What's your reaction to these Firings?

I’m pretty happy. Assuming this is all on the level, of course. There’s a chance it’s prone to favoritism, and of course standardized tests have their own list of troubles. But those issues aside, this is a great step. Actually holding teachers to an objective standard is an excellent idea, and one that should be spread. Now, 165 teachers may be a bit much, but we’ll see.

And, of course, the union will contest and has a decent shot of winning. One of the major problems with unions is they completely discourage performance based evaluations. Ah, well.

I read that 241 teachers were being fired and the teacher’s union is only planning to argue against the firing of 81 of them. That pretty much sums it up for me . . .

My reaction? That I’m even happier to hear this than the passing of national health care. Both have great intentions. Let’s see if they achieve their goals.

@Kayak8 Oh, that’s much better then expected then. I can imagine that 84 of those legitimately should not be fired. That’s a rather broad swath to not get some mistakes.

[edit] and since only 165 firings are based on bad appraisals, the union’s objection may only be to those others. Nice.

Holding trained professionals to an objective and valid standard of performance is a smart move, if that is indeed what was done.

In most other sectors, a worker whose production doesn’t meet certain standards is fired. If the teachers were slacking, then they got what they deserved.
Still, I think that the problem extends beyond the faculty. The material is sub-par, and worst of all, many students don’t care about school at all.
I think back to my high school American Government class. It was a state-required class, so the work was easy even if you were only half awake—I spent much of the class doodling in my notebook, and still aced everything. Yet when midterms rolled around, 28/30ths of the class failed, and the professor had to re-test everyone.
The Italians have an interesting system: high schools have a career focus. Upon graduating from middle school, a student must select a high school to attend, based on his strengths and/or ambitions. Some teach blue-collar skills. Others specialize in business. Others still focused on the arts and graphic design. And for the serious student, there are the Lyceums.

I think the issue here is firing teachers based on standardized test scores. We already know that students from certain backgrounds are more likely to achieve poorer scores. Unless teachers spend all day teaching the students to pass these tests (which is poor education in my opinion) then depending on how your class is made up you might have really low levels of kids who pass these tests. Now I realize this is about improvement on the tests but again you have to teach students how to take the tests well, to even be interested in passing them, some students would need serious after school time (that most wouldn’t attend if offered) just to catch them up on something like reading skills.

Oh, would you look at that. Glad that isn’t me losing my job. =my reaction to these events

Welcome to the future of pupils abusing this new practice to get rid of teachers they do not like by intentionally doing bad on tests.

I think it was Woody Allen who said: Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.

If these teachers can’t have a positive effect on the kids learning, I have no issue with them being fired.

often, it is just a case of ‘you can not teach a chimp calculus’.

This is wonderful news because people are machines that take up everything they are exposed to and are totally always 100% motivated and teaching is such a great career that the best and brightest beat down the doors of the teacher-training colleges to be allowed to train and kids never fail tests and they are always alert at 8AM, despite strong biological evidence to the contrary and if the kids fail its so obviously the teachers’ fault.~

@the100thmonkey Wow. So we should just let sub-par teachers keep going with no oversight because it’s the kid’s fault? Jeeze, can i teach then? Sounds like the easiest job ever. I can just blame everything on stupid and rebellious kids.

I agree with some of the sentiment on here that standardized tests are not the best yardstick. However, it’s one of the few we have, and probably the best, and easiest, especially on a large scale like this. At least for now. Maybe this will spur some more incentive to find better measures.

I am torn on this topic. I can see both sides. What I am against is tenure, a sort of guarantee you can never be fired no matter how much you suck.

@Nullo Much of Europe starts tracking children on certain paths in high school. I like having the option for children to go to magnet schools to focus on specific interests, but I prefer it not be mandatory that such a young person be forced into deciding what they might be interested in for the rest of their life. The children who have not found a passion yet should be able to pursue multiple interests I think.

Tenure is here to stay because the teachers’ union supports it and is the biggest single contributor to the Democratic Party.

@ItsAHabit I’m a democrat and I think tenure is bullshit. In fact generally I am anti-union, but over greedy, lack of integrity business owners make unions a necessary evil in private business sometimes. I have never really understood unions for government workers. I think unions are under fire after the whole auto manufacturer chaos. Bloomberg in NY is taking on the teachers union somewhat, and NY is a very union oriented city. Of course he is not a Democrat, but New Yorkers really like him and NYC is very liberal. Maybe things will change over time? I don’t disagree that the Dems get a lot of money from unions.

@BhacSsylan – I don’t recall blaming ‘kids’ in any way. In fact, I just read my post again and still can’t find where I blamed them.

