While the challenge presented by educational reform is complex, this article makes no mention of teacher tenure. Tenure is supposed to be a reward for positive performance, as it was originally envisioned. Its universal bestowal now appears to be a major stumbling block to the firing of patently incompetent teachers (who would still have the right to due process if fired without just cause).

The Bad Teacher is not a myth. They're out there. I've done a lot of tutoring because the teacher in the classroom wasn't delivering the information.

It's not EVERY teacher -- it's the occasional teacher who should NOT be in the classroom. We all need to admit that those people exist.

In every industry it's the Captain who guides the ship. Why in teaching do we blame the workers on the floor and not incompetent management? look at the Superintendents.

The "Bad Teacher" is a convenient lever for the shouters and union busters. But they are just as common in charter and religious schools as in public schools -- and yet the kids survive!

We haven't any consensus on what school is for, what kids should learn, and (aside from popularity) what a good teacher is or how to train someone to be a good teachers.

What can we control? A) the physical setting: schools should not look or act like prisons or homeless shelters; B) the social setting: neither teachers nor students should be allowed to bully, persecute, or abuse other students or teachers; C) the funding: unequal schools produce advantaged and disadvantaged kids, so move the faculty and funding from school to school every other year - not the students, establish state-wide curricula and abolish "local control" (always a code for segregation by race and class), and equalize funding for each entire state, replacing property tax with a truly progessive income tax.

It won't work much better than what we have now (see the first paragraph again) but it will at least be a model of an equitable and humane system of public schooling.

Anon at 17:35:
Exposing the Bad Teacher Myth is not to say there are no bad teachers. It is to say that bad teachers are not the fundamental problem of American public schools. The fundamental problems are standardized testing, socioeconomic decline, and a national discourse that focuses on the sensational (i.e. oil on the surface of the ocean) to ignore reality (millions of gallons of oil on the bottom of the ocean). It is much more imperative that we admit these fundamental problems than it is for us to admit the existence of bad teachers.

To anon at 16:22. Your understanding of teacher tenure is incorrect. Not everybody gets it. Not everybody keeps it. My sister-in-law was a principal at a public elementary school in Northern California. The school was troubled when she arrived and was a distinguished school when she retired. I went to her retirement party and there were many teachers there who professed their love and appreciation for her leadership. One of the things she had to do to turn her school around was to remove some incompetent tenured teachers. She did so, much to the approval of everyone but the fired teachers. Removing tenured teachers is quite possible. School leaders just need to do their jobs.
I'm also married to a retired kindergarten teacher who was a teacher-of-the-year in two districts in California and one in Texas, although the superintendent in Texas tried to get her principal to fire her for pointing out the superintendent's misuse of funds. But the principled principal, who had the full support of the district's community refused to do so, informing the superintendent that she would have to fire my wife herself, if she wanted it done. The superintendent backed down. By the way, they didn't have tenure in her district in Texas.
As another poster wrote, the educational system is complex. Like all imperfect complex systems, its troubles will not be solved with simple solutions.

Parents are the primary teachers in a child's life.
A child values education if the parent's do.
Yes, there are bad teachers, but even a good teacher's are overwhelmed by students who don't get support at home.
Also, the curriculum was written for a different time. Real life should be apart of the curriculum. Education should also include courses on how to manage money, how not to get ripped off by pay day loan companies, banks, or insurance companies, etc. Courses should include a practical education.

Help! Some time ago I read about a lady principal of a high school, I believe it was in the Bronx, that raised the standard of the school by inspiring the teachers to do better. I have been unable to locate a reference to her work. I do believe that the interest and involvement of a school principal or superintendent has much to do with the standard of teaching. I would like to hear comments from teachers who have worked under such a demanding principal.
When I attended high school in Naperville, Ill. back in 1941 school superintendent Beebe demanded high standards from the teachers.I can remember only two whom I thought were not top grade.

Bad teachers exist, but they are not the fundamental cause of the problem. Of course our educational system would be better if we could remove bad or ineffective teachers or help them improve, but there is a much larger problem.

In the currently seemingly popular extremist rhetoric about reducing government, reducing costs, reducing taxes, the "bad teacher" is really only a diversionary tactic, an attempt to offer a "cost savings" approach to "improve" the system AND cut costs and cut taxes.

In reality, there are bad teachers, there are inefficiencies and waste in our educational system, as there are in almost every other part of our lives and culture, and where we can we should eliminate these when possible, ..but the bottom line is that our educational system is under funded. What is the old adage? "you get what you pay for". We are trying to get by on the cheap, and we're risking the education and future of our children.

The problem is NOT that there are too many "bad" teachers, the problem is that there are not enough teachers!!

What if we had two teachers in every class room? Not a teacher and a volunteer parent assistant, but two full-time paid teachers. Pair new teachers with experienced teachers, good teachers with bad teachers.

