Smaller schools.

When my son was in k-8, he was in a district with a great superintendent and head of HR. They had a wonderful relationship with the unions, partly because they gave every COLA 100% to salaries. They were able to work with the union to get rid of bad teachers. About 20% of new hires were not asked back after one year (probabation period), and they had a process they went through to get rid of later bad ones. They also had full-time mentors for new teachers and a raft of programs for teacher improvement. I was on a bunch of district committees and was impressed by most of the people there.

You are right that the problem is identifying who is bad enough to fire. There are no real metrics, although parent complaints and too many kids failing are clues. Mostly teachers seem to know who the bad ones are. 5th grade teachers know who the bad 4th grade teachers are by how well prepared their kids are. If administrators don't seem out to get anyone and otherwise have a good relationship with teachers, it's easier to do.

One lack in public schools is middle management, between the principal and teachers, who could actually know what goes on in the classroom.

If your private-sector emloyees had the same job safeguards currently held by members of the teacher's Union, would those concrete work products have mattered?

(I know, I'm asking for it)

Not intending to offend anyone, but in my experience as a student and then as a parent, the principal isn't necessarily objective or competent.

Many of the good teachers that I remember were good in spite of their principals.

Well, duh. Bad teachers are the ones who discuss evolution and refuse to lead prayers.

I say, if Kaus is so fired-up to make it easier to shitcan teachers, we should also make it far easier to shitcan columnists who promulgate false-to-misleading story lines.

Bad teacher=hates my child

Another factor in determining if a teacher is good or bad is that a public school teacher doesn't get to pick and choose the "product."

I decided my son's English teacher was not a good teacher when she misspelled words on the blackboard during PTA meetings and neglected to correct sentences in his papers that didn't have verbs.

That said, I think most of the problems with American education is structural and financial rather than personnel in the classroom.

Yeah, that's my reaction too. I suspect if yu made it easier to fire teachers you'd get fewer good teachers, not more.

Good elementary school principals can evaluate their teachers. Between walking through classrooms, knowing students and seeing them in the hallway, talking with the teachers, etc, they get enough interaction.

Evaluating principals seems like a harder problem than evaluating teachers.

anandine has the answer!

The teachers of the next grade decide. So the 3rd grade teachers rate the 2nd, the 4th the 3rd, the 5th the 4th, etc.

Open the districts and let parents choose where their children attend school. Top-down approaches to administration will always yield bad teachers and administrators hiding in the layers of created bureaucracy. Only with freedom of choice will the districts feel the pressure to fire bad teachers.

You could start by making it easier to fire teachers who engage in gross misconduct as in this notorious New York case in which it took many years to fire a teacher who had admitted that he tried to seduce a student.

My father was an elementary school principal supervising about 10-15 teachers. I'm sure he knew some were better than others. I'm not at all sure that he could have articulated the deficiencies of those who were less good in a way that would necessarily have convinced you, or me, that he was right. Being good at being a teacher, or being miserable at being one, is hard to measure.

My view about the difficulty of evaluating teaching has been confirmed by my own experiences teaching, in circumstances where I was almost always subject to evaluation by students. Let me tell you, even students, who ought to know best, don't agree very much on what a teacher's weaknesses and strengths are.

On the other hand, my son at one of the best public high schools in New York City some years ago had an abominable French teacher. Awful. Taught French like it was a dead language (Latin was her true love) and handed out high grades to cover up for her failures. I think everybody knew she was, or had become, terrible. I think no one wanted to throw her out of her job, since she was approaching both senility and retierment and probably needed the money. But maybe there ought to be some way to spare students this sort of thing.

There is a fundamental problem in K-8 education somewhat similar to that in software development: Excellent teachers are 1000 times better than average teachers, and 10000 times better than bad one. However, there are very few excellent teachers (as in everything else in life) yet everyone thinks all the teachers should be held to the standard of the excellent rather than the average. Just as you can't beat average software developers into being superstars, you can't punish/fire average teachers into being excellent.

And there is the whole other issue of top-quality women no longer being restricted to K-8 education for careers.

Cranky

anandine makes some excellent points, and I'd only want to add that every study of US public schools reveals enormous differences in student achievement, increases in student achievement, graduation rates, college acceptance rates, essentially every measure of educational output you'd want to study. But one feature public schools have (generally) in common is that teachers work under collective bargaining contracts, and are therefore not "at will" employees. The fact that this feature is shared among the ostensibly good and bad schools suggests that it does not explain the poor performance of bad schools. Kaus, as usual, is barking up the wrong tree.

I've been covering our local school district for about 30 years now; when the school board meets, I am, by far, the senior person in the room.

In our district, the principal does indeed interact with teachers on a regular basis. Tenured teachers are evaluated every other year or so. Non-tenured teachers are evaluated every year. Evaluation includes at least two classroom visits by the principal or assistant principal, videotaping of class sessions for later review, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now.

A bad evaluation means remediation. Two means the teacher is on the bubble. Teachers are not fired often from our district, but I've seen probably a dozen over the last 30 years get the boot after the process was completed.

The trick is not to hire bad teachers in the first place. That's why our district's screening process is so rigorous. In addition, it now takes four years to gain tenure in our state, and teachers can be dismissed during those four years whenever the principal decides it's time for them to go.

I'm a believer in tenure; I've seen far too many vindictive administrators in my time. It's easy to make competent teachers look bad: Just give them the roughest, low achieving classes year after year. Too often, standaridzed tests are misused to blame teachers. Tests that show this year's third grade isn't achieving as high as last year's do not show teachers are doing bad jobs. It shows this year's third graders--who are different children from last year's remember--need more help. A better measure, which is becoming more commonly used lately, is to compare a class with itself. In other words, if last year's third graders scored at grade level, are they doing the same this year as fourth graders? If they are, teachers are doing a good job. If they're scoring higher than fourth grade level, teachers are doing a great job. If they're scoring lower, something needs to be done.

Again, I've found that bad teachers can be, and have been, fired as long as the process is followed correctly.

So what's the key for good schools? Good central administration. Good, skillful teachers. School board members who take their jobs seriously and without ax grinding. Parents interested in making sure their kids achieve the most they can. Kids are kids; they'll do as much or as little as they're allowed to get away with, I don't care whether they come from the inner city or rural America.

