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Learning is obviously hard to quantify, but some teachers are much better at inspiring and helping children to learn than others. But that's a high bar. Curren
by ericd 15y ago
Learning is obviously hard to quantify, but some teachers are much better at inspiring and helping children to learn than others.
But that's a high bar. Currently the bar is far below that, with many teachers obviously phoning it in to anyone paying attention. They can't be fired, and that's the problem I was talking about. I went to an excellent public school, and I was tiered with the 'smart kids', so I generally had relatively good teachers, and some that were absolutely excellent. Even there, though, some were blatantly awful, and should have clearly been fired. I took a couple of non-"Gifted and Talented" classes, and the teachers there were a good bit worse on average. Some seemingly knew less about their subject than some of their students, and taught things that were just false in some cases.
It's demoralizing to have terrible teachers. A few terrible teachers, and it makes kids restless and bored during the school day. Talent/quality density is important in many organizations, and schools are no exception.
The stakes are a good bit higher, though. It's cliched, but the kids in schools do form the base of the country's economy a few years down the road, and if a high percentage of them can't do much more than manual labor or service work because they weren't inspired and decided that learning sucked, the US is screwed in the long term. None of the benefits of a teacher's union are worth the risk they're creating. It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. As dkarl says, it works in other professions.
- jasonlotito 15y ago> It's really important that we not throw our hands up just because we can't objectively measure them. Straw man much? Avoid the question? You wrote a lot, but said absolutely nothing. By what measure should we measure teachers? It's easy to say "get rid of terrible teachers," but if you can't define it, then you are back to square one. I'm not the one throwing my hands up. You and dkarl are basing saying one thing: "Fire bad teachers." I asked you to define bad, and you merely respond with: "You have to fire bad teachers." So, I'll try again: By what measure should we measure teachers? Test scores? Student performance? Parental voting? Secret peer ballots? Teacher testing? School board review (which pretty much amounts to parental votes)?
- ericd 15y agoYou're trying to find an objective/standardized measure of performance, and I was trying to illustrate that it's not necessary. Most of that crap is talked about because the situation has gotten to the insane point where one needs concrete evidence of failure to fire a teacher. That's not needed in almost any other profession, and it shouldn't be necessary in education. All that "saying nothing" was trying to illustrate anecdotally that it was obvious to anyone who actually watched the classes who needed to be fired. If one gave absolute firing power to every principal, minus the ridiculous hoops they have to jump through and conditions that need to be met, they would undoubtedly take care of the worst offenders quickly and accurately. That alone won't get us to uniform excellence, but it would be a very good start. That's why I was harping on the inability to fire bad teachers.