How Would You Get Rid Of Bad Teachers?
Take a look at this. And my earlier post, which looked at how difficult it is to fire LAUSD teachers. I understand there’s a gulf between my reaction to these stories, and the way that E.D. Kain, Freddie, and others process them.
Fair enough. But here’s what I’d like to know. If you disagree with my preferred system, where principals would be as free to hire and fire who they wanted as management at The Atlantic or General Electric or McKinsey or the Catholic school system, what’s your preferred alternative? Put more precisely, if you were king for a day, and could codify into law whatever protocol you wanted for firing allegedly under-performing teachers, what would it look like? Or to use Freddie’s preferred formulation, you don’t like my idea for getting bad teachers out of classrooms where they’re disadvantaging their students, and disproportionately hurting the most disadvantaged among them. Okay, fine. But then what? Tell me your solution.
We just need to find a way to make unions and principals work more cooperatively to identify and remove the worst teachers. Unions are moving in this direction already it appears.
— E. D. Kain · Mar 4, 02:51 PM · #
ED: Well.. OK. But this seems just about on par with GOP discussions about health care. “We just need to find ways for the market to provide health care to everybody, but to do so affordably and at a sufficient level.”
The “just” seems to be doing an awful lot of work in both cases. In the case of bad teachers, this appears to run squarely up against your idea that unions and employers just need to get along. The union doesn’t WANT to get along. That’s not because they are bad people. It’s because one of the primary things a union provides is job security.
Sometimes cooperation just doesn’t work, and someone needs to take a trouncing. In a perfect world, I guess coal-fired power plants and EPA regulators should find a way to cooperate. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Yeah, I know. “Union bosses want good schools, too.” I agree. But it’s also true that “The CEO of the power plant has kids who breathe the air, too.”
Sometimes someone has to lose, and lose big.
— Sam M · Mar 4, 04:16 PM · #
Define “free” a bit better. You mean “free” as in “I have an employee I don’t get along with. He is constantly questioning my methods an outcomes. I want to fire him right now”. or “My wife’s nephew needs a job for the summer. Now if I could just fire Harry?” or “I don’t like having to work with liberals. If I could just fire Betty” or “I won’t give John a raise even though he deserves so I’ll just fire him” or “I know Joan is going through a divorce and has 2 young children but she’s just not getting it done so she’s outtahere” or “your terrible experience goes here”.
Being able to fire at will gives the bad principal the power to be even worse. No one intentionally hires bad teachrs. Or has the teaching profession become so contemptible in the eyes of the public that only the worst of the worst go into teaching anymore?
In most of the good corporations I have worked for they foster a strong HR department to be the omsbudman for the employees. A job also done by unions. In bad companies the power to fire on the spot without notice or severance or hearings or the ones to stay away from.
W. Edwards Deming advocates:
“The most important things cannot be measured.”
The teacher (sic) is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management! (school board, principals)
We are treating the teacher and principals as standalones instead of seeing the system in which they operate, the process.
Its a loop aka vicious cycle so we go round and round and nothing changes except who wins the struggle for power.
— mikTek · Mar 4, 05:11 PM · #
Cornor,
Do you have a proven method of teacher quality? Do you know what the correlation between teacher quality and student outcome is?
If you don’t know these things, then you don’t have any idea whether firing “bad” teachers will improve student outcomes nationwide. And I don’t realy see what the point of a national movment to fire bad teachers/reward good teachers is unless you think that it will lead to national improvements.
From what I have read, I don’t believe that anyone has a good measure of teacher quality and that there is a pretty low corellation between the avareage teacher and student outcomes. And I know that firing bad teachers is an ideological aphordesiac for conservatives becasue it requires putting a strong arm on the unions.
So while it would make things easier for principals I don’t think it would have much affect on outcomes. And that damaging teachers unions might actually make student outcomes worse because teachers unions are a strong potential ally to school reform. School unions also corellate with better pay, benefits, and esteem for teachers, all things that make teaching more attractive to higer quality candidates.
Really, improving our ability to fire bad teachers is the equivelent of earmark reform. It’s just political theater.
— cw · Mar 4, 06:01 PM · #
The first step is in convincing the unions that those pushing for reform in this direction are not using this issue as the first step in destroying the unions. In order to achieve that, it has to in fact be the case that destroying the unions is not the end goal. I don’t think that it’s somehow unfair or intemperate to correctly identify people who are opposed to teacher’s unions in principle. But once you’ve identified them, you’ll understand why the unions are unwilling to compromise with them. Nobody engages in diplomacy with entities that are unambiguous about their desire to them. You wouldn’t be surprised to find that in foreign policy and you shouldn’t be surprised to find that here.