If you want better teachers, pay them more.

Don't hire bad teachers. How might you manage that?

This is a systemic problem involving parents, students, teachers, colleges, and employers, but you might start by (1) paying decent salaries and (2) making teaching a respected and honored profession so that you start attracting people who can develop into good teachers. You have to support them - even if that means (God help us) letting them fail students or throw them out of class. (You have to have provisions to help the students who fail or get thrown out of class.) You have to give them feedback - from students, parents, employers - that they can incorporate into their teaching. You have to have a probationary period during which the teachers get on their feet, start interacting constructively with colleagues and the community, and if they don't meet a high set of standards within, say 3 to 5 years, it should be relatively easy to dismiss them. There must be a sufficient supply of well-trained candidates to fill those positions and keep class size down, lest school districts find themselves increasing class sizes and retaining bad teachers just to survive.

Do you want a quick, cheap fix? There is none.

Many education critics like to criticize the teacher union, and they often act like all we need to do is get rid of them and our education problems will largely disappear. But even if many of their complaints are true, one thing unions are good at is negotiating wages for their members. I would assume that if you get rid of the teachers' unions, over time their wages and benefits will go down at least when adjusted for inflation while their job security will also deteriorate. Since I haven't found anyone, even in the conservative camp, who claims that public school teachers in this country are overpaid, how will a move (destroying teachers' unions) that drives down teachers' pay be good for education? You can hire and fire teachers all day long, but if the pool your hiring from declines (and no one claims the teacher talent pool is that great to begin with), what difference does it make? WalMart has a greater flexibility when it comes to firing its workers than any school will ever have, and I don't know many people who are impressed with their level of service.

There are so many people longing for those teacher positions. Who wouldn't want to work 60 hrs/week for just-above-poverty income?

Oh I don't know Kev, maybe they could do things like:

1. Hold weekly meetings with all the teachers to discuss lesson plans, problems, goals for next semester.

2. Have regular one-on-one meetings between principle and teachers.

3. Use a mixture of standardized test results, interviews with students, peer review, etc.

Gee, and I put about ten seconds of thought behind that.

dk, so you think paying bad teachers more will magically make them better?

Drum: ..the conversation never really got to the key issue..

Inadequate funding? Lack of parental involvement?...Not that doing something about these two issues would promote better performance for both teachers and students or anything...

No, the key issue has to be how to identify poorly-performing teachers. Then we can move to the next 'key issue' of what to do about the unions that shelter these inadequate teachers.

...Eeesh...

Guscat, in many parts of the country, including Westchester New York where I live, public school teachers are overpaid.

One lack in public schools is middle management, between the principal and teachers, who could actually know what goes on in the classroom.

But how would this work? Have non-teaching department heads that can more frequently observe in the classroom, and review more of the work done relating to the class?

If you want to destroy our public school system, there may be no better way to go about it than by eliminating tenure. I speak as the son of a retired elementary school principal who has had the benefit of years of dinner-table talk. My father spent a great deal of time dealing with threats/requests, etc. to have teachers fired -- because the child had a "bad experience."

Reasons:

1. Parents are not rational consumers of teaching services. If a child has a "bad experience" with a teacher (misbehavior, poor grades, etc.), it is the teacher's fault. In some cases, this is true. In many, it is not. A problem child is more likely to be suffering from a problem household than a problem teacher. When that parent happens to be a friend of a school board member, or someone who wants to raise enough of a fuss, without tenure, that teacher would be gone.

2. With tenure in place, the best teachers get the tough cases. If there were no tenure, would an elementary school principal risk putting the kids with problems or with screwy or connected parents in the classrooms of the best teacher and put the job of one of the good ones at risk?

3. Everyone wants "better teachers." Are we going to get better, brighter, more dedicated people to join the teaching profession by removing one of the primary benefits -- security -- of joining that profession? A capable young person would have to be crazy to go into a profession that offered the salary limitations of the public sector, but the risk of the private.

4. Without tenure, teachers would no longer make themselves available to serve as coaches. Why would a teacher put themselves at risk of pissing off sports parents for the few-thousand-dollar stipend coaching generally pays?

5. Without tenure, teachers would spend their summers researching their class lists for the following year, finding out which students have parents with connections. That way, they could adjust their grading/discipline accordingly to keep their job safe.

> dk, so you think paying bad teachers
> more will magically make them better?

Well, it is _exactly_ the Wall Street Journal's (editorial page) argument that $200 MILLION/year salaries are necessary to "draw out" the best CEOs, but for some odd reason this is never held to apply to K-8 teachers[1].

Cranky

[1] I keep saying "K-8" here not because high school teachers don't have many of the same organization concerns (they do) but because both by the nature of their work and their inclinations they tend to resemble community college academic faculty more than they do K-8 'kid raisers'.

dk, so you think paying bad teachers more will magically make them better?

I think paying teachers more, in general, will make it less likely that the best and brightest teachers (or people who might otherwise consider becoming teachers) will instead end up as laywers or advertising sales executives.

As a former HS and college level teacher, I would say that direct observation can be very inconclusive. I always taught better with an observer in the room, other people taught worse with an observer in the room. Even if you're really awful, it's not too hard to get it together for one class period while the principal's in the back of the classroom (not to mention that the presence of the principal also affects how students behave as well). Add in the fact that the administration:teacher ratio (correctly) has a large number of teachers per administrator, and the work environment is such that there is very little direct supervision and direct evaluation is a difficult problem.

I am from a family of educators (father, wife, 2 aunts ect.), and in family discussions what concerns them most about teacher evaluation is, suprisingly, not political interfence but management interference.

As long time teachers they all have stories about how every 5 years or so the latest educational/managerieal fad that comes down the pipe and will solve all of thier problems.

To a person they agree that these are failures for several reasons.

First of all the nature of following the latest fad does not allow for proper integration within a complex system.

Secondly, education is a slow moving beast,in the 5 years a system is in place it is just bearing fruit when the new ideas come in place.

