Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
... The employees that work for me were my gain and the teaching profession's loss. They were great teachers ....
How else do we determine which teachers are doing a good job and which teachers aren't?
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I take it from these statements the teachers who work for you gave you records of the testing results of their classes from their teaching days? Is not, how can you assert they were good teachers?
I happen to think there are lots of ways of identifying good teachers There are also lots of ways to define a good teacher beyond his ability to teach an immediate subject in such a way that his students can regurgitate it on a multiple choice test.
You look at tenure and see a mechanism to keep the lazy employed. I look at tenure and see a millenium-old tradition that protects professional from the whims of stupid people.
(I'm suggesting you are stupid; I'm suggesting that the woman who my senior year in high school keep writing to the school board and the local paper demanding the head of my English teacher for daring to teach -- OMG -- 1984 (it has sex in it, you may recall) is stupid. Lest you think this is purely an anti-conservative bias, she also taught the KJV of Genesis in class. In a less conservative town, I could see that causing just as much a stir.)
We are both right; tenure does both of these things. We just each find the respective aspects of tenure more important. I'm willing to accept that a few bad apples will get to stay. You're willing to accept that teachers will be subject to academic censorship by wingnuts.
I happen to think there is a middle ground. I think that lengthening the time before granting tenure to 6 or 8 years would eliminate almost all the bad apples. I'd also be in favor of expanding somewhat the professional negligence type grounds for firing teachers post tenure (and pre-tenure even more). Right now, in most jurisdictions, you have to be caught doing something illegal or just stop coming to work to get fired. I can see a system of low test scores combined with low teacher evaluations leading to dismissal.
