The Importance Of Teacher Quality

Evaluated by the rubrics above 
-- and the list seems accurate to me -- 
most conservatives are bad teachers.

Conservatives are chiefly interested in dictation.
Authoritarianism "is" as authoritarianism "does."

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Alan: Yes, teacher quality is crucial. The intractable fact is: good teachers are relatively rare. More would emerge if the starting salary for a good teacher were set at $75.000.00 or more. 

Wait a minute... Where did all the "conservatives" suddenly go? 

When I began my public school teaching career in 1989, my wife -- a high-end Public Health researcher -- followed me around for half a day.

That night, she said: "I could not do what  you do for a single day."

Conservatives: Repeat my wife's experiment and report back when reality has tempered your "impossibly pure principles."

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"Studies have repeatedly shown that teacher quality is more important than class size, income level or access to high-tech wizardry....Until this week California’s unions had successfully thwarted reform. Teachers in the Golden State received tenure after less than two years on the job; firing bad ones was so costly and arduous that school districts rarely tried. But thanks to a lawsuit brought by Students Matter, an advocacy group formed by David Welch, a telecoms millionaire, this may now change. On June 10th Mr Welch, helped by some expensive lawyers, won a stunning victory in a case he had brought against five state laws governing the hiring and firing of teachers." The Economist.

Will the dominoes start to fall? "Teachers' union presidents have embraced Lewis’s argument that they are waging a populist battle on behalf of urban school students....Still, the judge’s decision undercuts the moral case Lewis and her supporters have been making for tenure....The ruling may embolden conservative politicians to take a tougher line against teachers unions, inspiring lawsuits in additional states to knock down laws that make it hard to fire poor educators....Many districts would gladly raise good teachers’ pay if union leaders would agree to rules making it easier to dismiss ineffective instructors. In many cases, unions have resisted such concessions. That will be be more difficult to do, now that the ground is shifting beneath their feet." Devin Leonard in Bloomberg Businessweek.

States were already rolling back tenure protections. "Even before a judge's scathing ruling against California's teacher tenure policies, the once-sacred protections that make it harder to fire teachers already had been weakened in many states — and even removed altogether in some places. Florida, for example, put all teachers hired after 2011 on an annual teaching contract, which essentially did away with tenure protections. Kansas and North Carolina also are seeking to eliminate tenure or phase it out. The nonpartisan Education Commission of the States...says 16 states — up from 10 in 2011 — now require the results of teacher evaluations be used in determining whether to grant tenure. Not all changes have stuck, and few are without a political fight." Kimberly Hefling in the Associated Press.