— Freddie · Mar 4, 06:41 PM · #
Ok Freddie. As King, you’ve now gotten rid of “reformers” who are trying to destroy the unions, and the only people left are people who like the union but still want to see better teaching and schools. What’s step 2?
You’ve written what amounts to the same blog comment several times on this issue. But I’ve never heard you offer your own roadmap or indicate whether or not you think there is a problem with the current system; you simply argue bad faith on the part of whoever you are directing your latest comment. What do you do next? Do you have anything else to offer?
— Jay Daniel · Mar 4, 07:11 PM · #
When did education stop being about educating children and become about protecting unions? If it requires destroying the teacher’s unions to get rid of bad teachers than so be it. They’ll have brought it on themselves.
Good grief, I wish we some people cared half as much about the countries children as they do is some 1930s leftist dream of universal unionization.
— Joe Carter · Mar 4, 07:11 PM · #
(I’d like to blame my typo filled post on the poor education I received from union teachers, but sadly it is more likely due to my poor proof-reading skills.)
— Joe Carter · Mar 4, 07:25 PM · #
News flash….. Joe Carter intentionally (has to be, on some level, right?) misreads several liner feet of blog comments. Replies with trite, intellectually dishonest, campaign slogan.
— cw · Mar 4, 07:57 PM · #
cw,
Did you see my last post at The Atlantic? If not, I think you will be amused!
http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/02/kludges-adaptations-and-evolution/70475/
RE: Teachers
It’s too late to do anything that wlll help
— Tony Comstock · Mar 4, 08:17 PM · #
You see the dilemma from these comments, Conor. They demonstrate exactly the problem. Maybe instead of getting sensitive, you should ask whether you would compromise with people who are dedicated to destroying your job and will be satisfied with nothing else.
— Freddie · Mar 4, 09:32 PM · #
You certainly don’t have any obligation to respond to my comment, Freddie. But with your latest comment you again attack Conor and the comments here on bad faith grounds rather than engage substantively. What are you trying to accomplish by your comments? Vent?
As best I can tell from your comments, you believe that there is no educational problem that can be solved by policy, that the “reformers” are simply a wing of the anti-union, anti-worker capital interest using reform as a pretense to destroy the power of their class enemies, and that people who write about this issue are either with the working class or capitalist stooges. Ok. The bad news for you is that most people don’t share your narrative, and if this really is just a marxist power struggle, you’re team is going to get crushed on this one.
— Jay Daniel · Mar 4, 10:23 PM · #
Tony COmstock,
I had no idea you were guest blooging. That’s great. But you’re giving up movies? Are you going to take kids out on your boat?
Jay Daniel
Freddy is just pointing out—as a tangent to the discussion—that a lot of conservatives want to bust up the teacher’s unions, who give a lot of support to democrats. That’s just a fact, and it is relevant to the discussion.
— cw · Mar 4, 11:21 PM · #
cw, the Fallows/Atlantic guest blogging thing was a total bolt from the blue. Happy and honor to have done, got a lot off my chest, but had already begun something new. Yes, a floating classroom idea, partly, but not built on the traditional not-for-profit model. If thing sake out properly, our floating classroom outings will be a part of community service that’s woven into the fabric of our business model.
that convo maybe a year back with you, Matt Feen and me about reading helped some things fall into place, and better understand myself. so I’m thankful for that, and I thought you’d get a kick out of seeng the skiing analogy again.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 4, 11:27 PM · #
I tend to think further ‘professionalization’ is the way to go. (Union leadership favors this as well.) Teachers could be subject to a multi-stage reappointment and tenure review process where they’d be scrutinized by a committee of mostly other teachers. Pay and working conditions need to rise in order to serve as an adequate incentive for putting up with the rigors of increased professionalism.
— matt · Mar 4, 11:30 PM · #
cw — I think I understand his point, and if it was isolated I’d be fine with it. I actually think Freddie is a great writer, and occasionally even a moving one, which I think is pretty awesome given the form/forums. But I’d guess that 3/4 of Freddie’s comments at the Scene over the last few months have been nearly identical in simply charging the author or his interlocutors of bad faith. Here, Conor even directly addressed his post to Freddie. Given that Conor has gone out of his way to try to engage Freddie on his terms, I guess I just hoped he would actually respond instead of copying and pasting his grievances.
