What Makes a Good Teacher?
22nd December 2008
The solution proposed by researchers such as Harvard’s Thomas J. Kane and Dartmouth’s Douglas Staiger is not to raise teacher qualifications but to lower them—hiring “anyone with a pulse and a college degree,” Mr. Gladwell says—and then impose a rigorous yet flexible system of assessing new teachers in the classroom and weeding out the bad ones. That would mean adjusting teacher salary scales and ending automatic tenure, among other sweeping changes in the profession.
An idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it. We’re already doing the first part and the second part won’t ever happen while we have (a) Democrats and (b) education unions. Bzzt! Thank you for plaing.