On Good and Bad Teachers

As the "put a quality teacher in every pot" debate rages, some more thoughts:

Many good teachers - if not more - leave the system or are promoted out of the classroom each year. But poor teachers leave too, an awful lot of them becoming supervisors. The replacements will fall into the same bell curve, especially first year teachers. So focusing all the reforms on removing them from the system is a losing game and the right wing and Dems 08 and Ed Sector types are using the quality teacher issue as a diversion.

On good teachers, we are not saying they are not important - but the witch hunts and the use of barely trained newbies does nothing to improve the overall teaching core while we think lower class sizes and some kind of internship for newbies would lift all boats.

Teachers should take a good look at their school and all the schools they have been in and make a list: great, good, average, poor, horrible and I just can't tell.

When it comes to bad teachers, In fact fellow teachers don't really know all that much. You know who does? The kids and their parents probably have the best feel for a good teacher than anyone else.

Think back to the teachers you had and rate as many as you can remember on a scale from 1-5 in terms of overall quality. Would you give the highest ratings to the teachers of classes where you scored very high on regents? Maybe. If you do well in school, you feel better about the teacher.

But are there other factors?

Thinking of yourself as a student might give a much better insight into quality teaching than viewing it as a colleague. Or a supervisor. A supervisor's list of who are good and bad teachers might look very different.

If you are a parent, think about the teachers your children had and rate them? Based on what? How happy your child was? Grades? How they related to you?

We might get the better insights into teachers from students and parents than almost any other method. Yet they are totally left out of the equation.