— Jay Daniel · Mar 5, 12:33 AM · #
Principals and downtown administrators have their own union, such as the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles:
http://www.aalausd.org/
That’s like baseball managers having their own union.
Why not start by making sure the principals’ union isn’t protecting bad principals? You get a lot more bang for your buck at that level.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 5, 12:55 AM · #
Tony,
I remember that conversation. What is amazing to me is that both you and Matt could get to where you did without being “good” readers. There’s something to be learned from that, I’m not sure what.
Jay Daniel,
I haven’t been paying all that much attention, so you may be right, but I don’t see anything too egrigious in this thread. I said myself, in a round about way, that Connor needs to consider the motives of conservatives school reformers and the results of their reforms if they get their way. I live in Madison Wisc. and the conservative agenda as far as unions go, has been made very apparent here. As are the dishonest tactics and rhetoric employed, here and across the country. Wisc. for instance, is not broke, as soon to be recalled Gov. Walker claims, but instead has a 3% short fall for each of the next two years. There is no crisis that requires the budget to be balance in next two years. We are not going to go bankrupt, and past govenors have been sucessfully dealing with 3-4% deficits for at least the past 10 years. As far as public employees unions go, they have nothing to do with the deficit. They are compensated, when salary and benefits are combined, just about the same as private employees, they have agreed to the pay cuts, and the pension fund is fully funded. So, all the legislation designed to kill the unions, is just about that, killing the unions.
I never really paid much attentions to unions before, but the current duplicity in Wisc. makes me realize that my whole life there has been this constant anti-union drum beat, and now I’m starting to wonder why. I am questioning the motives of anti-union conservatives and the consequences of them getting their way.
— cw · Mar 5, 04:50 AM · #
Freddie,
The problem with the argument from bad faith is that it’s two edged. Sure, there are those on the right who want to destroy unions for political reasons. But likewise there are those on the left who want to save them for political reasons. In the end, it just comes back to the merits. And on those, you are notably silent.
I live in a northeastern state with a huge public sector union problem. The contracts that they have struck bear the same resemblance to fair value for labor that subsidies to Archers Daniels Midland do to fair compensation for corn syrup. And this is in a state where the GOP is a joke — the vast majority of our local politics (where these issues are relevant) are “blue-on-blue.” Given the enormous political and financial power of unions (public safety, teachers) it’s just very hard for any reform minded democrat to make progress. That’s just the reality. So why is it beyond the pale to suggest massively disempowering public sector unions?
— Ben A · Mar 6, 04:18 AM · #
The problem of bad teachers is terribly overblown. Teachers are certified by the state after graduating from a state approved and monitored certification program along with a bachelor’s degree. This process includes student teaching. Principals have several years where they can not rehire a teacher. They are required to take continuing college credit to stay up to date in their field. Parents, coaches, school boards and sports fanatics all want to fire teachers who hold student athletes accountable. Teachers are not free to choose texts or even eject students from class. They have to follow state curriculum and deal with severe behavior problems and uncooperative parents. Teachers can be fired for cause but they have to be given a chance to improve and due process. Administrators all too often do not want to bother with the documentation. Critics are asking the same people who hired poor teachers to have the authority to fire them. Once a poor teacher has been documented then the attorneys get involved who seem to be able to effectively run up billing hours at union and school district expense.
— Mike · Mar 7, 06:47 AM · #
It’s worth underscoring that this is the process by which a teacher can be removed for INCOMPETENCE. Not that anyone was claiming otherwise, but it should be underscored that this is not the only process by which a teacher can lose his or her job.
It strikes me as entirely reasonable that the bar for removal on the grounds of incompetence should be the highest one (over say unethical or criminal misconduct).
As far as the appeals process goes, one way to streamline it might be to increase the capacity for handling appeals. It’s not clear to me if you need four levels of vetting. Maybe three would do the trick.
If the choice is between the 2 to 5 year Illinois process and a capricious, arbitrary one, I’d take the Illinois process 10 times out of 10 (incidentally are the typical cases closer to 2 or 5 years? Did the Trib. print that information?). An at-will standard on the part of princinpals would be an open door to even greater abuses. I think there’s also a reasonable argument to be made for giving a genuinely incompetent teacher the opportunity to develop teaching skills. Elementary and secondary school teachers aren’t the only professional discipline with a learning curve.
