

California Teacher Tenure Found to Violate Student Rights - arch_stanton
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-10/california-teacher-tenure-found-to-violate-student-rights.html

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ryansloan
Warning: Anecdata follows...

When I was a student, I had some great teachers who were tenured and some
great teachers who were non-tenured. However, nearly _all_ my awful teachers
did have tenure. A lot of the people I know were in a similar situation. Some
were good teachers who got complacent and lazy, and some seemed to have
slipped through the cracks from the beginning. Small N, but I can see how
tenure definitely creates some messed up incentives.

That said, I think there are two sides to this issue. Making it easier to get
rid of bad teachers is a start, but it's also important that there's a good,
transparent way of evaluating whether a teacher is good or bad. I know a lot
of teachers, and they all feel as if the way their performance is measured is
pretty broken. They're measured based on performance on standardized tests
that don't test the right things, etc. I think if you want to attract and
retain good teachers, you have to establish better metrics, too. With the
wrong metrics, what you end up with is a big pool of teachers who are
successful at checking off the right boxes.

(I realize this performance measurement thing is a hard problem in just about
every industry!)

