Newsweek article says bad teachers should be fired

Jonathan Alter, in last week's Newsweek, offers a drastic (and maybe necessary) way to boost American public school performance: get rid of the teachers who are dragging the system down.

The article begins as a commentary on Senator Barack Obama's recent appearances before the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, and his education policies. Alter asserts that teachers should be rewarded with higher pay for good work, but "removed from the classroom when they fail to improve", and then tries to say his view is in line with Obama's, though the senator doesn't usually bring this up. Wonder why.

I don't know whether Obama is really set on stricter teacher requirements (maybe you know? post it in the comments), but Alter's article is provocative and unapologetic. He says the U.S. ranks 25th among 30 industrialized countries in math, but gives no source and doesn't say which industrialized countries (or why there are only 30) are part of this ranking. This is my research topic for 649, so I can tell you that there has been huge controversy in the last 20 years about the validity of results like this. Even if the numbers don't lie, they way they are represented is sometimes misleading. For example, when the U.S. was ranked 19th out of 41 countries on the science section of the TIMSS (1997), many of the reports failed to mention that there was only a 10% score difference between 5th and 30th place (Bracey, 1998). Newsweek doesn't mention where this new statistic comes from (a test?), but often the test distribution is as follows: a few high-achieving East Asian nations at the top, most Western/other industrialized nations in the middle with very close scores, and a few low-achieving countries at the bottom.

So despite what I think of the fear factor, I find this article refreshing and Alter's evidence convincing. Ok, the other evidence (which admittedly, I have not checked). Apparently school districts nationwide fire, on average, only one teacher per year for poor performance, which, according to Alter, implies that "protecting incompetents is more important than educating children".

The accusations continue. He claims teachers resist (with hostility) accountability methods and that unions protect ineffective educators. Andy Stern, head of the Service Employees International Union (not strictly a teachers' union, but includes education) is quoted as saying, "I don't care if a teacher has a high school degree, college, or a Ph.D if he or she can produce results."

Is teacher accountability feasible? How can teacher quality be measured anyway, and should it? If you're a political junkie, let me know what Obama & McCain are saying about education reform.

Almost forgot. Here are my sources:

Alter, J. (2008, July 21). Obama's no-brainer on education. Newsweek, 35.

Bracey, G. (1998, January). TIMSS: The message and the myths. Principal, 77, 18-22.