It’s interesting how a public service such as healthcare is not exposed to the same predatory actions as education is, despite there being hard assessables in the field – mortality rates and life expectancy, for example. I cannot recall a mass firing of doctors in areas with poor standardised health assessment scores. Generally, it is recongised that a doctor is pissing into the wind if they are practicing in an area with high unemployment and high poverty rates. Why is it acceptable to give teachers the boot en masse when the SAT scores associated with them do not improve, but the same doesn’t hold true for other professions?

Generally speaking “best” and “easiest” do not correlate when it comes to assessment. Your analysis is simplistic and betrays a lack of understanding of education. The same may be said for the policy of making SAT scores a “high-risk proposition for teachers” – improvement in education outcomes is not solely determined by the quality of the teacher in the classroom – social and environmental factors play a massive role in outcomes for learners. Even the time of day that classes are held makes a significant difference to attendance, test performance and SAT scores.

Assessing quality of education in such an isolated way is akin to examining an egg without making reference to the chicken that produced it.

Such a policy can only lead to washback, further diminishing the value of the education that children receive at the hands of the state (although it is questionable whether modern, target-oriented ‘education’ is actually an education at all for too many).

If you really want to see an improvement in education outcomes, the ‘simplest’ solution is to pay teachers more, stop fucking with their curricula (I’m looking at you, Texas) and cut class sizes. Social investment (outside of education) in areas of high poverty and social exclusion wouldn’t go amiss either. Availability of jobs and availability of positive outcomes works wonders for outcomes. Funny that.

@the100thmonkey Some states don’t pay that badly. My girlfriend is paid over $50K, great benefits, and only works 9 months a year. In the US people generally get a paid a lot if they are one of the few who can do a particular job, not if a job is important. I had to comment, it is a pet peeve of mine.

I think it sucks that bad doctors skate by. And, I resent paying a bunch of money and the doctor does nothing for me. I am not sure how to fix it, but I don’t like it.

@the100thmonkey , “If you really want to see an improvement…” I agree that those things wouldn’t hurt and some of them are sorely needed. But with these firings, I would like to know their criteria for firing. If they are saying, “this large percentage, more than 51, is failing these standardized tests, you need to go…” I support it. If they are saying, “hrm… you don’t have a perfect record for students passing these standardized tests, you’re out…” then no I don’t. Having gone through the public school system in a shitty neighborhood, I’ve had plenty of terrible teachers that are just trying to get through the day to their paycheck and it heavily affected many of my classmates.

We need our teachers to care about their kids and their kids’ success. Part of that requires a bigger paycheck and better benefits. But our teachers do need to be more inspiring and care about improving their methods so that their kids are learning. Sure everyone learns in different ways, and there will always be some bad apples… but when 90% of the class can’t do fractions or don’t understand how introductory chemistry works, it’s clearly resulting from the teacher’s methods.

Teachers should be accountable, but to a certain extent. And of course we need to improve their system and not cut them first when our budget goes under. That goes without saying.

@the100thmonkey Your first comment was too vague, frankly, and it was very hard to tell exactly what you were blaming. I took it to mean that, I’m sorry I was wrong. The last one was much better.

Anyway, I am currently a teacher, (a TA, to be specific, but i teach an hour lecture and a three hour lab to a 24 student class every week, so I have even more face time then most teachers) and have gotten a decent evaluation for my efforts, both from students and boss, so i think I can say that i’m at least not bad, and i have some degree of understanding, so please try not to be too condescending.

Here’s my argument: I know standardized tests are not great. This is easy to point out. But, what, at this juncture, is better? Shall we pay tons of middle managers to judge all the teachers? Education has always had low budgets, for some unknown reason, we really shouldn’t strain it more. We simply do not have the resources and capability to judge at the necessary case by case basis. And, of course bad teachers, like every other person who’s slacking off at thier job, has the nasty habit of suddenly getting much better when an eval is scheduled, so the only way to measure well is long term. But, at the same time, we equally cannot do nothing. Education is suffering not just because our system is bad, but because there are many teachers who do not care or are bad or, worse, are both! But, they can blame it on all those factors you mention, whether they apply or not. Oh, my class is too early, my students are too stupid, etc. Having hung around my fellow TAs i can say how rampant that kind of talk is, and we have direct oversight. We can be kicked out of grad school for being a particularly bad TA, or at very least shuffled out of TAing into some other department. How much more of this do you get when there is so much smaller of a chance of your position being taken away?

I, and I know almost everyone else here probably, has known a terrible teacher that we had no idea how they got their position, and yet inexplicably they’re never fired. For AP history I had a horrible man who pronounced library as “Lie-berry”, was condescending and sleazy, and whose idea of teaching was assigning us large readings and giving pop quizzes and droning on for the other half an hour of class. I got a 3 (out of 5, for those that don’t know. Not a good score) god knows how, probably because I’m good at multiple choice. Now, my AP English Teacher was absolutely incredible. One of the best teachers I have ever had, and opened my world in ways far beyond a simple English Class. Hell, she introduced me to the book that currently defines my entire philosophy. I got a 5. None of her students had ever gotten below a 5, by the way. The next year, she was stolen away by the local prep school because, well, she was amazing. And since my school didn’t have the staff to do direct oversight (who does?) and didn’t use an objective standard of measure, like AP scores, Mr. History probably was paid the same, which is frankly an insult to her intelligence. And so she left.

