Archive
July 08, 2009
Editorial: Grading Teachers
Last week, at the big annual gathering of the National Education Association, members of the teachers’ union behaved badly — behaved, in fact, like out-of-control middle-schoolers commanded to stop texting and do something in class. When speaker Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, called for higher professional standards, the teachers booed and hissed.
Duncan was suggesting something that, outside the public-education establishment, seems perfectly plain: Some teachers are much better at their jobs than others, and American schools would work better if we rewarded great teachers, improved mediocre ones, and got rid of lousy ones.
But inside the establishment, that statement of the obvious counts as hiss-worthy heresy.
The hacked-off NEA members appear to prefer what Duncan described as “the industrial, factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.” That every-cog-is-equal model is great for union solidarity and teachers’ job security, but it’s rotten for kids stuck with teachers who can’t teach. And it’s high time that our kids took priority.
Teachers don’t work in a vacuum, of course. “Where you see high-performing schools, it’s the culture,” Duncan said — a culture of high expectations, a culture in which students, teachers and principals are all expected to achieve great things. We need more schools like that.
“The president understands that the nation that out-teaches us today will out-compete us tomorrow,” Duncan said. “That’s why he wants America to produce the highest percentage of college graduates by the end of the next decade. This is our moon shot. This is our call to action.”
Those words are worth remembering as the Houston Independent School District picks its next superintendent. We’ve already taken steps toward reform, but we need a superintendent willing to hold teachers and principals ever more accountable for their students’ performances.
If high expectations are heresy, we need a heretic.
