Our Failing Schools Are a National Crisis
Recent test scores show a 50-year downward trend for American students. We need to change course immediately.
www.city-journal.org
The City Journal - no friend of teachers' unions - basically blames them for the disturbing trends in American K-12 education. And for the record, the Covid lockdowns did some harm, but they were sucking big-time even before the Pandemic hit.
If "we" presume that in teaching, as in every other profession, the bottom ten percent should be fired for incompetence, that means that there are tens of thousands of incompetent teachers and hundreds of thousands of students under their awful tutelage at any given time. The unspoken fact is that it is virtually impossible to be fired for non-performance in an American public school. The few terminations are invariably for some form of misconduct and not for being a horrible teacher.
But how do we evaluate public school teachers? It can't be done on grades alone because teachers do not choose their students, and also because if grades were used then teachers could easily cheat and inflate grades.
Imagine that a standardized test could be administered every September, then again in June, to see how much the students have learned. The contents of the two tests would be kept confidential to everyone, especially teachers. Teachers would be compared to their peers, district wide, and the poorest performers put on probation, then terminated if they have two consecutive years of inferior performance.
But that's pure speculation on my part.
Any teachers care to weigh in?
Parenthetically, we are told that there is a current and future teacher shortage, so there is little incentive to start a program that would be tossing some of them out. Nevertheless, I'd rather have fewer teachers, all of them competent, and possibly larger class sizes than keeping teachers who are, in effect, harming our children.
