Friday, March 12, 2010

Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers

In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability.


The relative decline of American education at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation's future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag.

For much of this time—roughly the last half century—professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language—but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements.

Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. Much of the ability to teach is innate—an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy. In any case the research shows that within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not.

It is also true and unfortunate that often the weakest teachers are relegated to teaching the neediest students, poor minority kids in inner-city schools. For these children, teachers can be make or break. "The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover," says Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and coauthor of the 2006 study "Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality."

Nothing, then, is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones. But here is the rub. Although many teachers are caring and selfless, teaching in public schools has not always attracted the best and the brightest. There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.) Read more.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No you cannot fire them. If you look at their basic qualification they are all performing well within their ability.In my language there is a saying. " No matter how hard and how many times you smash your thumb with a hammer it can only swell so much." So please stop going for these teachers and find ways and means to improve their qualification and if necessary their capability to teah and do an honest day's work. Ramalx

Kaning-kaning said...

If all bad teachers were fired in Malaysia, there would be no teachers left. Who would teach our kids then? Fat Mama Rosmah?

Anonymous said...

Ha ha... This is a good one. It is decades of neglect, what would you get out of our education system? Only left to own family and 'luck' of the child. Luck as when they get right guidance from a friend or relative.
For the most of the population, hard luck!
But in the quest for Ketuanan, that is an achievement, right? Not for quality but conquer in sheer numbers.
Fat Mama is only putting up a show for this and that but in actual fact, she is just doing PR job to get publicity. Nothing more.