This newsweek article titled Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers argues that the teacher in a classroom is more important than the curriculum and textbooks. So it would make sense to hire more good teachers and just fire the bad ones. However, the reality of this situation is not that simple.
In many places, teachers are given lifetime tenure after just a few years of working at a school and it is nearly impossible to fire them. In the United States, almost no teachers are fired for bad performance depsite the fact that many teachers are under performing. It seems that all the worst teachers are concentrated in the poorest and lowest class regions in the United States, and nothing can be done to get the bad teachers out and the good ones in. There are programs such as KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) set in place in poorer areas that are trying to better educate students despite the bad public school system, but these students are still at a huge disadvantage.
What can be done to get better teachers into lower class school sytems? Is it even possible to do this or are these school system just a lost cause?
I think that the best way to get teachers to work harder is to have bonuses for teachers who work harder. If you look at my post, Are American Schools Dying, I linked to an article about a book about the death of American Schools by Diane Ravitch. The author said that if we can't fire them, then we should give them a reason to work hard. A lot of teachers in impoverished neighborhoods are underpaid and have a plethora of obstacles to overcome when trying to reach children. Because of this, after a few years, they lose the fire that they once had. Ravitch said that an effective way to get teachers interested in teaching again is to give state sponsored bonuses to those who have students that perform well. I see no problems with this, though we would have to devise a system in which we were able to tell who deserves the bonuses and who doesn't. No offense to our teachers, but SES does have a large bearing on how students perform on tests. Thus, teachers in wealthier areas should not receive the same bonuses as those in poor areas.
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