Monday March 15, 2010
Last week’s education-focused Newsweek online article is titled, “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers.” Interestingly, the print version of the article is titled, “Why we can’t get rid of failing teachers.” A different tone set with the varying titles, but the point of the article is to highlight how within the teaching profession, educators are often insulated from accountability due to union regulations. We have 99% of teachers being rated as “satisfactory” when students are not achieving where they should be. Are bad teachers being told that they are bad teachers and then working to improve their practice? It seems that should be the first step… Of course, this doesn’t resolve an underlying issue of valuing education within our society. That would be another crucial step…
Comments:
2 Comments so far
| March 24. 12:45pm by sally |
Though the Newsweek coverage was thorough and made sense, i.e. the difficulty in removing bad teachers from classrooms, I agree w/Comment #1 that there are many factors by which to judge a teacher’s performance beyond the academic achievement of his/her students. I was particularly interested in a “sidebar” article, “Blackboard Jungle,” re. lack of teacher training in classroom management. because my son, a nearly-new secondary level teacher, is now doing his student teaching in the Chicago public system and having great difficulty w/just that. With no formal instruction in this area and unruly students facing him in class after class, he, along w/so many others, is in desperate need of the mentoring that a teacher residency program would afford, mentoring not being provided by his “cooperating” teacher. Thank goodness Mr. Duncan is promoting teacher residencies; too bad they haven’t been available to all who’ve so needed them before now. |
I think before anybody points their finger to the teacher-you need to look at ever situation. Just like children, each situation is different. Teachers are going against a lot of things -parents who are not parenting, video games and children are just rude. I do fully agree that there are bad teachers, but as general comment-just because a student does not succeed does not make them a bad teacher. You don’t know the situation if there was attendance issues. There are bad people in all professions. It is very obvious when a teacher is bad and most of the time the administrators are going through the process to fire them. But student success is not the way to show a bad teacher.