Good and Bad Teachers: So Many More of the Former,
So Many Fewer of the Latter
David C. Berliner
Arizona State University
A refereed journal article by colleagues1reported on a survey of adults, asking for their beliefs about “good teachers.” The respondents defined good teachers as those who “knew me, cared about me, and wanted me to do well; created interesting activities for us to do; praised me and other students for good grades and improvements; gave extra help or a challenge to students who needed or wanted it; covered a lot of material that was useful; and made learning relevant to me and my life.”
These respondents had little trouble recallingsuch teachers. Good teachers demonstrated caring and support, along with strong subjectmatter knowledge. They also estimated that more than two-thirds of their teachers were good or very good teachers, and they believed that only 12% of their teachers were bad or very bad.
With a different set of colleagues2, I studied what students said about their “bad teachers”. In that study we had access to 4.8 million ratings of teachers! Using a 100-point scale, 55% of our respondents gave a maximum rating of 100 (the best score), 75% gave a rating of 80 or more, and 89% gave a rating greater than 50 points. These data are compatible with other studies suggesting that America’s students are exposed to highpercentages of “good” teachers, and a lowpercentage of “bad” teachers.
From other research, Berliner estimated the number of “bad” teachers in the USA to be about 3%, with “bad” being generally and poorly defined. The well-respected Hechinger report, in 2014,reported that states such as Tennessee, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania, particularly in Pittsburgh, all provided estimates of “bad” teachers that were in this same low range. Danielson, who visited and coded hundreds of classrooms, estimated the “bad teacher” percentage to be around 6%. From those who are experienced classroom analysts, that seems to be on the high end of the estimates in the literature—though it is still a relatively low percentage.
Furthermore, in our study, when we analyzed the comments associated with teachers judged to be “bad,” we found that unanimity among the classmates of those who rated their teachers poorly was quite rare. Nevertheless, we did find a few classrooms where the unanimity and diversity of the charges leveled by students against their teachers made us think that a particular teacher should be dismissed immediately! However, for large numbers of teachers who were rated “incompetent” or “bad” by many of their students, we found other reviews (and sometimes many such reviews) of the same teacher that were positive. Further analysis showed why such disparate judgements made sense. For example, a teacher may be rated poorly because they have strict rules about how essays should be done andgrade them accordingly. And teachers’ who were quite strict about classroom behavior, or who gave out lots of homework, might also be rated low by some of their students. But for other students–say those who make few grammatical mistakes, those who don’t act out in classes, and those who do not find their homework burdensome, ratings of their teachers might be considerably higher. In our study, this seemed to explain why so many reviews of teachers by students were not uniformly either positive ornegative.
So, what do we know through research–not from publicity-seeking partisan news columnists, irate parents, or the public-school critics among the “Moms for Liberty? Research suggests wecan defend a general statement such as this:“Among America’s 3+ million public-schoolteachers, the numbers of genuinely “bad” public school teachers are quite small, while the numbers of “acceptable” and “good” public school teachers is quite large.” Furthermore, both the positive and negative characteristics of these teachers are recognized by adults long after they have experienced them. Given the relatively low pay, low prestige, difficulty of the work, and fairly regular abuse of teachers by some parents and newspapers, how lucky we are to have staff for the public-schools that are generally so well regarded.
1. Haas, E., Fischman, G., & Pivovarova, M. (2023). Public beliefs about good teaching. Research in Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237231207717
2. Valcarcel, C., Holmes, J., Berliner, D. C., & Koerner, M. (2021). The value of student feedback in open forums: A natural analysis of descriptions of poorly rated teachers. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29 (January – July), 79. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.29.6289
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I watched my daughter drive away to school this morning. A bit late to have your drivers license, I know. She is approaching 18. She has good academic judgement, but not so much driving judgement yet. So I worry.
last Sunday, her old seventh grade teacher came to see her in her final play. Relationship is the most important part of teaching.
In NYC, a ton of people don’t get their license until they’re 30-something.
Thanks for the reality check. The media tends to jump on alarmist messaging to get higher ratings or likes, and they do not do their homework. As a result they amplify propaganda for which there is little basis in fact. Teachers around the country have been the recipients of all the unrest these falsehoods inspire while the reality is that like most professions or careers the number of bad actors is relatively low.
It would be nice to see how these stats compare to, say, the same for policemen, CEOs, office managers, etc.
In Massachusetts, it takes three years for a public school teacher to receive tenure (meaning dismissal must be for cause). Most who make it past the initial three years know exactly how challenging the job is; many wash out.
Teaching is much too difficult to remain if you cannot do the work and especially at such low compensation. It’s not for the weak. Those who remain have been through the fire and really, really like to teach.
In NJ, it takes 4 years to get tenure. It was 3 years when I started teaching and for many years thereafter.
Students talk.
During the three decades I taught, it wasn’t difficult to learn who didn’t have what it takes to teach. Most of them, left teaching the first or second year. For the few (when I saw few, I mean less than a handfull) who stayed, it was not difficult to learn who they were.
One new teacher didn’t make it through his first day. His first lesson was to teach his student how to cheat on the standardized test.