Most importantly, they tell me that the best teachers follow no specific theroy for management and education but use pieces of many as personalities and the amouphous nature of a group of children demands.

They really truly fear being judged not on thier educational abilities but on how completly and dogmatically they are embracing the latest paradigms.

The politics they can fudge.

cmdicely on February 23, 2007 at 3:03 PM:

I think paying teachers more, in general, will make it less likely that the best and brightest teachers...will instead end up as laywers or advertising sales executives.

..Thus saving their souls from eternal damnation..

...in many parts of the country, including Westchester New York where I live, public school teachers are overpaid.

Posted by: James B. Shearer on February 23, 2007 at 2:57 PM | PERMALINK

Any cites. I'd like to know what overpaid is in Westchester.

Anyway, to back you on the New York teacher/seducer, David Bracaccio (hardly a right-wing sop) did a PBS program about a year ago on the New York public school system where there was just such a case plus other useless teachers who turn up to some building and sit there for the school day to collect full pay for months or years on end.

They interviewed the union president(?, I think) and she was rabid, off the wall, defensive of all union privilige. I am most assuredly pro-union but she came across as someone you couldn't deal with. A horror. I was really disapppointed.

On the other hand, in the early 80s I lived a couple of blocks from Brooklyn Tech in Fort Greene. Smaller school, dedicated students and a disproportionate number of Asians, even then.

The problems go much deeper than the teachers.

The argument for paying teachers more is that a higher salary will attract more qualified people.

The problem with bad teachers is in part a problem of not being able to assess applicants, but it's also a problem with the applicant pool. In this area, for example, it's impossible to own a house, and difficult to rent a condo, on a teacher's salary; so the best and the brightest, unless they are particularly called to teaching, go do something else.

One example from an institution 90 or so miles away from your location.

I taught there for 7 years in the writing program. Generally, not simply good but outstanding evaluations from students and reviewers.

I was fired the same day I received the department's evaluation of my teaching which said something along the lines of "material superbly chosen and taught: students involved, evidence that they actually improved. Offers the department a background in classical rhetoric that it would otherwise not have.

I rather enjoyed that.

James B. Shearer: I looked at the salaries below:

http://www.myshortpencil.com/newyorkteachersalaries.htm

I can't say I was overwhelmed by starting salaries in the wealthiest Westchester communities at around $40K and median salaries at about $70K compared to the cost of living. I bet you didn't buy a house in Westchester on that salary.

Students should evaluate their teachers at the end of the course -- and the evaluations should COUNT!

Kids know their teachers better than anyone else. Their evaluations should come at the end of the course so they aren't trying to curry favor. And knowing that kids will "grade" them should give teachers incentive to deliver the goods.

1. bad teacher. Ducktaped a kids entire head because he wouldn't stop talking. Grabbed a different student by the neck and shopok him while screaming "I hate all you little bastards! I should not have to put up with this crap!" Never once had any kind word about any boy in her fifth grade class. Only ever stressed negative. Batshit crazy is bad. (my oldest son's fifth grade teacher)

2. Watched as three older, bigger children surrounded a 1st grade student on the playground and shoved him around calling him names. When the 6 year old boy grabnbed one of the older kids and slugged him. She called the little boys a "Columbine kid", excusing her own behavior as "Well, yes, maybe I should have stoppped it before he hit the other kid, but he totally overreacted." This boy came out of first grade knowing less than he did when he started. He was never called on if he raiseed his hand and was sent to the principal any time he spoke up in class. He was treated by this teacher as a pariah.

3. Principal called parent and told her that a boy in her 9th grade class had threatened her life. But, that he was not going to punish the kid. Told the student that she needed to "watch her back and not say or do anything to make the boy "lose it". Those are BAD teachers. Pretty easy to find.

Good teachers:

1. Third grade teacher for the boy in example #2. By the time he finished that grade he scored higher than any student in the class on his tests and he was reading at a 6th grade level. He excelled in math and never had a straight As for the year. Why? Because this wonderful teacher told him he was good and treated him with love.

2. math teacher at high school. AS my son says, you have to really want to not know something in order to flunk her class, she will just keep on expalaining it again and again until you get it. She was named teacher of the year for the state a few years ago and she deserved it.

Good teachers are easy to spot. So are the truly bad ones. I had to haul my son fifty miles each way to a different school for a year and get him up at 5 am to get him away from that crazy woman who called him a "columubine kid". But it was the best thing I ever did for him. Thank God for my mother who helped me so I could do it and still get to work.

Guscat, in many parts of the country, including Westchester New York where I live, public school teachers are overpaid.

Many? What percent would you define as many? Do you advocate decreasing the pay for teachers in Westchester, New York?

dk, so you think paying bad teachers more will magically make them better?

Increasing the incentive for people to become teachers should draw more talented people to the profession, nicht wahr? Or do I misunderstand the magical workings of the free market?

The Americanist hit the nail on the head in the very first comment; smaller schools. Solves lots of problems.

Kevin,

Another thing to keep in mind- if you as a private employer fired a good employee, you would ultimately suffer consequences- you'd sell less product, your profits would go down, and, if you fired enough good employees, your business would go under. What's the self correcting mechanism for a principal that fires good teachers?

The problem is pay.

When I was in high school, I had a great first year physics teacher. He was recently licensed, was A+ in presenting the material, and was able to reach the students who were brainy and into science as well as those that couldn't care less.

He had no job security as a new teacher and ended up going into the private sector with his science degrees and made some real money.

I've mentioned before on this blog my complaint about fellow Minnesotans freaking out about the quality of the school bus drivers in the state. Last night yet again there was an alarmist news story about them. But starting pay is in the $8.00 range less than workers at fast food. How on earth do you expect to get quality people at those wages? You can't. I think this applies in some measure to teachers as well. If the pay could attract qualified folks, not just those who have a commendable dedication to educating our youth, competition would take care of this. But we are left only with those who don't mind making peanuts.

"Students should evaluate their teachers at the end of the course -- and the evaluations should COUNT!

"Kids know their teachers better than anyone else. Their evaluations should come at the end of the course so they aren't trying to curry favor. And knowing that kids will "grade" them should give teachers incentive to deliver the goods."

