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Why Is It So Difficult To Fire Bad Teachers?
Ant writes with this depressing story about how public schools sometimes work: "This six-page Los Angeles Times article shares its investigation to find 'the process [of firing poor teachers] so arduous that many school principals don't even try (One-page version), except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare ...'"
"The erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence .... Nothing could be further from the truth."
Not sure where that quote is from, but it's good and I had it lying around.
Do away with our corrupt tax code. Support the Fair Tax
I think it's blatantly obvious, the NEA is exceptionally powerful and won't permit it.
Brett
... but somehow we keep creating.
The problem is that we don't want to trust people in authority to make decisions, so we come up with a process or committee or something to ensure that one person can't make the hard decisions. But time and time again, it's shown that if no one can make hard decisions, no one will.
And while it's probably going to beat the hell out of my karma for it, I recommend The Death of Common Sense, by Philip K. Howard. It basically goes into examples of how our unwavering belief that a legal processes can sort through the mess impartially causes all sorts of unexpected results.
As soon as the authority to make a decision is lost, how can bad behavior be punished?
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them, then when the time comes to get rid of unnecessary teachers, its easier to get rid of the ones where the students can't learn in. Because, most students can easily identify teachers they don't like and can't learn from, and face it, even if you have a PhD in mathematics, yet your algebra students are totally confused, you aren't doing your job as a teacher and should be let go.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Give 'em a broom instead of a class. They'll get the point.
SCENARIO #2: Put that same teacher in a classroom of African-American kids from Oakland, California. The kids will do poorly because African-American culture rejects learning -- and rejects Western culture in general.
In scenario #2, the teacher would be fired as a "bad" teacher. In scenario #1, the same teacher would get a bonus for producing such accomplished students.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
first is tenure.
second reason is unions.
Broward County schools are filled with bad teachers. The unions keep them working.
recently a broward teacher had a delusional episode in the classroom. she had a pair of scissors and was threatening a student shouting about demons.
the union not only kept her job, but she's coming back to the classroom (albeit at a different school).
Bad teachers are a bit like molesting priests. They get moved around schools when people complain about them.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The article summary is incomplete. The title of the article is "Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task"
Well, the problem, and the solution, are right there.
Tenure is intended for university professors mainly; it intentionally makes it harder to fire a tenured person, so they can "push the boundaries" a bit in their classes.. without the fear of being fired for petty political reasons.
The universities do not just give out tenure to every new professor, they make sure they are competent first. If the California schools have *tenured* teachers that can't teach, that is the problem RIGHT THERE. Don't give tenure to a teacher until they know they can teach. Simple as that.
Part of the problem is unions. Another part is the massive bureaucracy. But many times, it's to protect the good teachers from vindictive parents.
"I think most nerds have had bad experiences with teachers in public school. Because either teachers count off for the most ridiculous things, have a personal bias against some things (and will fail you if you think otherwise), have a personal vendetta against students who (rightfully) correct them, or many other things that are wrong with our public school system."
Well, this isn't surprising. As someone who has been in high-school and also someone who grew up in a family of teachers I can safely say that this is inevitable. Nice teachers will simply be bullied untill they give in. High-school kids are highly observant of the level of authority a teacher has and once they see a weakness they can be quite merciless.
The people who are left are either split between people who have some natural authority and dickheads(the kind you read about in this article). A lot of teachers see students correcting them as an assault on their authority and they are partly right about this. Yes, the student may be right but admitting this may weaken the position the teacher has or aspires to have and thereby he has to carefully maneuvre between admitting his faults and maitaining order in the classroom(and over the students in general).
Remember that a high-school student spends around 5 years in a high-school but a teacher needs to maintain his position many times longer and that can cause the teacher to become ridgid. Personally, I see this as in inevitability though through good planning the damage can be minimized.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Wanna fire that "bad" teacher for teaching evolution? Great, make it easier to do so. I agree there are bad teachers, but the fact that you don't like them doesn't necessarily mean they are indeed bad teachers.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I've worked as a computer programmer for over 20 years, and I have never seen or heard of any programmer being fired for incompetence, no matter the magnitude.
As far as I'm concerned, teachers deserve our support, and I think all of the bitching is just a smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
The problem with this is that students are generally not in a good position to evaluate their educational needs. Many middle and high school students prefer to not be challenged and to do as little work as possible. A likely outcome of a student rating system is that teachers who offer easy classes that require little work will be seen as the highest quality educators.
Some of my most difficult teachers in high school are among those that in retrospect I recognize to have done the most for me. Only a few of those would I have evaluated so highly during my schooling.
This would also be alleviated if there was a license required before people could become parents.
For all the back-and-forth that's going to take place in this article, the fundamental truth is that shitty parents generally lead to shitty students.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Many schools already have this. The problem is, students are either too lazy to do this, or intentionally give terrible comments about teachers they dont like, regardless of that teacher's teaching ability.
