Hot for the Wrong TeachersWhy are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?

Notes from the Fray Editor

This was an excellent, full Fray with many many great posts and arguments. Although people disagreed with one another and with the article, often very strongly, the threads mostly stayed calm and polite: an object lesson in online posting. Almost everyone wanted to contribute to the discussion, to make useful points, to make suggestions or to relate personal experiences – to the benefit of anyone reading. Posts below are just to whet the appetite: read the full Fray to get the full experience.

Comments from the Fray

I have been a public school educator for 13 years. Firing bad teachers would improve my morale immensely. It's very frustrating to know that the lazy/racist/apathetic/clueless idiot down the hall is getting paid to be a marginal-at-best babysitter. Bad teachers do inordinate damage to our profession as well as students and make everyone's job even more difficult. To paraphrase something I read in Harper's many years ago, no one works harder than a good, conscientious, caring teacher, but there's no one lazier than a bad one. (This is probably true in many other fields as well.)

I would love it if good principals with common sense (another kettle of fish) spent more time in all of our classrooms. Many do not out of a fear of being accused of micro-managing, time constraints, and/or an "ignorance is bliss" mentality. Conscientious teachers welcome observation, professional guidance, and constructive criticism if they know they are truly valued for their hard work, being treated fairly, and given real power to do what is best for their students and their school. Under these more ideal conditions, average teachers also become better, and ambivalent or stumbling teachers emerge from the gray areas with the skill and motivation they need to continually improve their classrooms.

--herdbird

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The obvious, sensible, tried-and-true method of educating pupils and students well is to provide a wide variety of subjects, from rigorously academic to useful trade to the esoteric and artistic, taught in a variety of styles and methods, in small classes, in secure schools without distractions and have the students live in stable, economically secure households. Doing that would require considerably more money than we want to spend and demand a restructuring of our economy to provide the stable and economically secure homes. I don't see us willing to do that for our children…

The canard about the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher was once again repeated. Any principal who can't successfully go through the steps to fire a truly bad teacher should themselves be fired. It is neither that onerous, nor particularly lengthy. It happens every year in most school districts in the land. I've seen several fired over the years, more often for teaching in a way that annoyed the principal than actual bad teaching, but fired nonetheless. Firing does involve more than at private industry, but that protection is well-founded and ever more necessary. Often, the teachers principals want to fire the most are the ones the school and the students need most for those teachers are the one asking questions instead merely following orders, the ones trying new ways and ideas, instead of trodden the well-travelled path.

We can fiddle with details, but until the military is holding bake sales to buy needed battle ships and schools are funded enough that underpaid teachers aren't buying pencils and paper, we aren't really committed.

--MacAdviser

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