My own experience with student evaluations is that they are so variable as to not be very helpful. Most are so general as not to be useful -- "Great," "Pretty good," "Bad," "Hate his guts." And the more particular ones tend often to be in diametric opposition to one another. And finally, I've seen evaluations of teachers whom I would have flunked that were quite good (probably for reasons not much related to teaching -- really cute, kind but ineffectual, gives good grades, etc.). While I have always been evaluated by students, I wouldn't say that the evaluations had much to do with any improvements that have occurred in my teaching. I think that for most people, supervisors' evaluations are far more useful, to the extent they bear any relationship at all to what has gone on in the classroom (that is, prepared by a decent supervisor).

I am a Democrat because I believe that there are certain things markets/the private sector cannot handle. I believe that one of these is education. Now there are ways to make the education system better, and we owe it to or children, ourselves, and our nation as whole to do everything we can to move toward a "more perfect" system. But trying to shoehorn the ways of the private sector into the public, on the assumption that what works well in one sphere will work well in the other is not the way. And because we owe it to the youth of our country to, to put it bluntly, not screw them up, I do not believe in experimantation. I am fundamentally conservative when it comes to messing with government structures, in that any change that cannot be shown to directly and certainly improve things should be avoided.

If someone comes out with an accountability plan that's not modelled on the private sector, but instead tailored to the very different needs and capabilities of the public sector, I'm willing to give it a hearing. Education reform that works by analogy to industry fails the test, as well it should.

I think its actually very easy to determine who the good and bad teachers are.

I read some experimental results about high school or college teachers, in which evaluations of prospective students after seeing just a few seconds of teaching (I think it might have been as little as a few, 2-second film clips) were highly correlated with their evaluations after a taking a class with the teacher.

So, a principle can probably evaluate the teacher pretty accurately based on a small amount of contact for the same reason that we can evaluate whether or not we like someone based on very limited contact with the person.

Contrary to what we are taught, judging a book by its cover works pretty well.

I am a teacher and a union rep. I also worked in the private sector as a manager before becoming a teacher. I have represented teacher who I wished would be fired and more often than not the administrators drop the ball. It really is not much harder that the private sector. Usually pricipals just don't take the basic steps necessary to accomplish the task. In addition, often times they are presented with the reality of weather or not they can replace the teacher with someone better. Often, it will be a sub who is in fact worse.

Students should evaluate their teachers at the end of the course -- and the evaluations should COUNT!...

Posted by: William Slattery on February 23, 2007 at 3:16 PM | PERMALINK

That will not work.

That is what already goes on in some colleges. Lecturers can be intimidated into making the course "fun", there is grade inflation, and good lecturers are adversely affected by students who don't like to be intellectually challenged or marked fairly. And that's where the teacher isn't having to be a disciplinarian too.

Feedback may be. Evaluation no. Itelligent appraisal of the teacher, fine.

"How do we know who the bad teachers are?'

This is kind of similar to our problem in Iraq. After thirty years of teaching in public schools I can say with some authority that the only ones who knopw are other teachers. I do not believe we, as a society, have the political will to solve this problem. We want "accountability" and we want "creativity" and we want administrative "accountability" and we want "good scores" on tests. If we get good scores, we recalibrate the test (make it harder) so there can be continued rants to improve test scores. We want a responsible beauracracy to account for all that govt. does. We want planning for progress, which is the surest sign of Zeno's philosophy ( we can never achieve anything because before we achieve it we must be half way there )

All of this costs money. So over half of our educational money is spent outside the classroom. Teachers know that Americans will never achieve quality education being, as they are, completely absorbed in themselves. Any teacher who has been in the system for any time knows that the only operational method is to: 1) remain human and in touch with the needs of your students 2)if something needs to be done, don't ask permission 3) do it yourself with a little help from your friends 4) ask forgivness when a sleeping beauracracy finds out what you've done 5) always allow the beauracracy to take credit for your efforts.

When Americans really want to get serious about education, finding out who the bad teachers are will be the easiest of chores.

Students should evaluate their teachers at the end of the course -- and the evaluations should COUNT!...

Posted by: William Slattery on February 23, 2007 at 3:16 PM | PERMALINK

That will not work.

That is what already goes on in some colleges. Lecturers can be intimidated into making the course "fun", there is grade inflation, and good lecturers are adversely affected by students who don't like to be intellectually challenged or marked fairly. And that's where the teacher isn't having to be a disciplinarian too.

Feedback may be. Evaluation no. Itelligent appraisal of the teacher, fine.

When I ran for school board I was pretty sure that the early retirement plans were an imperfect way to cull teachers that had burnt-out.

I think it's not that hard to detect burnt-out teachers.

I can't say I was overwhelmed by starting salaries in the wealthiest Westchester communities at around $40K and median salaries at about $70K compared to the cost of living. I bet you didn't buy a house in Westchester on that salary.

Teacher's Son

And you ought to hear the investment bankers in these towns whine about their school taxes! It is sickening. My Dad (I'm a teacher's son, too) always lamented that teachers were expected to live in "genteel poverty." Things haven't changed all that much (although the unions have surely helped some).

It has always struck me as strange that teachers say the way to improve classroom education is to pay teachers more. They can only be saying two things: Either they are not teaching as well as they would if they had more incentive, or the existing teachers aren't very good, so we need to get smarter people into the business. I would agree with the latter. Teachers score lower than PE majors on the GRE, ahead of only home economics majors.

That said, elementary school teachers in my experience have been extremely dedicated to helping kids, just not always very good at it.

"When that parent happens to be a friend of a school board member, or someone who wants to raise enough of a fuss, without tenure, that teacher would be gone."

In the late '40's, my Dad lost his job as superintendent of schools in a small Michigan town for disciplining the daughter of a Board member. I don't think things have changed much.

> It has always struck me as strange that
> teachers say the way to improve classroom
> education is to pay teachers more.

It has always struck me strange that Robert Nardelli needed a $475 million bonus on top of his $200 million salary to "incentivize" him, or that Wall Street investment bankers need $20 million EOY payouts on top of their $3 million/year salaries, or that baseball players get multi-million-dollar performance bonuses on top of their quite nice salaries, but it seems that is the way we as Americans have structured our economy. Only K-8 teachers, for some reason, are supposed to be angels who do great work for low pay.

