Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
tokenadult · 2009-10-27
· Original
thread
Links about a current problem (that a substantial number of teachers are just flat-out incompetent, by any standard of evaluation), which seems to have been going on for a long time (to judge by the dates of publication of the various links):
http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-921/incompetent.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Incompetent-Teacher-Managerial-Respons...
http://www.schoolmatch.com/audit/jacksonville/articles/teach...
http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/papers_presentations/pre...
http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/how-to-fire-an-incompe...
http://www.maa.org/features/083104pointcallforaction.html
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_...
Could you kindly explain who is competing with whom in the policy situation you envision? I'm not aware of any empirical example (raising teacher salaries has been tried, especially in Connecticut during the 1990s) where raising teacher salaries across the board has resulted in more competition for excellent performance among teachers.
One statement in the Jay Mathews article from the Washington Post we are discussing here suggests to me that Marc Tucker (who comes to education reform as an issue later than many other authors) simply hasn't read enough of the prior literature. Mathews writes, "Tucker says that with better pay, fewer teachers would quit, saving money now spent to train replacements." But there are already studies on teacher competence, and the finding of those studies is that the most skilled teachers quit more readily than the least skilled, with the least skilled hanging on to jobs in teaching desperately rather than facing the free-enterprise job market,
http://www.amazon.com/Incompetent-Teacher-Managerial-Respons...
and one of the reasons capable people don't stay in the occupation of teaching, or never enter this important occupation in the first place, is that they don't like being lumped together with less capable people.
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cupton/Senior%20Seminar/Papers...
(After edit: the reference immediately above supports the statement in a highest-level comment that was posted while I was first typing this comment, namely The US education system benefited for a long period where many incredibly smart women had career options basically limited to teaching and nursing. As equality improved, some of the brightest prospective teachers instead became doctors, scientists, and engineers. )
Meanwhile nearly all teachers have salary schedules that in most states are strictly on the basis of years in service (with bonus salary tracks for having postgraduate degrees, often from diploma mill "education" degree programs).
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2011/02/bill_ga...
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/should-teachers-get-r...
New teachers can't even come into the school, however competent, until there are openings for hiring in a particular school. For this reason (and for the sake of the honor of schoolteaching as a profession and ESPECIALLY for the sake of the children in the current school classrooms), I think some affirmative administrative steps are needed to encourage the least effective teachers to change careers, to make room for more teachers with greater effectiveness.