Incidentally, how long does it take to remove an incompetent lawyer, doctor, economist, or pundit from his or her job and professional discipline?
— JP · Mar 8, 04:10 AM · #
Everyone keeps on talking about “firing bad teachers”, but this is nonsense. Corporate America doesn’t just fire “bad workers”, it fires whoever it wants to for whatever reason it wants. Accept that, no matter what brilliant process you come up with, fantastic teachers will be fired by principals who want someone else.
Each school is like a family-owned business—there’s just the “owner” in charge, and all sorts of people who the owner likes and/or keeps around for god knows what reason. Anyone arguing that the principal will only use his or her powers for good, focusing on test scores or effectiveness, is simply deluding himself. Teaching is one of the most intensely ideological occupations in existence and principals have a very clear idea of what makes a “good teacher”. Results are not high on their list.
But if principals are allowed to fire at will, then we have to change teacher compensation. Teacher salary and benefits are set to reward people who stay at one place for a long time. Switch jobs, switch districts, and the teacher pays a price. So if you’re going to allow schools to be the equivalent of family-owned fiefdoms with the Principal Daddy/Mommy in charge, you’d have to dramatically increase teacher mobility and also hold principals to some degree of accountability. Best way to do this is to evaluate teachers by an outside agency, publish test results as one other indicators, and let principals fire teachers for whatever reason they want. Of course, principals could also then recruit from other schools, spotting teachers with excellent records and evaluations—and naturally, in this imagined world, principals could recruit those fabulous teachers.
So: Principals get increased control with increased scrutiny, which means making teachers’ records public. Teachers lose job protection, but gain increased mobility and salary control.
No one wants the results. Teachers aren’t entrepreneurs, and if they wanted to go job hopping, they’d have found another career. Parents will be furious when their schools’ best teachers are recruited to a richer district and oh, by the way, dream on if you think lousy schools will get a prayer at decent teachers, since the one thing keeping teachers at bad schools now is the cost of job switching once seniority builds up. This is particularly true of schools that go through a massive demographic change in a short time—they often have good teachers for 20 or more years, until those teachers retire. Now they can jump instantly, the first time the poorly behaved kids drive them to it.
I’m a second career teacher and I’m all in favor of the world I just described. But most teachers—and most parents—won’t be.
Oh, and fire the bottom 5%? Good lord. It’s taken us 30+ years to get a really, really bad 5%, and you want to get rid of that many every year?
Should we make it easier to fire really bad teachers? Sure. Will that improve results? No. It will save money, which is not at all a bad thing, and we should keep trying to make it easier to get rid of blazing incompetents. But don’t kid yourselves about the outcome.
— Cal · Mar 8, 05:43 AM · #
Part of the problem is that we lack a good metric for measuring teacher performance. I would suggest that a good metric is this: Do students that have had a particular teacher outperform their peers over a three year period? I would suspect that if you measure student performance over time you would uncover the teachers that do the best job of improving student performance and those who hinder student performance.
Once you have established the metric, you can then rank teachers based on their performance and assign carrots and sticks based on that performance. So, in my ideal world, teachers who were in the top 10% would receive tenure after 3 years. To encourage them to stay competitive, I would allow them to retire one year early with full benefits for every three year period that they stayed in the top 10%. Teachers who were in the top 50% would receive tenure after 6 years. They would also be allowed to knock years off of their retirement age if they broke into the top 10% for a 3 year period. Teachers who had never been in the bottom 20% would receive tenure after 9 years. If they moved in and out of the bottom 20%, they would need to stay out of the bottom 20% for at least 6 years before they would be eligible.
If you’re tenured, and your performance drops into that bottom 20%, then your pay is frozen at its current level until you move out of the bottom 20%.
Teachers who were in the bottom 20% after their first three years would receive remedial training. They would receive extra attention & training in classroom management. If, after three more years, they are still in the bottom 20%, then they would be fired.
— JohnnyA · Mar 8, 05:07 PM · #
My king-for-a-day solution would be this:
Offer a trade to the union. In exchange for higher salaries (good luck getting that past the budget cutters!), more disciplinary powers in class, and a promise from administration to protect them more vigorously against nutty parents complaining about little Jimmy’s C+, they accept a significant reduction in the roadblocks to firing a teacher (though I would not go all the way to “fire at will”). I’d also want more scrutiny on administrators. Maybe it’s just me, but it sure seems like people like to blame teachers for everything and leave out the other culprits (administrators, parents).
