Firing Idiots

Besides the number of poor teachers being lower than many assume, you also have the chicken and egg issue. Most of the poor teachers I have seen that last are the ones who have been beaten down by the system (lack of respect, pay, overcrowded classrooms, lack of supplies, etc.). They tend to be at least somewhat organized and do cover the material but don't inspire nor do they go out of their way to help students. At one point they were good but over time they were drained of their passion. Companies are filled with people like that. The truly poor teachers, at least in the schools I went to, were new teachers who just never got better and they usually were not retained.

As far as standard assumptions of the debate that might not necessarily be true go, is the whole "underpaid teachers" another one?

I'm only a casual follower of this topic, so I'm unaware of whether these authors have an axe to grind or whether these are valid findings.

My understanding is that wages for entry-level teaching positions are uniformly abysmal, to the extent that they're a primary reason why the majority of people entering the teaching profession quit within the first few years.

However, my understanding is that the underlying reasons for this situation are (a) a seniority system where desirability of posting and level of pay is all determined by how many years you've been on the job, so the initial low pay is needed to counter-balance the veteran's wages, and (b) the staggering numbers of graduates that enter the workforce each year with teaching degrees, too many to be absorbed without a system that aggressively creates openings.

The real problem in the real world is that NO ONE can fire an incompetetent CEO. My guess is that 20-30% of the CEOs in the FORTUNE 500 are incompetent and another 50-60% are just time servers. This is a much more serious problem than incompetent teachers since each CEO costs 20-1,000 times as much as a teacher. When we've solved the fire the CEO problem, then it will be time to attack the fire the teacher problem.

Chad has lots of good things to say, but I'll suggest that the additive, more subtle effects of bad teaching are very serious. Bad teachers can waste time and resources, inflate grades and in some ways, make their more effective colleagues look bad by comparison. I won't waste Chad's bandwidth. Please check this out if you want to read more.

Before you place the whole blame on a factory staffed and run by malicious incompetents you might assay the raw material input. The second leg of the stool is quality assurance - there is none, by law; it is discriminatory. Blacks and Browns marvelously fail objective evaluation even when given the answers beforehand and an unlimited number of tries.

To guarantee stability on any mathematically "nice" surface we'll add a third leg - the marketplace. A GED holder with not too many felony convictions can be a $120K/annum LAX Homeland Severity warrantless search and seizure stormtrooper or a $100K/annum California prison guard. How much do they pay you, physics PhD? Do you suffer performance standards beyond showing up for work?

If the take-home message you get from white collar tales of incompetence in the workforce is that it's okay to leave incompetents laying around, gumming up the works, then there is no possible common ground for discussion.

Is it really so difficult a position to hold, that incompetence is bad; incompetent teachers exist; and incompetent teachers ought to be gotten rid of? The above strikes me as perfectly common-sensical whether it applies to teachers or anyone else, and the only logically consistent argument against it would be to make the case that the modern system (including but not limited to the effects of tenure and teachers' unions) provides the optimal trade-off between protection from the vagaries of teachers-office politics and actual incompetence.

Is this the case you want to make? That the system we have right now, incompetence, mediocrity and all, is optimal? This is the best we can do? That any lessening of protections is actually going to do damage and drag down educational performance?

'Cause I have a really tough time buying that.

The argument I'm making is not that the current system is optimal, but rather that it's immaterial. That is, the problems of the educational system are not actually the result of the difficulty of firing incompetents, but reasult from a collection of other factors.

Firing the small number of genuinely incompetent teachers is viscerally satisfying and all, but not actually likely to do much to solve the real problems of the system. It's a great way to sound like you're doing something, but as Mark says, it has more to do with union-bashing than real reform.

As a member of a 20 teacher high school science department, I can truthfully tell you that of those 20, only 1 is what I would have to say is really, really bad. And yet, even this teacher, I learn by talking to students who have had him, manages to "connect" with a measureable percentage of students.

I will weigh my opinion in on the side of feeling that incomptent teachers are not really much of a problem. For one thing, they usually sink to their own level in that they get the students who are also most problematic. In an age in which some students are coming to school for the free breakfast and lunch, the social interaction and the only meaningful structured aspect of their lives, there actually seems to be a place for these "incompetent" teachers. They serve as placeholders, as it were.