The "lazy" student is used constantly by bad teachers. There are some teachers who can't teach, pure and simple. In order to boost their self esteem, they call students who simply can't learn the way they teach, lazy. Sure, there are some lazy students who won't do anything. And most teachers that can teach, the students like. The teachers who only have to explain things once because they make it crystal clear, the teachers who will spend a week going over a concept until the students grasp it, those are the teachers that students like. The type that can't teach, give pointless assignments, are strict about parts of grades that don't matter (like failing students because they picked a slightly different typeface other then Times New Roman) usually students hate.
Ex. A teacher has to constantly discipline a group of 5-7 students who disrupt class. When it comes time to do evaluations, these students all give the teacher terrible reviews. And, since it is done anonymously, there is no way to tell which students gave the evaluations, so there is no way to determine their bias against the teacher. The teacher is then fired because of those bad reviews, simply because some students didnt like the teacher disciplining them.
But usually teachers have 200 or more kids in a year, so those 5-7 would be quite insignificant.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The article kicks off describing how a group of shrill, ignorant parents took the word of an emotionally disturbed 12 year old and decided to push for someone to be fired based soley on that.
Parents like to treat teachers as their personal governesses. Like that cheerleading coach who was crucified for playboy pictures that were not a big deal until some fat dumpy girl who didn't get picked had a tantrum and made her mum charge into the headteachers office with the pictures.
Your kid isn't special. In all likelihood, your kid is a spoilt, willfully ignorant little shit who will give the teacher hell no matter how much they try (and they do try; nobody sticks at teaching who doesn't see it as a vocation as well as a job). Your little darling is so convinced they will be a millionaire professional sportsperson/musician/actor because you've always told them how 'special' they were, that they carry this overinflated sense of entitlement into the classroom along with 30 other 'special' kids.
The result basically lord of the flies with nicer clothes. And the people who take up the under paid task of controlling the little bastards are constantly subject to demands to fire them, cut their pay, and increase their work loads.
Back off assholes.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I've found that a good teacher can make students like them. Make students respect them. Who treats them as adults and not 5 year olds. A good teacher adapts course material to the class's demographics, if you have a required history class where most of the class isn't going to be historians, don't hammer in obscure dates of obscure events, doing that isn't learning. Focus on improving the student, not forcing them to memorize useless trivia.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Tenure and Unions
I work in a private school as an IT director, and we don't have either of those things. If you are a stellar teacher, are rewarded with more compensation, and better kit for your classroom.
If you are a, "do-just-enough-to-get-by", type of teacher, you don't get more/better stuff for your classroom (motivated teachers will make better use of the materials), and if you are bad enough, your contract won't be renewed next year.
I've been with this school about 8 years, and I can see the steady improvement in the staff. The strong ones stay, the weak ones go elsewhere.
We are a private school - typically districts send us students, and we have some private pay students. We need to have the best staff possible, or else districts and parents will send their kids somewhere else. Competition does make us better.
That's the way public schools need to be.
-ted
The teachers' union in Toledo, Ohio, has spearheaded a controversial policy to purge the school district of incompetent teachers. It's called "peer review" and no school system in the country has been doing it longer than Toledo.
...
union members today overwhelmingly support it.
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The AFT endorsed peer review in 1984.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91327130 Listen to the story -- the text is a poor summary.
Because bad parents affect kids more than the teachers, and there are a /lot/ more bad parents out there.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
What I love about /. People publicly admitting to illegal behavior and encouraging others to copy their behavior. I am sure the officers let go from the military with dishonorable discharges would agree no harm was done, their lives went on fine as if you had not done anything. ;-)
If I were to ask you if an apple is past its ripest point, you would have difficulty telling if the apple I gave you was just a day past its prime. If the apple was rotten, you would just know.
The notion that you can't quantify bad teaching is somewhat of a red herring for this issue. We aren't talking about the two average teachers down the hall, we're talking about someone who is clearly bad. When I was in high school, I had a Physics teacher who didn't notice when two fellow students drew a six foot tall penis on the back wall. He spoke in half sentences, and couldn't remember how physics worked. He should have been fired. When you get into the middle of the road teachers, firing them is a whole other issue.
An important change for education.
Part of the problem is, what metric are you using to judge the teacher?
If you judge by student performance, you run into two problems: stupid/unmotivated kids, and "teaching the test" issues.
If you judge by observers, what method do you use to observe?
I work in higher ed - we regularly get kids coming in that I am flabbergasted that they EVER got through high school. Unfortunately, in TexAss, the "top 10%" of each high school is automatically required to be able to enter any state College.
So since we aren't a "top tier" university, we are forced to take the "top 10%" of kids from Redneckistan, Mexishithole, ElBarrio, MiniAfrica, and NewZimbabwe High Schools - you know, the kids who "graduated with a 4.0 GPA" and yet have NO writing skills, NO speaking skills, and barely can manage 3rd-grade mathematics and english equivalence. They expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter - after all, they were socially promoted for 12 grades beforehand, their education paid for completely (and will continue to be so, even the ILLEGALS who shouldn't even be in this country might be getting tuition waivers and in-state rate soon, which is fucked up beyond belief when the kids on our military bases don't get that), the test standards constantly lowered for them, the curriculum altered, the language taught not the language they need to use in this country, and of course, the standardized tests removed because it was easier to stop testing than try to explain why there was a "racial disparity" between black/white/asian/hispanic/etc in the results every year.
