S.C. deputy filmed slamming teen girl out of desk, dragging her away

Do you really think that Geico and Capital one fire as low a percentage of their workforce on an annual basis as our public schools?

Companies fire people for poor performance all the time. And, they certainly get fired for disciplinary reasons, which can take years with a teacher.

Even when we know a teacher isn't any good, they rarely get fired:

This is why over the 10-year period I studied, 61 percent of the city teachers who were found guilty of incompetent teaching, excessive absence, verbal abuse and/or corporal punishment were returned to the classroom.

Over that decade, a total of just 61 teachers — averaging six of the city’s 78,000 teachers per year, or 0.008 percent of the teaching force — were dismissed for poor performance.

http://nypost.com/2015/03/17/why-weak-teachers-are-so-hard-to-fire/

Buy, hey, let's just pretend that 99% of teachers are great, and we'll just hope the lousy ones go take a job at some other school, because it's just too hard to actually fire a teacher:

Like John Scopes, most teachers are fired for misconduct rather than simple incompetence. The New York City School District, which employs more than 80,000 teachers, terminated 25 tenured teachers during the 2008-09 school year. Just two of the firings were based solely on incompetence. Less than one-half of the districts surveyed in one study reported dismissing a teacher for poor performance in the previous five years.

Among schools that maintain binary evaluation systems—rating a teacher as either satisfactory or unsatisfactory—more than 99 percent of teachers receive the positive rating. Surveys have suggested that principals give good reviews to bad employees in the hope that they will find another job and leave voluntarily. It's harder for the teacher to find another job with bad reviews. The phenomenon has been called "The Dance of the Lemons."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/07/no_teacher_left_behind.html

 

And, in what should be a surprise to no one, additional spending, without a good plan on how to spend it, does nothing, and instead just gets wasted:

The administration pumped $3 billion of economic stimulus money into the School Improvement Grants program. Six years later, the program has failed to produce the dramatic results the administration had hoped to achieve. About two thirds of SIG schools nationwide made modest or no gains — not much different from similarly bad schools that got no money at all. About a third of the schools actually got worse.

Here’s why $7 billion didn’t help America’s worst schools

And, when grant money, intended to help kids, might mean some changes to the norm -- the failing norm -- teachers in places like Chicago will actively fight it, and sabatoge it:

A powerful and combative teachers’ union in Chicago added to the challenge.

Timothy Meegan, a high school civics teacher and union delegate who ran for alderman, said teachers at his school circulated petitions to keep the grant money out because they heard “horror stories” from other schools. Principals and administrators were “secretive” about the grant process, Meegan said. Unlike teachers in Miami, teachers in Chicago didn’t feel involved and felt that they were losing control over their classrooms as the emphasis shifted to testing.

 

Baron, I've got to give you credit. You fairly accurately summarized some of my opinions.

The fact that these ideas horrify you is what gets me.

How is this controversial?

Competition is good. If a school is so bad that no one wants to attend it, why should it be open?

If teachers can't meet measurable criteria, why shouldn't they be fired?

It's common sense.

 

Just because something's measurable doesn't mean it's actually quantifying what you're interested in.

 

Look, I'm happy to leave the criteria to be measured to others. But, there has to be a way to determine good teachers vs. poor ones.

We measure everything now. If we applied half the analysis to teachers that we apply to baseball players, we could do this.

 

Wow, what a cartoonist. Use the same panel four times and just change the background color. Ought to be working in a fast food place, Tom Tomorrow.

 

Well, it's not so clear-cut as you'd think. In baseball, we don't really need advanced metrics to separate the good players from the bad ones. Advanced metrics are used to separate the merely good ones from the valuable good ones.

The question as to who is a "good teacher" as opposed to a "bad teacher" is a different one. For starters, I suspect there's very, very little agreement on just what a "good" teacher is. Then, there's the issue of context: What's good in one setting might be awful in another. In my own experience, I've gone from being an exceptional, award-winning instructor to an awful instructor to an OK instructor ... and I really didn't change much from setting to setting.

 

Well, and I know that anything that is subjective to any degree will be fought, but I did like the practical nature of the role paying that was done in the story I linked to earlier. It actually tests a teacher's ability to impart knowledge.

Testing proficiency in the actual subject matter would be easy.

And, while you may not be able to compare student test scores, or graduation rates from one school to another, there should be a way to determine what the expectations are for test scores in particular classes/grades, and graduation rates for particular schools, and compare the results to the expectations.

 

What percentage of cartoonists should be fired on an annual basis?

 

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