minted teachers work with a co-/supporting teacher for at least a year, etc. (not just student teaching for a semester (at best) while getting certified). It's one of those ideas that always pops up, maybe gets briefly tried in some pilot program, and then fades away because it's difficult and expensive. Which is, of course, part of the overall problem.

Steve - As someone who works in the trenches of public education, I'd say your mother is onto something. Administrators tend to like teachers who make their lives easier, especially when it comes to student/parent complaints and following administrative fiats. Teachers who give light workloads and high grades rarely provoke complaints. Teachers who challenge students can create a bit of friction at times. Administrators don't like friction. That said, there are plenty of talented administrators who can negotiate the friction. Unfortunately, such administrators are few and far between.

Dan.S. - being no expert, I can't really say I have special authority on what kind of hoops actually exist for teachers to go through. Naturally I would hope not to just make it easier for the sake of making it easier.

But, I do think it's fair to suggest that some barriers exist on the road to accreditation that don't have any bearing on the quality of the teachers and there still exist a few opportunities to "have it both ways" - to streamline accreditation without opening floodgates of mediocrity.

But your point is also interesting- any increase in quality is mitigated by an equal and opposite swelling of, well, chumps. But so what if the floodgates were opened? The dredgery would get through, and so would the "free spirits" or whatever type of capable personalities could effectively teach. It's plausible to think that we would see equal increases in each, which at first suggests it's a zero sum kind of wash with no effect. But I don't think that's the case.

Schools still have the power to be selective in who they employ and if they can staff themselves effectively (probably a big "if"), I think they would stand to benefit, even if the dross gets through. After all, the same amount of jobs would need to be filled and the less qualified teaching candidates, though more plentiful, just wouldn't see an opportunity to teach.

Ok, I think I've successfully lowered the level of discourse here enough to declare my job done...

I talked to a principal about this a few weeks ago and I have to disagree about the "lazy administrator" business. It's more like "frustrated administrator." If you want to fire a teacher, you have to build up years of proof and then the unions complain, send them to a new school so they can be "treated fairly" and the whole thing starts all over again. You pretty much can't win in this debate.

I guess the ultimate objective is not so much to fire "bad" teachers but to reward good performance. The system today is structurally broken-because it doesn't allow for that.