Bad households matter. The "solution schools" (KIPP, YES Prep, well known boarding charters etc) have a single common thread: pulling kids away from home more hours of the day and placing them with adults and environments that are good for them.

A kid with a bad teacher and good home life will turnout just fine. The opposite is not true. Schools will improve when home life does the same. Very very simple.

Excellent summary of today's wave of teacher bashing. Let's not forget Rod Paige's claim that the NEA was a terrorist organization. Ultimately, the teacher bashing is part of the general political trend to terrify the public so that they will accept policy changes that benefit big business. In this case, destroy the unions, make the school system seem so broken that only for-profit charter schools and CEO run school districts seem like solutions. See Modern School, where I blog regularly about education "reform" and class.

It all starts at home. I am a reading teacher in an "impoverished school" that can be considered "failing", but that's not what I see. I see teachers that work hard everyday, that stay late to problem-solve on students that are falling through the cracks, and do their best to get all of their students to succeed. But, of course, with very little compensation (in our district we actually took a pay cut this year, with our class sizes going up, but I don't see the superintendent taking a pay cut).

The real problem is the lack of support at home from the families we serve. It's a fact that children learn more in the first 5 years of life than they do at any other time in their lives. It's a fact that a child's number one role model is their care-giver at home. And it's a fact that without support at home, students will struggle and even fail. This not in the control of teachers! The more we demonize teachers, the more the uninvolved families feel comfortable in using teachers as scapegoats for their own failures as parents. We are a society of blaming others.

Teachers are taught to be reflective. We are taught to make changes to our instruction to fit the needs of our diverse population of students. We are taught to be intuitive, thoughtful, and creative. Most of us are just that (and at a very small price to the public).

Yes, our education system needs to be reformed, but pointing fingers, name-calling, and blaming one sub-set of the system is not the answer. We ALL need to take responsibility, realize that we are ALL part of the problem (as well as the solution), and work together to solve it. It takes a village to raise a child, not a school.

I am a school teacher: high school, one junior class and four senior classes teaching social studies. I'd like to see people who complain about teachers come in for one day to see if they can do a better job. I'd like to see Whitmann and Fiorina come in and try to teach for a day. I've worked in the public school system and a Catholic school (where there was no tenure, and you had to be re-hired at the end of the school year). I have tenure, and I worked hard to get it. I never would claim to be the best teacher, and I certainly wouldn't admit to being the worst. I do my best with the students that come my way, whether they care about their own education or not, whether they like to read or not, whether they can do sixth grade math or still, at ages 16 and 17, don't. I get them whether someone ahead of me tried to teach them how to write a sentence correctly, let alone a paragraph or a five-paragraph essay. It's time for those, like Bill Gates, to put up or shut up and come into a classroom for a week, let alone a semester or quarter, and try their hand at teaching!

Bad Teachers?

As I long time member of the Planning Board in our town, I got to see many of our local lawyers, real estate developers, and real estate brokers in action. As a parent of three kids who attended to the public schools I also encountered a lot of teachers.

In my opinion, for better or worse, the number of bad teachers I came across were roughly equal to the number of incompetent or poorly-prepared lawyers, developers, and brokers. I suspect the same is true of physicians, accountants, and other professions.

No doubt there are bad teachers, but I suspect there are fewer than bad politicians, bad journalists, bad attorneys. From my research and work with teachers (my area of expertise that other commenters seem to lack), the problem isn't with teachers. The problem is with politicians and the "system" of schooling that has strangled the life out of schools, teachers, and children.

Many of the comments and reactions here as well as the positions and opinions of politicians are not based on any knowledge of teaching, learning,and schooling, other than from one's personal experiences in school. Teachers of today have much better preparation than ever before. Politicians use education as a pawn and continue to create policies that are killing our kids by preventing teachers from actually acting like the professionals they are.

Teacher's don't usually go into teaching to make money. They are mostly idealistic and want to make a contribution to society. After years of going through the grind, some become lazy and do just enough of what is required. Most keep trying to do the best job possible staying up to date and keeping their enthusiasm and improving their teaching methods. Teachers who teach in poor neighborhoods usually have to spend a large part of their time on discipline. God Bless all those hardworking teachers who are trying. Before you criticize them, walk in their shoes.

1. There's been a lot of commentary on teachers, and some on parents, but nobody has mentioned the students themselves. Our children are being brought up to expect to always be entertained, to expect that teachers should "teach them" (meaning, make them get good grades) without much effort on their part. They have time for Facebook and skype, hanging at the mall, and video games, but precious little for homework. Not only parents, but much of society, tells them that this is normal and good. Homework---the chance to not only practice what they learned in school that day but also to check to see that they indeed "got it"---is seen as unreasonably burdensome if it requires more than 10 or 15 minutes per night, per subject.

Sayward, your second post held some valid heft but your first one was spoken like a childless man. If you've raised a child you can say how that child is cognitively (to a point), and academically. Otherwise, don't try to speak for any other parent who has confronted a culture that commodifies everything and disdains real learning.

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