Good Teacher, Bad Teacher [View All]

[MineralMan]

There's lots of attention today to a proposal to release teacher effectiveness reports. I think it's a mistake to do so, but what is to be done with poor teachers or just plain bad teachers? Anyone who looks back on his or her own educational experience can point to excellent teachers who inspired them to learn. By the same token, anyone can also point to teachers who failed miserably to do their jobs. Anyone could also point to teachers who were just adequate, but none of us remember them very well.

Teaching is a wonderful profession, and dedicated, talented teachers play an enormous role in shaping the students they teach. Poor teachers, on the other hand, do exactly the opposite. A couple of examples from my own life stand out:

In high school, I had an English teacher in my sophomore year. Even though I got an A in this teacher's class, as I did in all of my classes, this teacher took me aside after class one day and said to me, "You know that you'll never amount to a damn thing, don't you?" I've never been certain what led this man to say such a thing to a 15-year-old A student. I sent him a copy of my first book, with a pithy little inscription on the title page.

Also in high school, I had another English teacher, who inspired ever student in her class to grow and excel to the best of his or her abilities. She helped us all to learn how to read literature and how to write about it. She worked to get rid of weaknesses in each student in her classes and succeeded in making every student a better reader and writer. She encouraged constantly and her mark-ups of writing assignments were a model of showing students how to fix their mistakes, rather than just marking those mistakes.

I could give many more examples of excellence and utter failure.

So, even though I dislike the idea of exposing evaluations to public scrutiny, I believe that there must be some way to hold poor teachers accountable and reward those teachers who work their butts off to give students the best education they can. I'm not sure what that method would be, but I know it's needed.

So, instead of just decrying one idea of public measures of teacher accountability, why don't we discuss how this situation could be handled in a way that benefited parents and students by helping them know which teachers are excellent, and which are failures at their profession? I encourage DUers to tell us about good and bad teachers they have experienced in this process of trying to figure out a good way to handle this.