I will use this forum to make the point I always make when our public education system is compared to other countries: no other country opens its doors as widely as ours. No other system takes in any student, regardless of limitations of language, physical ability or learning capability. No other offers programs of sports, band and other extracurricular acitivities as part of their public education. If there are "incompetent" teachers (and there are) their presence hardly has enough detrimental effect to be bringing down the whole education system.

Even if bad teachers only account for 5% of the problems in the public education system, why not fix that issue and move on to the next one? I think that just the threat of being fired could help some teachers. I think of my 9th grade spanish teacher who let us play cards in class while showing us movies dubbed into spanish. That accounted for about 50% of all classroom time. Maybe if he knew his job was threatened he might be inspired to perform.

Assume a hypothetical math department of 10 teachers. 9 are good teachers, one is terrible. I contend that firing the one terrible teacher and splitting those students up between the other 9 can actually lead to a better education for the majority of students. (Use the salary of the 10th teacher to give everyone else a raise!)

In my experience, at the jr. high and high school levels, the quality of teachers is much more important than class size.

Even if bad teachers only account for 5% of the problems in the public education system, why not fix that issue and move on to the next one?

Imagine that you have a patient whose face has been torn up in an accident so that people would have a hard time looking at them. And a broken arm. And a punctured femoral artery. You have a limited budget for treating them, so the first thing you do is a bunch of expensive and time-consuming plastic surgery to fix their face.

All you need to do is to look at NCLB testing to see how a facially reasonable idea (rewarding competence, punishing incompetence) can get turned on its head and bogged down in endless turf wars. Perhaps we should see how students and teachers do when they have enough schoolbooks and schools that aren't falling down around them, and put off the fun of intoning "You are the weakest link!" at incompetent teachers until later.

full disclosure: I'm a teacher.
I posted this elsewhere but there seems to be this common belief that there is a whole line of anxious and brilliant teachers that are kept out because incompetent teachers are taking up classrooms. There is always a need for teacher, at least here in California. At my school we had one person apply for a math position. He was awful, but guess what, he was the only "highly qualified" person so we had to offer him the job. We fired him at the end of the year. Still couldn't find a math teacher so we shifted a science teacher to the math department. Couldn't find a science teacher so that class has had a revolving door of subs that have to be changed out every 20 days because they're not "highly qualified." By the way, if you're wondering why we moved a science teacher it's because according to high stakes testing, only language arts and math matter.

The argument I'm making is not that the current system is optimal, but rather that it's immaterial. That is, the problems of the educational system are not actually the result of the difficulty of firing incompetents, but reasult from a collection of other factors.

Firing the small number of genuinely incompetent teachers is viscerally satisfying and all, but not actually likely to do much to solve the real problems of the system. It's a great way to sound like you're doing something, but as Mark says, it has more to do with union-bashing than real reform.

Not buying it. If you're going to generalize from white collar stories, I think I will, too-- but with a little more authority, since I actually live through my white-collar stories. I'll generalize first by saying that I gaurantee you if we got rid of the idiots where I work and replaced them with competent people, we'd be a whole lot more efficient and productive.

I'll further point out that the logical corollary of my position that incompetence matters is that hypercompetence also matters. Most people who have idiot stories will have equal and opposite stories of departments or projects hanging on primarily because of one or two heroic workers. (You can tell the ones that are true primarily because those are the ones where the storyteller is not the hero.)

I have an extremely hard time creditting the heroic worker stories without the incompetant worker stories-- you really can't have one without the other. Are you willing to sacrifice the heroic teacher stories on the altar, too? The logical conclusion here is that skill at teaching really just doesn't matter to the outcome.

All of which is really just symptomatic of my disagreement with you on, well, everything related to public level pedagogy: Everything you tell me forces me to believe that the ordinary rules of human behavious and incentives that I have constructed over a lifetime just don't apply to teachers and teaching; that teachers are, for all intents and purposes, just plain different.

Fix the other problems, sure. But don't tell me that incompetence doesn't matter. I'll just laugh.

To demonstrate that teacher X is incompetent, it's insufficient to look at any measure(s) of the students' outcomes -- mean, median, difference between highest & lowest scores, whatever. The reason is simple: all kids are not equal, and teachers are not given identical groups of students. To demonstrate incompetence, you'd have to show a statistically significant difference (whose effect size was above some reasonable threshold) between the expected outcome and the actual.

