Eric's famous position I do find somewhat flawed. First, the gold standard everyone uses is Finland, but Finland doens't do this. In fact none of the top ranki

Eric's famous position I do find somewhat flawed. First, the gold standard everyone uses is Finland, but Finland doens't do this. In fact none of the top ranking countries do such a program. I'd love to see this done w/ gret success in a single poor-performing school district first. Also, in some of the analysis I've seen the US already does relatively well when you control for various relative socio-economic strata. The point being that the problem isn't really in a lot of schools. But there are very targeted schools where the problems run really deep. Cutting 5% of the teachers from Overlake HS in Bellevue is probably worthless (and even counterproductive). And, at least based on the numbers, you could fire everyone at Oakland International. Plus it just doesn't pass the sniff test to me that you can simply get the 6 million best teachers in the US and inner city Detroit starts scoring like Singapore. Just doesn't smell right, unless we deal with some of the larger issues. Lastly, I just don't think you can fire 5%, or 300K/year, and realistically fill those spots. And unlike the private sector, no one is going to pin their hopes on a profession where a bad year, likely ends your career (since firings of gov't positions are public record).