— Rob in CT · Mar 8, 10:31 PM · #
Also we need an easier way to fire bad parents.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 9, 12:38 AM · #
Two things.
How to judge merit (teachers or principals)? The market, just like everything else. I decide which of several grocery store to patronize. I’m not assigned a grocery store and forced to count on a government “merit commission” to “reward” stores so that they will provide me with what I want. And how to decide what to provide? What constitutes “good” can vary between the many people assigned to that store (school).
In private enterprise, companies that fire good people and hire their incompentent buddies go out of business. Bosses that fire good employees and hire idiots get fired themselves. Only if management is immune to market forces can they get away with consistently firing good employees and hiring relatives, those with similar political opinions, etc.
— BillB · Mar 9, 05:10 AM · #
“How to judge merit (teachers or principals)? The market, just like everything else. “
Failing is built into markets. Parents who fail pick the right school (or who live in the wrong area or
lack the means or just don’t care) mean kids who are failed, which is counter to the whole purpose of compulsory education. The point is to provide every kid with a good education.
“In private enterprise, companies that fire good people and hire their incompentent buddies go out of business.”
see banking crisis, circa 2007
(I didn’t know people still worshiped publicly at the alter of the “market.”)
— cw · Mar 9, 06:04 AM · #
Why not put power in the hands of all the stakeholders rather than concentrating it in the hands of a small group of insulated administrators? Society, especially the nearby population, should be able to vote on who gets fired. Society has to bear the costs of poorly educated students. They can be called in for jury duty except for this trial only the teacher’s job hangs in the balance and it can be done at a weekend meeting similar to a PTA meeting. Unions should not have the power to keep bad teachers in the school system any more than managers should have the power to fire you because they don’t like the way you comb your hair. We need limits that start with considering the true costs of the outcomes.
— Gone Jalt · Mar 9, 11:51 AM · #
Also we need an easier way to fire bad parents.
Disagree. It’s already far too easy. The ease with which it’s done tends to make bad parents even more irresponsible.
— The Reticulator · Mar 9, 01:51 PM · #
cw: _“In private enterprise, companies that fire good people and hire their incompentent buddies go out of business.”
see banking crisis, circa 2007
(I didn’t know people still worshiped publicly at the alter of the “market.”)_
1) It’s not exactly honest to refer to people who publicly support greater use of the free market as worshiping at an altar. But I suppose a little exaggeration and colorful rhetoric can be forgiven if you also do the same for Sarah Palin, as I do.
2) The banking crisis was caused by regulatory suppression of the workings of the market, and was made into a U.S. economic crisis by the regulatory state’s bailouts that further suppressed the necessary corrections of the regulatory state’s earlier errors. So the amazing thing is that people still worship at the altar of a failed god — the god of governmental regulation.
3) But for those people who despite all evidence think their class of people needs to regulate private businesses even more, you’d think they’d be embarrassed by the mess they have made of self-regulation. They engaged in a corrupt insider negotiation of unsustainable pension benefits for themselves, yet not a single public employee union leader or politician has gone to jail for it. Self-regulation by these people on something that deals so directly with their own economic affairs has utterly failed, yet this class of people still thinks it is qualified to regulate the affairs of others. And look at their failure to regulate the educational system. Another massive failure, showing the incompetence of this class of people to regulate banking, or safety, or the environment. To try to regain some slight bit of credibility I suggest they try to regulate the tying of their own shoes. If they prove they can handle that, we might let them try bigger things and work their way back up to health and safety regulation. And maybe even education, some day in the distant future, after they have proven their competence in less important endeavors.
— The Reticulator · Mar 9, 02:14 PM · #
I think one problem many people have in this discussion is that, in America, union density is so low and employment at will is so prevalent that we cannot easily comprehend that some form of reviewable “just cause” firing is regularly implemented throughout the Western world. The teacher “tenure” system need not be any different than a system that provides for just cause termination and progressive discipline.
The “chart” that is referenced is not really accurate. Let me start at the last step, the court review process. At this point, the TEACHER HAS ALREADY BEEN FIRED and is not drawing a paycheck. The standard of review, “against the manifest weight of the evidence” is an extremely high one, and in almost all cases, once the teacher has been fired they are staying fired. Defending a lawsuit may take resources but so does a lawsuit by a private employee who raises meritless claims of, say, discrimination or one of the other limited protections at will employees have in this country.