Most of the "incompotent" teachers aren't staffing schools that lots of smarties attend -- they wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of ever being hired by such a wonder-school. Most of them are teaching students whose expected score on any reasonable measure of academic achievement is -- and will always be -- low, perhaps quite low. In this case, it's not the teacher's fault that the mean IQ of their students is 85, or that their stubborn inclination is to pay no attention in class and do zero homework afterward.

The only way such teachers could be construed as "incompotent" is under the hypothesis that the teacher can, in the course of an academic year, substantially raise their students' general intelligence (g) and trait conscientiousness. That's ridiculous, of course, and anyone who doubts this is more than welcome to have their own go at pedagogical alchemy.

In sum, it's pretty difficult to make your students stupider or lazier, and though I don't suggest the number of teachers capable of doing this is zero, like Chad said, they're rare enough not to worry about when there are more important issues.

Unless the US has a significantly higher standard of teachers than does the UK (of which I have seen no particular evidence) then I would say that incompetent teachers are a problem. Even if they weren't, of course, there would be nothing lost by it being possible to fire them.

My comments below are based on my experience as a teacher in the UK public school system (what is called the 'state school system' there). I have done a little research into the situation here and what I write below fits what I know of the US system too. There are no guarantees, however, because my knowledge isn't complete by any means and I have not taught here (although that may change, potentially).

I was a teacher myself (of physics) and my experience was that the best AND the worst teachers were all 20+ years in. It was a matter, in my opinion, of experience making the best teachers the best, and a lack of continuing interest making the worst teachers worst (particularly a refusal to accept anyone else's opinion because, you know, they know it all).

It is hard to document teaching incompetence, though, that is certainly true; it's not hard for a fellow teacher to work it out over a few weeks, but that's an 'I know it when I see it' sort of thing that's not going to produce a lot by way of legal objectivity. There is some merit to looking at 'value added' statistics if a suitable assessment regiment is in place, but you have to average it over a lot of classes. Furthermore, and here is the rub, you introduce a bureacracy and paper trail, the feeding of which takes teacher time away from activities more directly related to doing the job of teaching. Thus, the majority of (perfectly adequate) teachers get extra work in order to help create the information that will be used to take care of the bad teachers. It may be, of course, that the existing assessment framework is perfectly usable for identifying bad teachers, but that's not a given. It's a non-trivial problem in itself.

The reason why, in my opinion, incompetent teachers are a problem is that you don't need very many incompetent teachers to affect potentially large numbers of students. A given teacher teaches quite a lot of kids over, say, a five year period; even a year of poor teaching makes a big difference not just to student achievement but also to student interest (which is probably the key factor). That's just anecdotal, of course; a further and more limited anecdote I would add is that when I was a Head of Department (at the UK equivalent of a US highschool), I found that an incompetent teacher creates all kinds of problems. Which kids do you inflict that teacher on? Parents work it out pretty quickly, too; how do you fancy explaining that to them?

As a (former) teacher myself, I have no interest in there being any protection for incompetent, or lazy or disaffected teachers, because they do material damage to the education of their students. Like most people, my main concern is that a framework for judging competence isn't used to remove adequate, but expensive, older teachers. Bad teachers, though, are poison, and in my experience they were mostly of the experience that would see them well into tenure in the US system; most were not bad teachers in the past but had become disaffected, or had new demands on their time, or failed to adapt to changes, whatever. If it was easier to fire those teachers, a lot of them wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place, because whatever their faults, they didn't want to get fired from the job (and in the UK, there is no 'tenure'; it's just harder to fire people and, in particular, to fire teachers. Nothing like the solidity of the US tenure system, though).

I hate bad teachers. What little I know of the US system suggests that there are enough of them here, too. Being a great teacher is something special and most teachers aren't that, but being 'not bad' isn't brain surgery, it just takes work, ability to adapt and a willingness to take on advice. There's no excuse for being a bad teacher. If the majority experience of Americans from a variety of schools is that they don't really pose a problem here, then fair enough; what little I know suggests otherwise, but in that, I confess a paucity of information.

I agree entirely with Chad that there a heap of other problems, many of which might well be more pressing (and even harder to solve). It looks to me as if the US public school education system, overall, may have the distinction of being the only one in the West that's worse than the crumbling UK state education system; these things are, of course, hard to measure (further complicated by the breadth of the US highschool system curriculum compared to, say, the UK system where specialisation starts at age 16).