Cranky

Jim W on February 23, 2007 at 3:30 PM:

..a principle can probably evaluate the teacher pretty accurately based on a small amount of contact for the same reason that we can evaluate whether or not we like someone based on very limited contact with the person.

All you are doing is determining whether or not you like someone, not if they are competent. Your view of a person's competency is influenced by how positive you feel toward that individual.

Regarding Westchester teacher pay, it is my understanding that there are hundreds of applicants for every opening which indicates to me that the pay is too high. While Westchester New York is probably an extreme case I believe there are lots of school districts around the country with many applicants for every spot. When comparing pay, remember teachers only work about 180 days a year and often have better benefits than comparable private sector jobs. And also better job security.

As for corporate executives, I will concede that many are even more overpaid than teachers.

To be honest there are not as many BAD teachers as you might think,But there are a lot of bad parents.How much time do you spend on doing homework with your kids? I work all day and then spend three to four jours every night doing homework with my kids, Do you.?

Give teachers random excerpts from Kausfiles.

If they give them a passing grade, they're not qualified to teach.

What no one wants to admit is the reasons we used to have so many great teachers at such cheap salaries is because they were that half of the population which was shut out from doing anything else.

You can't get a fantastic system of education on the cheap. If you want to get brilliant teachers, at least bring their salaries up to those of college professors.

Second--how many cases do we have where so-called "bad schooling" is in fact "rotten students"? And "rotten parents"?

It's things like this that make me cynically propose bringing back child labor and get rid of Maybe if the alternative to getting an education was 12 hours a day of back-breaking work, parents and kids would appreciate the chance of sitting in a classroom and learning more.

I think it is easy to spot good and bad teachers.

Teachers should be judged on how their students do on tests the NEXT year.

You can't teach to the test because the students are not really able to handle the work they will be doing next year. The teacher can't help the kids cheat becuase the test they are giving the students this year doesn't have anything to do with how the teacher is judged.

If my students scored an average of 50 in 4th grade and 52 in 5th grade and your students averaged 53 in 4th grade and 53 in 5th grade then I did a better job teaching them.

Yes, it does mean you have to track students from year to year but it WILL show who the good teachers are.

I usually support an easier ability for principals to get rid of bad teachers. In my High school we had two terrible teachers. One was rude and obviously held all students in contempt. The other was a straight-out pervert, who made all the girls in his classes uncomfortable. Every student knew about these two, especially the pervert. It was even a joke that if you wanted a good math score, you just wore a low-cut shirt to your math test. Two years after I graduated both of them were fired, the pervert for finally being too inappropriate with a student, the other for displaying his wide racist streak right in front of a black student. Everyone knew they were going to do something horrid eventually, and they were both bad teachers, but nobody could stop it until it was irrefutable. Luckily for the school nobody sued over either of those teachers.

dob asked:

"Increasing the incentive for people to become teachers should draw more talented people to the profession, nicht wahr? Or do I misunderstand the magical workings of the free market?"

So you will only increase the pay for new hires? And if you already have hundreds of applicants for every position I doubt increasing this to thousands will help a lot.

Personally I don't think teaching is all that hard so it is a waste of resources to have extremely talented people teaching. However it would be beneficial to be able to remove extremely bad or dangerous teachers without requiring extraordinary effort.

The Nardelli situation is clearly a flagrant example of a severe principal/agent problem, as is the situation (on a smaller scale, of course) of a teacher who trys to seduce a student and keeps his job. Principal/agent problems can be dreadfully difficult to solve.

Ballplayers, however, are among the most rationally rewarded people we have in our economy. When millions and millions of people are willing to watch you do something, you are quite plainly worth spending millions and millions of dollars on.

I am a high school teacher. Here is the deal. Yes I know more or less who the bad teachers are at my school. The point is though that most teachers are really good. And there are bad employees in every profession and those people also slip through the cracks. It is really not about the unions. I also think that today there are many more safe guards and evaluations that teachers have to go through before receiving tenure. I think it is harder and harder to make it through this process if you really are a terrible teacher.

An off-the-cuff idea: Every teacher is visited by a different roving panel of evaluators, who stay in the classroom and observe for a week, a few times a year. At the end of the school year, evaluations are processed for a consensus about whether a teacher is good or bad. Good teachers are rewarded, bad teachers are fired.

Incredibly expensive, sure. But it might be the closest we could hope to come to an objective evaluation.

David Triche, that sounds like a rationalization. The union makes the process for firing bad teachers too complicated for the average principal to handle and then blames the principals when bad teachers don't get fired.

Personally I don't think teaching is all that hard so it is a waste of resources to have extremely talented people teaching.

It is apparent that we have different opinions on this subject.

Reading through the comments, I find a lot that's useful. Many of the issues in evaluating K-12 teacher performance have their counterparts in higher ed.

Some of the comments, though:

"1. Hold weekly meetings with all the teachers to discuss lesson plans, problems, goals for next semester.

"2. Have regular one-on-one meetings between principle and teachers."

The problem here is the increasing "professionalization" of K-12 administration. More and more, elementary school and high school principals have relatively little classroom experience theselves. They could listen, but how would they know what "good" is?

What is a "bad teacher"? Fifty years ago, when I was at school, I suffered under sadists who specialised in brutal and vicious punishments and kept their classes in order by fear. They also were inspired men (all men in an all boys' school)who knew their subjects through and through, worked ferociously hard, preparing lessons and marking work handed in, and managed to instil a love of whatever was their particular subject. "Chunky" taught English; ex-army, North Africa with the Desert Rats, Anzio, hit the beaches at Normandy, hero; I learned clause analysis and parsing, writing precis and composition essays, was introduced to the joys of Milton, Pope, Keats and Shelley, Dickens and the Brontes, Elliot, Yeats and Pound, Shakespeare and Miller by this brute who, if you merely coughed or drew a margin straight, would have you standing through all the lesson, arms outstretched in a crucifixion position, holding two textbooks in your hands. Hit you dangerously hard round the ears even if you wore glasses. Bad man. Good teacher?

