“Most companies that employ knowledge workers make hire/fire decisions using tools like performance reviews and 360 evaluations, @fretfulmother. Every decision may not be perfect, but a manager who makes too many poor choices will get weeded out herself. That’s how every high-performing private company does it, and it’s not clear that they would be better off with an inflexible workforce.”
@Roger_Dooley - there is a world of difference between a so-called “360 evaluation” with adult colleagues/employees, vs. asking children for their opinions when they are getting grades and have to meet outside standards of learning. Studies keep showing that even for college students, “course evaluations” are more about prejudice than about what was learned or how it was learned. (Like that one where they had an online course and changed only the name of the instructor but got wildly different evaluations based on perceived race and gender.)
Also, there is a world of difference between profit-driven companies which are able to choose their input supply line, and a public school which has to educate all comers to a certain standard.
“Tenure is not the reason that there are poor teachers in poor schools. The reasons include that teachers prefer to live and teach in better neighborhoods, so the turnover rate is very high in poor areas. Most teachers in poor schools haven’t been there long enough to have tenure. Administrators, who have a big effect on the quality of life for teachers, are also generally worse in poor schools, so good teachers move to good schools to escape bad principals.”
@Ynotgo - Exactly. But people tend to view this situation with a dose of human error as follows: Some story breaks about a teacher doing something bozo-ish in a tough/poor environment (often, as you note, not tenured). People pick up on the buzz words “bad teacher” and think to themselves, “Oh wait, I had a teacher I didn’t like once. Yeah. Bad Teacher.” And suddenly everyone’s an expert and the pitchforks go up. Add in a bit of stirred-up economic jealousy (the 1% likes to get the lower-middle-class riled up against the middle-middle-class to deflect attention), and it’s all about how rotten unions are.