[zimmy]

Originally Posted by Jim in CT

"Any idea what an accurate measure of teacher performance would be? "

That's a great question. In my opinion, evaluating teachers based solely on student improvement on test scores is unfair. What if the kid was up all night because his parents were fighting, and he bombs the test? That's not the teachers fault.

But obviously there's a way to differentiate the best teachers from the worst teachers. Hell, when I was 12 years old, I could tell you who was the best, and who was the worst.

It might be hard to distinguish between the 15th best teacher and the 16th best teacher, but it's not hard to identify the worst. The problem is, tenure makes it almost impossible to fire them. And very, very few teachers are willing to abandon the concept of tenure. They want their job guaranteed. And yuo cannot tell me that benefits the chikdren in any way, that only benefits the senior teachers.

"it is very difficult to quantify performance"

Agreed, I don't know that you can use a "statistic" to evaluate teachers. It should be based on evaluations by the principal, and feedback from parents, and even the students in some cases. The principals know which of their teachers are stellar, and which are dead weight.

"A well meaning, but misguided system for judging performance won't help the kids or tax payers"

Agreed 100%. If we reward teachers based on performance (and how could anyone be opposed to that), we need an accurate way of determining performance.

But evaluating teachers is not harder than evaluating anyone who works in any service type capacity. It's not all that hard. It may be hard to quantify as you said, but if you observe the teachers in their classrooms, you'll see clearly who is the best and who is the worst...

But to get to my original point, the teachers should not be striking over this. They serve the public, that's their sole purpose. I cannot imagine how disruptive this must be for the parents.

I believe I agree with everything Jim said in this post