You know what? We get feedback from the people we send out every year, the new teachers out there. What do they tell us?
- The parents WILL NOT help discipline the kids.
- The parents WILL NOT make sure the kids are doing the work.
- The parents will start screaming "lawsuit" if you suggest that little Tyrell, LaShawna, or Chiquita needs to go back a grade because they can't keep up with the expected standard.
- The school administrations WILL NOT back the teacher up if there is a discipline problem - let alone the drug and gang problems they are dealing with.
- The school administrations WILL NOT back up the teacher on giving a kid poor grade once the parents scream - doesn't matter if they never do a bit of work, never turn in homework, and even if they were in the bathroom doing crack during test time, the TEACHER gets blamed for the kid's performance.
I know there are "bad teachers" out there. You know what? There are EVEN SHITTIER KIDS OUT THERE.
I know there are "bad teachers" out there. You know what? There are EVEN SHITTIER KIDS OUT THERE.
As a homeschooling parent, I'll play devil's advocate here. The law says The Children must attend school, but it can't require them to actually be good students (be it grades or, for the most part, behavior).
Since public school authority over kids has been emasculated over the years, preventing them from doing real enforcement for problem kids, the proper solution is simply to repeal compulsory education. They should still collect *some* taxes to support a system where people who want to be educated can go. Then, the schools can have a sane policy for kicking people out, since their mission will be to, you know, educate kids, as opposed to play tax-funded babysitters for shitty parents.
Yeah, yeah... an educated citizenry is a cornerstone of a healthy, productive society. How's that working out, anyway?
Method of processing duck feet
Almost every criteria you put forward is subjective, and the rest of what you propose (Conference, Observe, Remediate, Terminate) bears a strong resemblance to union contracts in many fields.
The problem is that management and parents never want to follow the rules that are laid out in the contract. Read the comments in this thread and you will see that many people are complaining about the fact that at some stage in a process similar to what you outline the teacher was found to be competent/compliant with the rules. People want to fire "bad teachers", but they want to fire them the second they themselves identify them, not wait until after there has been some verifiable non-subjective proof of wrongdoing or incompetence.
Any review or remediation will be called "bureaucratic obstacles" or "politics" by the people who think this is easy. See bad teacher=fire bad teacher, simple.
Never mind the teachers that would get fired because they tried to teach something that violated the parent's world view (e.g. evolution).
I'm sure every person in this thread who is in favor of abolishing tenure is well intentioned, but most of them have probably never found themselves unemployed at the age of 55 with a "bad teacher" reputation hung around their neck because the school board realized they could save tens of thousands in salary and retirement costs by firing a teacher that ran against them in the last election.
At least removing obstacles from the firing path will never lead to a world where teachers will be afraid to publicly complain about waste and corruption in the schools, right? Whistle blower laws are just another legal trick in the union's arsenal.
The teachers that are "bad" because they dared to tell a well connected parent that their precious little butterfly has no business being in an advanced class will sleep better knowing that they lost their job to save us from the scourge of easily identified bad teachers.
Insert pithy comment here.
Word of advice about Missouri: the southwestern part of the state is horrifyingly conservative. If you like more liberal, open-minded types
"Liberal" and "open-minded" are two terms that in my experience are completely contradictory. "Liberals" are people who are (at least) just as hateful and malicious towards anyone who doesn't fit their chosen groupthink, as what you probably would claim "conservatives" are like.
If you're going to be "open minded", you're willing to see the argument and the objective positive and negative points from multiple sides of any argument. Liberals, by definition, come at their argument pre-biased to the left and are therefore never "open minded."
Now, if you want to find an open minded area, you need to find someplace centrist. Given the way that both political parties have been fucking around with districts and going around trying to polarize debate whenever possible, those are becoming harder and harder to find.
But I'm guessing - based on your phrasing above - that what you really are looking is for someplace that will blindly reinforce your own groupthink, rather than challenging you to actually examine your own beliefs and ideas with, say, an open mind.
Mod parent up. I've said it a million times. Once parents (a huge voting block) figure out that no politican will ever blame that voting block for anything their children do, instead casting the blame on video games, metal, rap, drugs and teachers, there's no turning back.
I'll be the first person to call out a shitty teacher or an obstructive union, but this kind of discussion cannot go ahead without factoring a huge dataset: Parents. Of course, the first person who does finds himself voted out of office pretty quickly.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Now, if you want to find an open minded area, you need to find someplace centrist.
Bullshit. Just because a position is midway between two others does not mean it is openminded.
There are openminded people who call themselves liberals, and (far fewer, but they're out there; see below) openminded people who call themselves conservatives. There are people who will accuse you of not being openminded if you disagree with them. There are people who have looked at a situation from many angles and formed a very well-informed opinion based on much evidence, and who are accused of closedmindedness because they're not willing to give a second chance to old anecdotes that waeren't worth anything the first time either.
Openmindedness is a willingness to evaluate new evidence, or a willingness to consider different axioms, both of which are pretty much antithetical--by definition--to everything that conservatives stand for. It is not the willingness to humour stupid people.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."