The Worst Teachers Must Go!

President Obama has called for a longer school year and has said that the worst teachers must go. This is great sounding rhetoric, but in real life actually judging the performance and teaching skill of a person is not at all easy. It sure isn't a science which one can quantify.

For example the teachers whose students get low test results may in fact be the very most effective person at reaching out to the worst of the bad asses, so she/he is consistently assigned the kids who need the most help. Or perhaps the teacher is just plain lazy and incompetent. It is often not easy to determine.

I don't remember many woefully incompetent teachers until I got to college, but I was young and lacked experience. I also was mostly interested in sex, drinking, and fast cars; not whether the teacher was doing a good job of educating me. It was just assumed that they were all competent.

I got my B.A. Degree, spent three years in the Army, and then returned to further my education. By now I was a little older, had seen a bit of the world, and actually learning something was important to me.

I found that at least one third of the teachers/instructors/professors were quite lazy and really didn't put much effort into teaching. Maybe one third were absolutely outstanding. And about a third were immigrants with very significant language difficulties. Perhaps they held a pHd degree, but they spoke in such heavily accented English that they were largely unintelligible. But I suppose they were cheap hires for the university.

I had sufficient life experience at this point where I could accurately judge whether these people were skillful at teaching. I was paying them, considered them to be my employees, and expected competence and hard work. I can remember that some of these bozos didn't particularly appreciate my attitude, so if they would not do their jobs properly I just went above them and complained to their boss.

I could weed out the bad teachers, but the university administrative staff had a far less accurate view of their skill level or dedication.

At the level of primary school or high school I can't imagine how one can accurately judge the competence of teachers. I was a manager and a supervisor in business for many years. There really are so many people whose primary skill is kissing the the ass of the boss and thus erroneously convincing him that they are doing a great job. I admit that I was fooled many times by lots of different people.

We all want the youth of America to receive good educations, but simply judging an experienced teacher on the standardized test results of her/his students doesn't seem like an effective method.

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