A further point on teaching unions. Many teachers in the UK join them merely for the legal insurance, but I think beyond that it's a net positive benefit to have them there. However, there has to be competition amongst unions for members and also a freedom not to belong to any union at all. I have heard, again anecdotally (from friends of mine who are teachers in different states) that sometimes there is not a great deal of practical choice not to be in a teacher's union at all, that there is at best considerable pressure to join. That, I don't like any more than I like places that refuse to recognise unions.

Even as an evil capitalist pigdog conservative myself, I like unions; if employees can organise themselves, they can negotiate with the employers, which can minimise the government bigfooting it into employee-employer relations by passing populist across-the-board laws that ignore context. The 'union closed shop', though, where you have to be in the union to work there, that's just plain wrong. Unions should compete amongst each other for members based on how good a service they provide, and one of those competing options should be the "don't join a union at all" option.

John: Not buying it. If you're going to generalize from white collar stories, I think I will, too-- but with a little more authority, since I actually live through my white-collar stories. I'll generalize first by saying that I gaurantee you if we got rid of the idiots where I work and replaced them with competent people, we'd be a whole lot more efficient and productive.

So why haven't they been fired and replaced?

I'm not claiming that life wouldn't be better if total idiots were replaced by people who are good at what they do (modulo the obvious problems with finding such people and getting them to work in the public schools). That would be insane.

The thing is, incompetent teachers are not the only problem facing public education, nor are they the biggest problem facing public education. To some degree, the idiots continue to have jobs for the same reason that idiots in any white-collar enterprise continue to have jobs-- because the efficiency gain of firing them is not large enough to be worth the hassle of finding and training a replacement who may or may not be better. Especially when there are other problems to be dealt with.

Think of it as triage.

Regarding unions, there are a lot of misconceptions about what unions are for, and what they do for members and non-members, which will probably turn into a full post (or possibly a Classic Edition, if I can dig up the last time I wrote about this). For now, the day job beckons.

I agree with the author of the blog (Chad?). Claiming that the problems in education may be solved by getting rid of incompetent teachers is like saying that you can keep your family by catching the flu by eliminating all dog poop from your yard. While it is true that both dog poop in your yard as well as bad teachers are things which are best eliminated, doing so will hardly solve most of your problem. I have no doubt that a sick dog could have a nasty virus in his poop that you could step in and then track in your house and that your baby could then crawl over it and get sick. But you would be better to spend your efforts on keeping raw chicken off of the same cutting board that you plan to slice apples on.

Actually, the current climate of blaming the teachers for the dysfunctions of the educational system is actually contributing to the problem. This is particularly true in math. Let me explain how.

Let us say that you have a very talented math teacher. This teacher has the rare combination of both understanding the math and of being able to teach it well to students who are not completely devoid of intelligence and work ethic. This teacher takes his or her first teaching job in an inner city school. Most of his/her students are black and hispanic. They on the whole have poor work habits, poor focus in class, and have begun the class many years behind academically. Let us say this teacher teaches Algebra II. The teacher is responsible to teach rational expressions, quadratic equations, conics, trigonometry, and logarithms.

Unfortunately, 90% of the students cannot do long division, add and subtract positive and negative numbers, and cannot add/subtract/multiply/divide fractions. The teacher is told he/she must remediate these students (teach them several years of math in one lesson) as well as teach them the course standards. The teacher spends hours a week tutoring students, more hours specially adapting lessons for the students who are special ed or don't speak English or can't understand the textbook because they are also deficient in English reading or are just several years behind in math.

Despite all of this extra work, the teacher finds that he/she cannot seem to teach the students several years of math in one year, she cannot adapt the lessons enough to overcome the low IQs or other learning disabilities of the special education students, and he/she cannot make most of the students understand that math is important or interesting no matter how hard he/she tries.

Throughout the school year, this teacher hears over and over again that a good teacher could do all of these things. After all, Jaime Escalante did it in that movie. And worse, the teacher also has to deal with disrespect, misbehavior, theft in the classroom. The teacher hears that a good teacher would not have any students who misbehave or are disrespectful.

At the end of the school year or not infrequently one month into the school year, the math teacher quits. The teacher has had a miserable experience. The teacher is exhausted, overworked, and feels like a failure.

One more teacher bites the dust. This story is not a fable. It is a story that actually happens 10,000 times over in every large city in America.

So while we focus all of our efforts on improving teachers, meanwhile ignoring the other problems like lazy, disrespectful, or stupid students, good teacher after good teacher quits their miserable job for one where they won't feel like such a loser and where they might also make more money.

