Would teacher quality improve if every year the worst teacher in the building was voted off the island, a la Survivor? That’s the suggestion of Dangerously Irrelevant’s Scott McLeod. His “modest proposal” for improving teacher quality suggests first doing everything possible to create a positive working climate. But since students, parents, administrators and other teachers know who is just going through the motions, he argues, every year they should all get a vote, with the worst underperformer sent off.
If you don’t have a robust teacher evaluation system (or if you’re worried about administrator bias), do it like they do on Survivor: everyone gets a vote and the one with the most votes leaves the island. Administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents – everyone involved with the school gets a vote. Dismissal by consensus. The more that are involved, (hopefully) the less likelihood of a witch hunt. If necessary, modify the master contract to make this happen.
I appreciate the intent of McLeod’s proposal. He’s absolutely right that the larger school community has excellent radar for who is breaking rocks and who is merely going through the motions. That said, his specific proposal would incentivize office politics as surely as test-driven accountability incentivizes test prep and curriculum narrowing. Plus there’s the problem of that long line of great teachers, which is still not forming outside struggling schools.
I once worked in a large corporation where the informal motto was “it’s better to be popular than competent.” It’s not a formula for long-term excellence. Still McLeod’s idea reminds us that there is something to be said for the wisdom of crowds, and that test scores are not the alpha and omega of great teaching.
That said, his specific proposal would incentivize office politics as surely as test-driven accountability incentivizes test prep and curriculum narrowing.
After all, isn’t the whole idea of survivor that the “office politics” that it engenders makes for gripping TV?
It also seems to me that it would be an incentive for weak teachers to seek out weak schools, which is hardly what those schools need…
Would the other teachers “vote off” the incompetent but sweet teacher or the adequate but unpopular one?
My 10th grade English teacher was very popular with her colleagues but spent more class time flirting with the basketball star than actually teaching us anything. Then there was my 11th and 12th grade math teacher who was the opposite. He was a complete jerk as a person but a good instructor & coached the school’s math team to great success at the various competitions.
Am I the only one who thinks teacher laziness is not a big problem? It seems there’s this pervasive stereotype that public schools are being dragged down by a legion of fat-assed, do-nothing teachers. Where are these people? Such folks make up a tiny percentage of the staff in the dozen or so schools I’ve worked in (as a sub and as a full-time teacher). My guess is that slacker teachers are not among the top five reasons why American schools lag. What I worry about are the myriad workaholic, hyper teachers whose efforts are for naught because they’re implementing a vacuous curriculum based on bankrupt notions about teaching. Some of the smartest, hardest working and most innately talented teachers in my school are slaving away at these complicated thematic, project-based units that, in my view, yield little meaningful learning. Rather than engage in this charming Darwinian culling of the weak, why don’t we focus our efforts on providing guiding lights for earnest teachers who wish to do well, but lack clear direction?
One more thought:
For the teachers who ARE truly incompetent and lazy –fire them. I don’t know the arcana of the law and contracts, but, with enough documentation, it ought to be possible. One reason this doesn’t happen, it seems to me, is lack of administrative manpower. Well, then , if school districts are serious about weeding out the incompetent, hire an extra administrator whose sole job would be to evaluate teachers and prosecute the bad. If these dead-weight teachers’ effects are so invidious, the $100,000/year required to pay such an administrator could well be worth it.
Interesting that people think education should be based on reality shows. Of course, what with the reality of massive failures being bailed out on the dime of working people, like teachers, you have to wonder whether reality is even cheesier than those shows. And nowadays the shows include the spectacle of watching Donald Trump, the man who manages to have casinos lose money, fire people.