But what about those teachers who are not in as prestigious position as teaching an AP class, and so don’t have as good a chance to be noticed and move to a better position? They have to sit there and watch as other, lesser teachers get to squeak on by, being lousy teachers, while the good ones toil away in an attempt to do their jobs well, with no real hope of getting the others fired unless something major comes up, because there is not enough oversight. Heck, they’re, again, probably paid the same. Again, I say, this is not perfect, but it’s a good step!

Yes, we are, slowly and painfully, trying to change how things are taught, because it’s so obviously not ideal. It isn’t easy, change never is, especially across such an old an extensive system, but there are efforts to change it, same as there are efforts to change the SAT, and every other standardized test.

And I agree easiest does not necessarily mean best, but when you’re making a major change to a huge institution, some times you have to go through the easiest paths to have a chance of getting to the best. Changing directly to the best is simply not possible in a short time. I’d take this change any day over Ms. Rhee being fired over her radical and implausible ideas, which would very likely be the result if she tried to make all the changes that you (and I, don’t get me wrong) would like to see made all at once.

[Edit] and @Iclamae makes a point i somehow missed in this giant mess of a post that i meant to make: linking teachers success to that of their students will suddenly make many of them become much more interested in their methods.

@Iclamae @BhacSsylan Just a comment about the last few comments. I think the majority of teachers care about their students and want to teach. Becoming a teacher is not that hard compared to some other majors. Generally the GPA required and the pre-requisite classes are not that stringent. So, you get some teachers who are somewhat dissappointing sometimes. Those teachers generally teach to the text book, and many of our teachers suffer from never having been out in the “real world.” Knowing how the materials taught can really be used in many industries and be able to give stories and examples to students. I know that will offend some people maybe, I don’t mean to offend, but the truth is parents talk about it when teachers seem unempathetic to work situations of parents, and seem to be narrow in how they teach. Of course, there are many extremely intelligent, savvy, fantastic teachers too.

In fact, for myself, I can only think of three teachers I thought were below par in my entire school experience all the way from K through 12. My slacking in my primary and secondary education was due to my own lack of effort, I don’t think I can blame the teachers for the most part. I was a B student, probably could have been an A student if I had put more effort in. In fact as senior I received all A’s and one B, one of my best report cards, and one of my most difficult years academically. A big help was my 1st period teacher did not care if I came to class late, and I was late every day, gave me an extra hour of sleep. Which just brings me to how teachers do not hold all of the balme on students performance.

But, we have to evaluate the teachers somehow.

And, again, in many states the pay is not that bad. They only work 9 months, and they have fantastic benefits typically. Excellent retirement packages, good healthcare coverage for the most part, and tenure until that changes.

@JLeslie Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that most teachers are bad. Quite the opposite, i likewise have had some amazing teachers. The ones I mentioned above were just two of the best and worst. But my point is that there are bad teachers. And there are also those that mean well but are simply not great at teaching. I had a college professor that fit that well. He was a very nice guy, and had won awards for his lab, but he was one of the worst professors I ever had, because he simply had no teaching ability.

Now, that is considerably less of an issue on lower schools, as professors usually do not need the certification that other teachers do. But this kind of problem is still apparent. Especially because, as @the100thmonkey and you pointed out, the system is not exactly set up that well in terms of the student. But, especially with tenure as you said, we currently do not have a very good ability to weed out the ones that are bad.

So, in short, I do not at all disagree that “there are many extremely intelligent, savvy, fantastic teachers too.” I just think we need to deal with those that are not.

Actually, are we even arguing?

@BhacSsylan We are agreeing. I did not think we were talking about professors on this thread. I got lost there. My comments are only at the primary and secondary level. College level is whole other game to me.

@BhacSsylan – I’ve been a bit short with a lot of people lately, particularly online, so my apologies to you. It’s the workload I have right now (full-time teacher, academic manager, raising two kids and writing an MSc thesis) and the stress of working in a small, private ESL school for people who know, by their own admission, next to nothing about teaching.

To be clear, I was talking about compulsory and state-funded education (I am a UK-qualified public sector ESOL teacher), not university, which is a whole different kettle of fish.

For further clarity, the tilde at the end of a block of text on Fluther indicates sarcasm.

Anyway, I have more pressing things to do right now, so I’m going to check out of this thread for the evening.