I like to introduce readers of this blog to people I respect, to scholars and writers who are thoughtful and insightful.
Here is someone you should read.
Aaron Pallas of Teachers College, Columbia University, is one of the wisest, most perceptive observers of trends in American education.
He just finished a study of why middle-school teachers leave. It came out around the same time as The New Teachers Project report on “the Irreplaceables.” He compares the two studies here.
Where the two diverge is that the TNTP report thinks it is relatively easy to identify the best and the worst teachers in a year. You give a bonus to the former and get rid of the latter. As Pallas puts it, we can’t fire our way to excellence. (It was Linda Darling-Hammond who once said, memorably, in response to economist Eric Hanushek, who claims that we will see vast improvements if we fire 5-10% of teachers whose students get low scores: “We can’t fire our way to Finland.”)
Pallas does not agree. He writes:
I’m less sanguine than the TNTP authors about the ability to easily identify those teachers who are “irreplaceable” and those who are—what? Expendable? Disposable? Unsalvageable? Superfluous? The terms are so jarring that it’s hard to know how a principal might treat such a teacher with compassion and respect. Given what we know about the instability from year to year in teachers’ value-added scores as well as the learning curve of novice professionals, a reliance on a rigid classification of teachers into these two boxes seems unrealistic.
I don’t doubt that there are some individuals who are natural-born teachers, just as Michael Phelps has shown himself to be a natural-born swimmer, and perhaps their talents are revealed on Day One. But there are thousands and thousands of children and youth around the world who are competitive swimmers, and none of them is Michael Phelps. For these children and youth, as for most teachers—and there are approximately 3.5 million full-time K-12 teachers in the United States—technique and practice can yield great improvements in performance. This is perhaps even more true in teaching than in swimming, as there are many goals to which teachers must attend simultaneously, rather than just swimming fast to touch the wall as soon as possible.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If it were up to the administrators to decide who should be fired, it would be based on what your bulletin boards look like and, of course, how much you kissed their a****s.
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Aaron Pallas is one of my favorite commentators on education. When I read his writing, I encounter lucidity, knowledge, and wisdom. Thank you for drawing attention to this article.
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One of the reasons that our public schools are so bad is because they keep bad teachers instead of firing them. We should fire the ones in the bottom 10%, based on their scores on standardized academic tests. Actually, we shouldn’t hire them in the first place. Instead of hiring education majors to teach math and science, we should hire math and science majors to teach math and science.
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That’s ridiculous. Every time this is tried, the ones “at the bottom,” are teaching immigrant kids, kids who don’t speak English, kids with disabilities. Why should they be fired?
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When I was in twelfth grade, in September, my English teacher mistakenly thought that in the sentence, “The box of candy is on the table,” the subject was “candy” instead of “box.” She made this same kind of mistake in three different sentences, all in the same assignment. This is the kind of teacher who should be fired.
Every student in the class knew that the teacher was wrong – because we had all earned this content a decade earlier – but I was the only one brave enough to say anything about it directly to the teacher. After that, she never gave us another grammar assignment again, at all, for the next eight months – the entire rest of the school year. Instead, she just has us read stories and talk about our feelings.
Why do you think a teacher like that should not be fired?
Why are you so prejudiced toward immigrants? My immigrant friends from Taiwan, India, Russia, and Poland all did very well in school.
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She should not have been hired . She should have been fired after three months in the classroom, if that. Sounds like a very bad administrator hired her and kept her.
Diane Ravitch
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She was a “certified” teacher. She had a degree in “education.” She met every criteria that was necessary to be hired as a teacher.
She can’t be fired – the union protects her. The PDF at this link shows how incredibly hard it is to fire an incompetent teacher:
Click to access 12639308918768.pdf
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It’s easy to spot the commenters who have never taught in an urban public school (Dan, I’m talking to you). If you really want to know what the classroom is like, try subbing for a week at one of these schools. Your eyes will open to the challenges and lack of respect teachers face every day. If teaching was such an easy job, why aren’t you doing it, Dan? Come show the teachers how it’s done, since you know so much. Michelle Rhee couldn’t flee the classroom fast enough. This is the woman who admitted to abusing kids by taping their mouths shut and making them bleed. What a role model for educators everywhere. NOT.
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This post brings up a concept that has, I fear, now become American. That it is about talent and not skill development. If you are a good teacher you are by definition talented. If you are not, please leave. This concept fits nicely with the idea that one person has the right to rule over another. I have been born into the right family, made the right connections; therefore I am better suited to decide how your life/profession should be changed. They begin to think that I am talented and you are not. I thought this country was created to have citizens rule with each other.
We haven’t yet gotten to that dystopian future when we are told what we are “talented” in and that is all we will be able to do for “the good of society.” What makes this country great is that people get to decide for themselves to put effort into their passion. For those who see themselves as educators, we provide people with the skills they need to pursue their passions.
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