Such teachers do not exist any more, perhaps thankfully. But there are teachers, chaotic, bad at administration and record keeping, unplanned lessons, the school inspectors' nightmare, but charismatic, inspired, loved by their students, every lesson an entertainment and education, willing to spend hours after shool dealing with students' problems, good humoured, informed, inspirational. Bad managers. Good teachers?

Do you judge a teacher by the examination results he/she achieves with their pupils? That is quantifiable. But do you judge them by their contribution to school life and the community at large? By the atmosphere in the classroom? By the interest they inspire in their students? Thes are criteria not easily calculated. What dio you do about a teacher, formerly excellent, who has entered a stage of decline, perhaps through illness or personal problems or simply age.

There are teachers who are hopeless. They soon enough become known for their incompetence to senior staff. They should be - and generally are very easily and rapidly - terminated. For the rest, surely the senior staff will be aware of the performance of the teachers in their school. In big schools it is perhaps more difficult, but department and faculty heads will be aware iof the quality odf their troops, and should be able to give a reasonable account of their staff performance. Annual reviews, with department heads meeting with each teacher in in their departments, surely are a means whereby teachers' performances are monitored and communicated.

Erin, maybe you aren't a bad teacher when you receive tenure but 20 years later when you are a burned out drunk the school can't easily fire you.

"The Americanist hit the nail on the head in the very first comment; smaller schools. Solves lots of problems."

Regrettably, some of the things that seem logical don't turn out the way you might expect. Yesterday's NYT featured a story about the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found (among other things) that reading skills of 12th graders tested in 2005 were worse than those of students in 1992, in spite of the fact that "12th graders in 2005 averaged 360 more hours of classroom instruction during their high school years than students than in 1990."

You might think that more favorable teacher-student ratios would be beneficial, and you might think that increased classroom time would be, too. The problem is that these kinds of assumptions can be undone by any number of things -- not the least of which might be poorly trained teachers, indifferent teachers, incompetent administrators, and the effects of poverty on children.

As to Kevin's question, there's quite a bit research about best practices in classrooms. Some of it is, as previous commenters indicated, flavor-of-the-month stuff; and some of it may very well lead to better teaching & more learning, but isn't given a chance to take root because of things like impatience and a short attention span (as those same commenters, I think rightly, pointed out).

Effective teachers

-- like children;
-- know their subject matter;
-- plan their day/week/quarter in advance;
-- lecture as infrequently as possible;
-- employ a variety of student-centered activities in their classroom;
-- regularly provide feedback to students and, as much as possible, to their parents;
-- seek feedback from colleagues & supervisors;
-- participate in professional development (workshops, seminars, continuing education).

Yes, this list is reductive, but it's a reasonable start. I think it's true that many of the things that make teachers effective are things that can't be quantified, but most of the things I mentioned above are observable, and other things are as simple as checklist items.

One of the most important things you need in order to identify bad teachers is a smart administrator (whether a principal or curriculum director) who has spent time teaching in classrooms and clearly communicates his or her expectations. This person has to be dedicated to classroom observations of teachers. These visits should be both announced & unannounced. (For example, all teachers should have two scheduled observations, and one unscheduled.) That means a lot of classroom observation, and it may require more than one administrator, but what we're talking about is quality control. What business (aside from the business of government) functions very long without that?

What is a "bad teacher"? Fifty years ago, when I was at school, I suffered under sadists who specialised in brutal and vicious punishments and kept their classes in order by fear. They also were inspired men who knew their subjects through and through, worked ferociously hard, preparing lessons and marking work handed in, and managing to instil a love of whatever was their particular subject. "Chunky" taught English; ex-army, North Africa with the Desert Rats, Anzio, hit the beaches at Normandy, hero; I learned clause analysis and parsing, writing precis and composition essays, was introduced to the joys of Milton, Pope, Keats and Shelley, Dickens and the Brontes, Elliot, Yeats and Pound, Shakespeare and Miller by this brute who, if you merely coughed or drew a margin straight, would have you standing through all the lesson, arms outstretched in a crucifixion position, holding two textbooks in your hands. Hit you dangerously hard round the ears even if you wore glasses. Bad man. Good teacher?

Such teachers do not exist any more, perhaps thankfully. But there are teachers, chaotic, bad at administration and record keeping, unplanned lessons, the school inspectors' nightmare, but charismatic, inspired, loved by their students, every lesson an entertainment and education, willing to spend hours after shool dealing with students' problems, good humoured, informed, inspirational. Bad managers. Good teachers?

Do you judge a teacher by the examination results he/she achieves with their pupils? That is quantifiable. But do you judge them by their contribution to school life and the community at large? By the atmosphere in the classroom? By the interest they inspire in their students? Thes are criteria not easily calculated. What dio you do about a teacher, formerly excellent, who has entered a stage of decline, perhaps through illness or personal problems or simply age.

There are teachers who are hopeless. They soon enough become known for their incompetence to senior staff. They should be - and generally are very easily and rapidly - terminated. For the rest, surely the senior staff will be aware of the performance of the teachers in their school. In big schools it is perhaps more difficult, but department and faculty heads will be aware iof the quality odf their troops, and should be able to give a reasonable account of their staff performance. Annual reviews, with department heads meeting with each teacher in in their departments, surely are a means whereby teachers' performances are monitored and communicated.

If the crime rate went up, would anyone suggest that the solution was to give the Police Department less money until things improved? Hey, we should replace the Police with security from the Private Sector! The competion will improve services! How about less job security for the cops on the beat, get rid of those unions? And I think that they're overpaid; maybe the cops should be required to start chipping in for gas for the cruiser, like teachers do for supplies? Oh, I know...we'll let the folks they arrest evaluate them!

I think it is easy to spot good and bad teachers.

Teachers should be judged on how their students do on tests the NEXT year.

So the teachers given the least capable students by whatever system is used to assign students to teachers are, all other things being equal, the worst teachers?

Or is it maybe not so easy as you would paint it?

Their evaluations should come at the end of the course so they aren't trying to curry favor.