Students complained before lunch
The new teacher was fired, and period subs taught his classes after lunch.
At the high school, there was a French teacher who couldn’t teach French. Students wanting to learn French complained to the office.
A lot!
Somehow, she’d managed to get past the probationary period so getting rid of her too the district a few years but eventually they succeeded, and she quit. Before she quit, she complained to the teachers union asking for legal support to fight to keep her job. The union turned her down. They knew about her too.
Students talk.
One day, back in the early 1980s, during my planning period, I walked past a classroom where the teacher, who wanted to be a principal and superintended one day (she wasn’t planning on staying in the classroom — the only reason she was teaching was because it would look good on her r resume when she moved into admin) was ringing a handheld bell. Really loud! Shouting to her chatty class to shut up so she could teach. The students ignored her and kept talking to each other. She left at the end of that year. The district I taught in didn’t hire her into admin. She applied. But they knew.
Students talk.
I wanted to let you all know, Alonso, the young man I met in my 8th grade class is heading off to college. He will be graduating from GECA https://geca.gilroyunified.org next month. I have mentored Alonso since 8th grade (2019-20 school year) and just finished (as his Senior Project advisor/mentor) helping him pass with an A (outstanding work) on introducing young people to paleontology with a focus on what the fossil record tells us about climate change. He wrote and taught his curriculum (one-year unit) to a group of young students as well to test the information (45 minutes worth) he wanted to convey. It worked well. Alonso could have taken the “easy route” through high school, but he insisted on graduating with GECA. He lost his father the summer of his 8th grade year to a hit and run driver. His mother is still trying to get her citizenship, so Alonso has been the “man of the house” since he was 14. He received numerous college acceptance letters and said he has decided on UC Riverside (his uncle lives nearby). Just last week he hopped on a bus and took the a solo journey to tour UC Riverside. I can say enough about Alonso who has worked and worked and worked to earn his way to higher education. In fact, he told me he was awarded a $20K scholarship ($5K per year) as well. FAFSA has been a nightmare. Although I retired two years ago, I never hesitated to meet with Alonso or other kids who needed my help. Thank you for allowing me to share. Carpe diem, Alonso!
Amen! The right-wing or uninformed are always circulating the idea that there are a lot of bad teachers–or that it’s too hard to get rid of the bad teachers. In my work with the Cols E.A., OEA, NEA, I defended teachers daily and found that mostly administrators just didn’t like something about the teacher they wanted to get rid of.
I remember one case, in particular, where a gay teacher was being hounded out as incompetent, when in fact he was just rejecting the advances of the secretly gay principal. While this was a rare case, it was not rare for administrators to hound a teacher just because they didn’t like something about them–or they just weren’t subservient enough.
Early in my own career–as VP of the CEA, but still teaching part time–I served on a statewide panel appointed by state government to examine the issue of teacher qualifications and quality. Our group included administrators, college profs, etc., and we came back with a report that concluded the opposite of what critics had alleged: Ohio’s teachers were in fact quite qualified, working very hard, and teaching quite well. This was 1970.
Years later, we had a Democratic Governor who fell into the trap of saying publicly, “It’s harder to fire a teacher than a state employee.” Though generally a good governor, he did not get re-elected after casting those aspersions on teachers and other public employees.
I learned early on to ask lots of questions when parents had strong opinions– often divergent– about the teachers at our kids’ elementary school. It was relatively small [150 kids K-5], and parents would gather en masse to drive/ walk their children home. That’s when these conversations occurred. There was a 3rd-grade teacher like this, i.e., strong fans among some parents, rolled-eyes among others. Questions revealed her to be indulgent to girls and mean to boys. She always had a couple of “teacher’s pets,” used favoritism, disapproval, even sarcasm. Then there was my middle son’s 1st-grade teacher. Her general rep: ”should have retired 10 yrs ago,” “reported to nod off during class.” That was the year my child, a bored [beginning] reader, soared to become an avid bookworm. [I only remember one of her methods: wire baskets of books lined up from easiest to hardest. You had to read/ report on at least one (maybe more) from a basket before moving on.] Her reputation should have been “does a superlative job even when half asleep”! :-D
I’m an active teacher and have been since 1996. The last time I worked alongside a bad teacher, the year was 2005.
I always started my introduction to my 101 college classes with some casual get-to-know-everyone conversation, but also worked this in: ”I’d love to be friends with every one of you, but I won’t sacrifice for friendship what I think you need to be better educated at the end of the class than you are now,” or something similar, which seemed to clear the air from the get-go, especially for older students.
Also, for my online classes, I used to post student comments from my last classes online, including anything “bad” . . . I added in notes of explanation and/or about how I corrected for my next classes if there was something I could change. That process helped me be a better teacher, but also I think helped students be discerning about what they wrote knowing it would be posted in that section of my courses.
As an aside, several times, when I taught four-hour night classes, I received complaints that I wouldn’t let students out of class early (like a half-hour, and more, every class)–like all the other night teachers did! And everyone in my class knew when the other students were leaving early. I finally complained to the administrator who was glad to know and who disallowed the practice. . . . I felt bad about the whole thing. CBK