So does it hurt anything to fix the incompetence problem first and then get to the other problems? Yes, it does. Because ignoring the other problems is actually adding to the incompetence problem. This is because qualified and talented teachers are not an endlessly available commodity. For every qualified teacher that quits, there is not another standing in line waiting to take their place, especially in math where there are not enough people who have the ability to even understand the subject to begin with.

So while the real problems in education are driving out good teachers, we continue to just focus on trying to obtain good teachers. And yet, ironically, by doing so, we guaranteed that we can only replace the good teachers with incompetent teachers.

When a certified math teacher quits, do you know who usually replaces that teacher? A long-term sub or short-term sub who does not have even basic understanding of math generally replaces that teacher. Math classes in inner city schools are often taught by a revolving door of substitutes and teaching interns who often have not even passed their math competency tests and often are unable to pass them.

I hope somebody reading this can understand the basic facts of what is happening. Sometimes it is really frustrating trying to explain what seems very simple to people who are unable to understand it. It is almost like teaching algebra II to a mentally retarded 14 year old with impulse control problems who is still trying to learn their multiplication tables. It is like trying to explain to my low IQ mother in-law why I find soap operas boring. It is like trying to explain to dumb people why the problem isn't that they are bad test-takers, the problem is that they don't know the answer.

I want to add something. In today's American, the cultural climate favors the idea that there is no such thing as incapable students, only teachers who can't teach.

So every teacher who can't get a child with an IQ of 110 to understand math as quickly or as well as a child with an IQ of 145 is a bad teacher. That teacher is working their tail off for not much money only to be told that he/she is rotten at his/her job. So he/she quits, is fired for "incompetence" or caves in and inflates the grades so that it looks like everyone is learning.

Well, it isn't true that every child learns as well or as quickly. So we are driving good teachers out of teaching in support of a fallacy. So instead of having a teacher who can teach some of the students a lot and some of the students a little, they are often replaced by a teacher who can teach most or all of the students nothing. Is that a good trade?

America is a ship of fools. And like for any ship of fools, calamity fast approaches.

90% OF TEACHERS R INCOMPETENT & IDIOTS, INCLUDING THE PRINCIPAL, INCLUDING 90% OF THE PEOPLE IN THE BUREAUCRACY, THAT ALSO INCLUDES POLITICIANS, LAWYERS, & COPS, & SOCIAL WORKERS, & CPS, YES, CPS, ALSO !! MOST STUDENTS IN COLLEGE DO NOT EVER TRY TO PROTEST ABOUT HOW STUPID & INCOMPETENT THEIR PROFESSORS R, BECAUSE OF THEIR PH.D, IS EITHER WORTHLESS OR MOST OF THEM COMMITTING MALPRACTICE, IN TEACHING, AND THE PROBLEM DOES NOT STOP THERE, THAT THE PROBLEM ALSO EXIST IN HOW THE BOOKS ARE WRITTEN & PUBLISHED: MOST BOOKS ARE SHIT, OF LESS VALUE THAN TOILET PAPER, IS HOW BAD MOST BOOKS ARE, MEANING IS VERY BADLY WRITTEN, AND IS A SIGN OF INCOMPETENCE IN MATH & SCIENCE & INCLUDING HOW LANGUAGES ARE TAUGHT ALSO: MEANING 99% OF THE COLLEGE EDUCATION IS A TOTAL WASTE, AND ONLY 1% OF IT IS OF ANY VALUE, MEANING LOT OF PRICE GAUGING IS GOING ON: WHY DOES NOT ANY PROTEST THIS PRICE GOUGING: CORRUPTION IS ALSO EVERYWHERE, @ ALL LEVELS OF SOCIETY/IES, INCLUDING HOW KIDS R TAUGHT, NOT ENOUGH OR LATE, IS ALSO DAMAGING TO THEIR BRAIN: PROBLEM IS CORRUPT INCOMPETENT & GOVERNMENT, INFESTED WITH IDIOTS AND INCOMPETENT IDIOTS OR/& CORRUPT IDIOTS, THAT INFEST ALL GOVERNMENTS IN ALL THE COUNTRIES IN ALL ECONOMIES: WHY NO LAWS AGAINST THIS, INCLUDING CORRUPT DOCTORS, THAT OVER-CHARGE: IT'S A BOTTOMLESS PIT, BECAUSE ALMOST NO ONE EVER PROTEST AGAINST THIS, NEEDS TO END BEFORE 2012.