What is to prevent them from trying to extract revenge, though, on the teacher that actually expected them to work rather than handing out grades as bribes?

Random, probing interviews of samples of students would probably be more useful than written student evaluations.

> The Nardelli situation is clearly a flagrant
> example of a severe principal/agent problem, as is
> the situation (on a smaller scale, of course) of
> a teacher who trys to seduce a student and keeps
> his job. Principal/agent problems can be
> dreadfully difficult to solve.

I am glad it is clear to you, because it has been hotly debated in the business press for the last 2 years and there is no conclusion in sight AFAICS.

And it is interesting that I have made no statement on whether or not CEO, investment banker, etc salaries are too high - that is another topic - yet every who has responded has assumed I have.

What I _have_ noted is that every single business publication and organization in the United States has been consistently beating the drum since 1995 that enormous pay differentials - on the order of 66,667:1 - are required to "draw out" the best CEO talent. This isn't just the somewhat looney WSJ Editoral Page; it is every business publication out there (except Warren Buffet's).

Yet the same people who make this "66,667:1 draw out" argument also claim that the right course of action is to bust teachers' unions and privatize schools. The _exact same people_.

So what I AM asking for is a coherent explanation of why the differential draw out theory applies to some classes of employees, but not to K-8 teachers. Be specific and complete; show your work.

Cranky

forgive me if osmeone already said this but:

"The fact is that principals simply aren't in close contact with their teachers on a regular basis."

Well, maybe they should be, if they're supposed to be determining this? also, without these safeguards, what's to keep administrators form just keeping teacers who agree with them, as opposed to good ones?

When comparing pay, remember teachers only work about 180 days a year and often have better benefits than comparable private sector jobs.

Now there's some serious bullshit. What school districts only have 6 month school years?

Or did you mean just 180 days of being at work? Because there are only 260 actual work days in year.

Teachers, at least in Texas, work 187 days of the year (37 weeks). They're only paid for 187 work days (most districts stretch that paycheck out over 12 months, to make life easier for teachers -- but they're not paid for time they don't work).

As for benefits? Jesus -- they're awful, at least in Texas. The health-care is defintely sub-standard, the retirement is iffy (and what really sucks is you lose SS benefits as a teacher).

My wife made more as administrative assistant (a non-degree position) than as a teacher. (That was due to the MUCH better health care benefits as a secretary).

As for working 37 weeks a year -- I've watched, and teachers work a hell of a lot harder than any of my much-better paid counterparts here in the real world.

My wife's generally at work from 7:30 to 4:30. She has 30 minutes for lunch (she's watching kids WHILE eating, as part of lunchroom duty). She has to schedule her bathroom breaks, because trying to step out for a trip to the can involves snagging another teacher to watch her class. She cannot go stretch her legs, go grab a cup of coffee, or take a break mid-day to gossip for ten minutes with a coworker.

Every minute of her time -- from first bell (7:55) to the minute the last bus leaves (3:15) is scheduled and busy.

You couldn't pay my ass enough for that, thank you.

"The fact is that principals simply aren't in close contact with their teachers on a regular basis."

Good principals do. Question is, how do you find good principals?

Anyone who has spent any time in schools (even as a parent volunteer) knows who the good, decent and poor teachers are. When a bad teacher leaves, we all talk about it, for instance.

One aspect I've always thought underutilized in teacher evaluations is parent requests for teachers the following year. This is one of those few opportunities where market forces are somewhat in play. And people are evaluated by their strengths more than their weaknesses. Parents are always asking parents of children ahead of them who the good teachers are. And it's not just black/white or good/bad, but based upon what that teacher does well. One requests a teacher with a great science background. Another is looking for someone creative. Some like teachers with with controlled chaos, others like a tighter ship. We choose because we're trying to make the best match for our children.

The people NO ONE chooses are the poorest teachers. And again, we're all talking about who they are. Thus, the children who's parents are the least involved often end up in the poorest teacher's classrooms. These are often children that are more difficult to teach, making a poor teacher even less likely to succeed.

Lovely.

It has always struck me as strange that teachers say the way to improve classroom education is to pay teachers more. They can only be saying two things: Either they are not teaching as well as they would if they had more incentive, or the existing teachers aren't very good, so we need to get smarter people into the business.

Um, wrong. They could be saying that they are unable to teach as well as they could if they were in better financial circumstances, they also could be saying that the problem with eliminating bad teachers isn't that it is too hard, but instead that administrators are unwilling to do it because it is too hard to fill behind them, they could also being saying that teachers would be less likely to burn out if they had better working conditions (including salary), etc.

Certainly, districts that have a serious problem with classes that go substantial fractions of a year without having a permanent teacher probably aren't looking for (or likely to take advantage of) any power to get rid of even more teachers than they already have gotten rid of.

"How do we decide who the bad teachers are?"

In all the discussions about education and bad teachers, the one thing left out of the discussion is the students. I have long contended that a lot of the teachers who are lauded as "great teachers" might not look so good with a different crop of students.

Students have to want to learn. Class and family expectations play a huge role in whether students actually want to learn. If a kid doesn't feel they have any stake in learning, you can't make them do it. The standard line has been that the teacher must instill a desire for knowledge in the kid. How's that working out?

The desire to learn comes from the kids social environment. Until that is addressed, all the rest of it is just happy talk. Some of which is targeted at discrediting and breaking the teachers unions.

Inner city kids are often used as an example, but kids in rural settings ain't faring all that well either.

I could write a book on this one. Remember that the U.S.A. has over 3000 locally controlled public school districts. Each one is different in its standards, practices, available funding, and levels of achievement.

Some districts treat their faculty as professionals, while others treat them as labor, albeit without hourly wages. However, I would bet that few, if any, have taken the time to define the characteristics they are looking for in a "good' or 'great" teacher. Shouldn't that be part of each new hire's job description and form the core of their annual evaluation? Absent that information, it's much more difficult to sort out the "bad" teachers, fire them during their probationary three years, or work to improve his/her skills after that.

PersonnalIy, I would define a "bad" teacher as one who is immoral, demeans students, fails to work to meet the needs of students, fails to be prepared, fails to improve his/her educational level or teaching skills (at least to the extent that the district supports those efforts), or consistently achieves poor results at reaching state and local standards established to measure student success.

