State's bad teachers rarely get fired
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State's bad teachers rarely get fired
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Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#2If you want to see an interesting perspective on education in America, I highly recommend watching Bill Gate's TED talk (start at the 8 minute mark):
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html
In summary, currently teachers are not held accountable for the quality of their teaching due to the way their contracts are structured. Also, formulas for teacher's pay reward experience and extra education, even though both have been shown to be unrelated to teaching quality.
Simply throwing more money at the problem will not help, we need to rethink the current system.
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#3If you want to see an interesting perspective on education in America, I highly recommend watching Bill Gate's TED talk (start at the 8 minute mark): http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bill_gates_unplugged.html In summary, currently teachers are not held accountable for the quality of their teaching due to the way their contracts are structured. Also, formulas for teacher's pay reward experience and extra education, e…
Difficult for the situation to change, if your unions are anything like ours in Australia.
In NSW, they recently introduced a website that displays the score of standardized tests, not at the student level but at the school level. There wass a huge uproar by teachers, suddenly everyone can see how well they do, they and their schools can be examined.
Due to this, they have come very close to striking at times, lots of complaints about not being able to teach properly, at having to "teach to the tests". There is some truth to this, but it is also a way out for the bad teachers.
There needs to be some mechanism for recognising and removing bad teachers. The system is setup at the moment almost as a teacher retirement plan, once you get in, you can't get out.
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#4Our startup (based in Seattle) was looking at ways to help analyze the performance of teachers. It turns out that the unions lobbied for legislation in Washington that forbids such software from being installed in the schools.
The unions don't want mediocre teachers to be found out. It's really a crappy situation and really took us by surprise.
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#5Our startup (based in Seattle) was looking at ways to help analyze the performance of teachers. It turns out that the unions lobbied for legislation in Washington that forbids such software from being installed in the schools. The unions don't want mediocre teachers to be found out. It's really a crappy situation and really took us by surprise.
I think more than just "being found out" unions also have to tell there members that they are doing something for them. Teaching jobs are already really good (except perhaps for the pay, but that is constrained by government budget). So the unions can tell their members that they will always go to bat for them, even though it is almost completely unnecessary for a competent teacher.
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#6People interested in this subject will probably like this forthcoming documentary: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117941947.html?categoryId=2...
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#7I bet if I googled hard enough I could find one of these articles for every state in the union.
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#8Our startup (based in Seattle) was looking at ways to help analyze the performance of teachers. It turns out that the unions lobbied for legislation in Washington that forbids such software from being installed in the schools. The unions don't want mediocre teachers to be found out. It's really a crappy situation and really took us by surprise.
If the unions didn't zealously represent mediocre members, there wouldn't be any point to having them. (There might have been decades ago when management quite literally hired private armies to beat down their employees. Taking a look at the private sector, we can see that non-unionized employees are largely not beaten down by private armies and also don't come to class falling down drunk. Unions have and will continue to zealously defend teachers who do that.)
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#9Our startup (based in Seattle) was looking at ways to help analyze the performance of teachers. It turns out that the unions lobbied for legislation in Washington that forbids such software from being installed in the schools. The unions don't want mediocre teachers to be found out. It's really a crappy situation and really took us by surprise.
I would be very interested in more details, if you can. What was the product? How did it work? What legislation?
Re: State's bad teachers rarely get fired
#10More generally: Underperforming, unionized civil servants rarely get fired.