Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
At the risk of getting busted for linking to blog posts, this post and this one seem to raise particularly good questions with the proposals to give principals more power to fire teachers.
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The only time I would support principles being able to fire teachers if the princples could somehow be held accountable if their school is underperforming.
But unless you can determine objectively whether or not a principle is running their school well, they should not be given the power to fire teachers, because they have no incentive to fire bad ones. Then it would just be up to their whim.
Without annual testing there is just no way to know which teachers are doing their jobs and which ones are not. If you have annual testing, and teachers are compared to other teachers then you can get some knowledge. But then I think the call should be made by some panel, or a board and not the principle.
However, if there was some way that you could determine if a principle was running a school well (in that the kids were learning something) and he or she could get fired if his or her school does not perform, then you have to give him or her the power to fix the problem. Part of that power would be the ability to get rid of teachers that were not doing the job. If you could do that, then I like the idea of teachers being trasferred three times before being fired. But absent that sort of system, there is no reason to give principles the right to fire teachers.