Furthermore, I would define a "great' teacher as one whose students become increasingly independent, knowledgeable, inspired, and confident in his/her classroom, one who finds new and creative solutions to solving classroom and curricular problems, one who keeps up with current research in their field and applies it, and one who is positive in his/her relationships with students, colleagues, parents, and others.

I was fortunate to teach in a very high-achieving elementary school in a very high-achieving state that happened to have a strong state teachers' union. Every school in our district was a National School of Excellence. We had excellent teachers and average teachers, but very few of them were "bad".

I also served as the head of my local teachers' association for several years. People misunderstand the function of a teachers' union. In my experience, it serves to negotiate teacher salaries and working conditions (without which this country would have a much greater teacher shortage at today's salary levels) and then defends teachers from violations of their contract by the administration. I can vouch for the fact that even the talented educational leaders I worked for had no compunctions about violating our contract whenever they thought they could get away with it, sometimes five or more times/week. And, surprisingly, I can also vouch for the fact that teachers worked through their union representatives to try to improve, discipline, and/or get rid of "bad" teachers who gave the profession a bad name.

I now live in a state that has a "right to work" law, meaning that any teacher can be fired at any time, no unions allowed. So, how are we doing here? First of all, teachers are so poorly paid they need subsidized housing to live in any of the surrounding counties. Teacher shortages are a major state problem, and - no surprise here - so is student achievement and graduation rates. Ya get what ya pay for, folks. If you want all your teachers to be the brightest and best your children deserve, you will be competing for that level of talent with places that treat their faculties as educational leaders, not laborers, places that expect great achievement and support the only people who can deliver it, and places that will pay to get that level of service. Just like other Americans, the best can name their own price in both the public and private sector.

As for testing as a way to judge teacher and student achievement? It can best be summed up with the following saying, "A child does not grow by being constantly measured". It takes a "good" teacher, one who has both refined skills and an excellent knowledge base, along with great rapport with his/her kids. Remember, every hour spent preparing to take tests (sometimes as much as a month/year), then taking the tests, is an hour spent Not teaching children the things they need to know in the 21st century, many of which can't be measured by true/false, multiple choice answers.

Guess I wrote a book!

I live in the heart of one of the most abysmal school districts in the country (a federal judge controlled it for nearly 2 decades under a desegregation lawsuit). I know a couple of good teachers in that system, but by and large, they are a humiliating embarrassment, and I cringe when the local media sticks a microphone in the face of one of the grammar-deficient mouth-breathers.

Now that that is out of my system, what Paul said first: Smaller Schools!!!

As a teacher I would say that all of the factors you mention for judging a teacher's effectiveness are important. However, once a principal is in the position of firing someone, she has to be able to qualify a specific reason why and it probably won't come down to just one of the factors or ways of evaluating that you list. I think I, as well as parents, colleagues etc., know when we've found a "bad" teacher, not necessarily bad enough to justify firing. Effective teachers might be downright mean to kids, and really well-intentioned ones may not know how to plan curriculum well. Do they need assistance? Do they need to be moved to a different position? Fired? Is the principal wise enough to know which approach to take and are their resources she can take to help improve a flawed teacher rather than losing her completely?

We take a number of students from a nearby failed inner-city district. Say that Teacher A and Teacher B each get a new 5th-grade student.

Teacher A's student starts out the year unable to read (yes, we see this from time to time). At the end of the year Student A is reading at 2nd grade level.

Teacher B's student is one of the corporate/university transfers who also inhabit our neighborhood. At the beginning of the year Student B is reading at 6th grade level. At the end of the year Student B tests at 9th grade reading level.

Which teacher is doing better? How would you evaluate Teacher A's performance?

By the way, Teacher A (whom I would argue did the "better" job, to the extent such things can be measured) is now in danger of failing her No Child Left Behind Evaluaton.

Cranky

The real key to success in the education system is the active involvement of parents in the process- primarily by teaching their children the value of education and ensuring their children take it seriously. As long as a school has the critical mass of such parents, it will do well enough- below this critical mass, it will fail regardless of how much money you spend, or how many teachers you fire and hire.

The fact is that principals simply aren't in close contact with their teachers on a regular basis."

Well, maybe they should be, if they're supposed to be determining this?

That's, frankly, impossible; a typical school principal has an organizationally unmanageable task in closely monitoring teachers (even if subordinate administrators, like Vice Principals, were tasked with this in the typical school, it would be unmanageable without a lot more of them.)

With "department heads" in public schools generally teachers in a temporary, rotating assignment with additional administrative duties but not a real supervisory role (or time set aside to provide real supervisory functions) the ratio of teachers to supervisory administrators is often very high; there isn't a manageable heirarchy in the organization.

What needs to be considered is what we're afraid will happen.

I think we're primarily afraid that the parents of students will complain about teachers for doing their job, teaching things like evolution in science, or about birth control in sex ed.

We're afraid they'll stop teaching these things for fear of being fired.

So what we need, is a standard that CAN lead to being fired for inappropriate teaching --- like Bible references in classes that aren't religious studies --- but which CAN'T lead to being fired for appropriate teaching.

I think that's achievable.

We also need to consider the screening process and firing process for principals, recognizing the consequences of this additional power with bad principals.

One of the things that gets lost in discussions like these is the toll bad teachers take on students. This isn't just about efficiency versus sloppiness. This is about knowingly putting into classrooms people who not only fail to teach, but also undermine defenseless students who don't even have the option to "quit," the way adults do when they encounter a horrible employer. It shouldn't be allowed.

One of the benefits of "smaller schools" is narrower spans of authority at the top, which equates to higher administrative overhead; if one was willing to take the higher administrative costs, one could probably realize the same benefits in larger schools by narrowing administrative spans of authority (by having more administrators, in an intelligently-designed structure.)

OTOH, lots of school funding measures limit administration to get more $ into the classrooms, as if it were merely $ that produced results, not oversight to make sure the dollars were intelligently applied.

Try this:

No administrator, no teacher works in a school district longer than 10 years. After 10 years, they move on. Same in the district office.