With respect to the pre-hearing and hearing procedures, the chart sets a time frame of about a year for the two of them. That is relatively long for what should essentially be a labor arbitration. It can easily be sped up if the parties on both sides are willing to give. One thing I would note is that in my current home state of New Jersey, it is the teachers union that has proposed streamlining the process by replacing the convoluted administrative hearing process with labor arbitration. Governor Christie has refused to consider it because he is not interested in streamlining the process, he demands it be abolished.
Finally, we have the first step, which is “remediation.” This only applies to a case where the teacher is being fired for allegedly poor performance, not misconduct. A teacher who steals, hits, cheats, etc does not have to go through such “remediation.” We are only talking about someone who, in the judgment of a principal (certainly not infallible and often not competent him/herself) doesn’t like a teacher’s performance. This “remediation” process is simply an opportunity to allow a teacher to improve by set benchmarks. I see private sector clients all the time who, before being fired, are placed on “Performance Improvement Plans” and the like. The fact that the parties have bargained to allow a teacher to improve performance before being fired doesn’t strike me as a bad thing at all. It strikes me as both humane and a way for the school district to avoid turnover that could impede its mission of teaching children. If a teacher outright refuses to teach, that is insubbordination and misconduct, not poor performance.
I had the opportunity late last year to represent some teachers in the NYC “rubber rooms.” There was a backlog of about 730 cases. NYSUT and the Department of Education agreed to an expedited process which essentially meant requiring lots and lots of hearings over the course of the next year and dispensing with some bureaucratic formalities. In less than four months I disposed of 6 cases. One complete acquital. One found guilty of about half the charges and dismissed. The other four settled for a penalty shy of termination. In almost every case there was no reason for the Department to have kept these people out of the classroom pending the hearing. The backlog was cleared before the end of the year and in fact the Department began to bring new cases because the caseload moved swiftly.
Of my four best teachers in high school, three of them were harassed by administration in one way or another in an attempt to force them out. One of them was “rubber roomed” for 12 of 15 years and the subject of a NY Post article proclaiming that he represented “everything that was wrong with teacher tenure.” In fact, he was one of my best teachers, and as I found out, several former students came back after several years to testify to his effectiveness at his hearing.
The bottom line is that a “U” rating from a principal (now being suggested as a criteria to replace seniority in layoffs) is not, in my book, sacrosanct or even a remotely accurate measure of a teacher’s effectiveness. Principals do not like iconoclastic teachers that may do things differently. They do not like teachers who criticize administration or blow the whistle on improprieties and illegal conduct. They can be pressured to go after teachers by parents who insist that their kids get straight A’s and preferential treatment. And they, just like teachers, can be just plain incompetent. In the end, we should have an effective and streamlined process for making reviewable employment decisions just as we do in other areas of labor relations. We should not get rid of tenure just because bureaucrats have found yet another way to prolong the process.
— JPhurst · Mar 9, 03:58 PM · #
cw-
“Failing is built into markets. Parents who fail pick the right school (or who live in the wrong area orlack the means or just don’t care) mean kids who are failed, which is counter to the whole purpose of compulsory education.”
Failing is built into everything, unfortunately. How many businesses survive on consumers that “fail to pick the right” business or “just don’t care”? None. So, the issue is that you’re worried that some parents might not make what YOU think are the right choices. Yes, just like some parents feed their kids Ho-Hos for lunch, some may not make the best choices when it comes to schools. However, putting things in the hands of an government bureaucrats that “know better” isn’t exactly working either. At least those disadvantaged parents that do want what’s best for their children will have a chance.
Markets. Yes, I forgot that all the government regulators and academics knew exactly what was going to happen in the banking crisis but those silly capitalists just wouldn’t listen.
Merit evaluations. There is no system (despite the dreams of HR departments) that can be designed to objectively decide who does good work and who doesn’t. This is as true in the private as well as in the public sphere. Here’s the only thing that works. The bosses decides who works for them (on whatever basis they choose). The trick is that then the bosses have to be held accountable. The definition of a good worker can change from boss to boss (some of my best employees wouldn’t be touched by other managers that aren’t complete idiots). I’ve never seen an evaluation system that didn’t need to be “gamed” to reward the good workers. HR departments are a waste of time and space.
JPHurst – My favorite teacher was run out of the business as well as my son’s favorite. The problem is NOT that they get fired by narrow minded administrations that don’t like to see the boat rocked, it’s that they should be hired by better schools and my son should be able to follow them there.
— BillB · Mar 9, 09:25 PM · #