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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unbelievable how much American culture hates education.[/quote]

I hate entitled groups who bully by punishing.  If 100% of the teachers in my school were evaluated as the highest performing and the dropout/illiteracy rate was not so abysmal and embarrassing to our country, I would gladly redirect my charitable giving toward a bonus pool for teachers.   The idea of tenure for k-12 education is a ridiculous concept and should never ever have been adopted. Too many concessions for too long and we remain in a mess.[/quote]

The issue in Chicago is not about tenure.  It is about the pay scale.  And the reason that performance pay is difficult to administer is that it's extremely difficult to demonstrate whether performance is the result of the class or the teacher.  And it means that the best teachers will no longer take on the tougher assignments but cherry pick the easier ones.  In business that kind of problem happens all the time.  For example, in utilities you want your best crew working on the toughest line breaks  But if you measure them on time to repair, it will kill their performance scores.  You counter by attempting to adjust for difficulty, but you can't quantify it.  So the crew starts complaining that the weaker crews don't do the tough jobs, and then you have to spread the work around so you don't drive them off.  And then the customer has a longer power or phone outage.

No one has cracked the performance testing dilemma.  The best teacher might make very limited progress in a classroom with troubled kids.  In fact, if she does her job well enough she might actually cause some of them to not drop out, further lowering her score.  They can add in year to year statistics for the same cohort and it still doesn't correct the problem.  In the end, there are 30 or so people involved in those test scores, and most of them don't have compensation riding on the outcome.  They are just waiting for the bell to ring so they can leave.[/quote]

The tenure point was not about Chicago negotiations, it is a general viewpoint - even if CPS doesn't have a tenure system, it should be eliminated in every k-12 school district in the country.[/quote]

Any talk of tenure should be combined with efforts to significantly raise teacher pay.  I am the teacher PP who stated that working conditions made all the difference in attracting good teachers.  Job security is one of the things that attracts very smart people to the profession.  If you take that away, you really need to raise teacher pay to compensate for the added uncertainty and the fact that you can be fired just b/c your principal doesn't like you - the internal politics can be a nightmare.  I have seen good teacher evaluation systems and bad teacher evaluation systems, but none are objective and immune to administrative incompetence.  I don't think that my colleagues in the profession who have degrees from Ivy League schools (like I do) would tolerate this risk and stay in the profession.  They would become lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc.

By the way, incompetent teachers can be fired even when they have tenure.  My father was a principal in MD and he fired terrible teachers.  Most principals aren't willing to do the work of firing bad teacher b/c they have to document that the teachers are bad.  In MCPS, the union does not protect bad teachers, so if a bad teacher is there it is b/c the principal won't do the work to fire them.  AND, it is the principal's job to make sure that bad teachers don't get tenure in the first place.  So don't blame unions when you see bad teachers working, it's ultimately the administration's responsibility.[/quote]

Tenure belongs in higher education, where it originated.[/quote]

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