We all know that successful teaching beyond the infant class involves (a) wide and detailed knowledge of a difficult subject, (b) an enthusiasm for the subject which communicates itself to the class, and (c) a few simple tricks of the trade, learnt by anyone from a single volume and from about three weeks of experience. The art of the Educationalizer is to expand (c) into a mass of pretentious nonsense, fogged by technical terms and psychological twaddle. To do research in Educationalization is to forget about (a) and (b) and make the mastery of (c) seem practically impossible. Those who can, do (it has been said), and those who cannot will teach teachers how to teach other teachers the art of teaching. This is the brotherhood of the Ed.D. and it forms a sort of campus with the campus; an enclave, as it were, of people committed to the study of nothing.
Peter's Predicament, Chapter 7, The Fur-Lined Mousetrap, C. Northcote Parkinson, Leviathan House Ltd, London & New York, ISBN 0 900537 05 I, no date (really!).
(If you ask me, eliminate tenure, break the teacher's unions, and fire the least performing 5% each year measured by before and after tests each year; with 5% yearly "mortality" we could use turnover to retain the good ones. And yes, eliminate pay raises based on continuing education and seniority, neither of which measure teacher effectiveness.
I think knowing how to make a teacher good is an impossible problem, but knowing whether a teacher is good or not is not very difficult, using a combination of peer and parent review plus before-and-after test scores.
But first ... break the unions and eliminate tenure and any special protection for teachers. I am totally pro-union when it comes to janitors and factory workers, but not managerial level staff; at best, it reinforces consistent mediocrity...)
In our current system, peer review is very difficult, and parent review is even more difficult. Parent review is difficult because a) parents don't interact with teachers much and b) any teacher flunking a parent's child will often rate the teacher poorly.
What's being talked about here isn't revolutionizing - it's altering an already very broken system.
What I can foresee happening is the stuff you talk about going forward, and missing out on the 10 other things that need to happen to make it actually successful and so being an abject failure as a result. The other things that need to happen as to make any of this successful are (and which are more important imho): work the system to get communities and parents more involved, change the grading system, change the perspective on the purpose of standardized tests, change focus of classroom subjects, teacher purpose/focus, student purpose, etc.)
There is little possibility of an entire class jeopardizing their entire future and graduation prospects in order to make one of their educators look bad. Also, you are suggesting that such malicious act would not be detected, and there would be no safe-guards against such an act?
We all know that successful teaching beyond the infant class involves (a) wide and detailed knowledge of a difficult subject, (b) an enthusiasm for the subject which communicates itself to the class, and (c) a few simple tricks of the trade, learnt by anyone from a single volume and from about three weeks of experience. The art of the Educationalizer is to expand (c) into a mass of pretentious nonsense, fogged by technical terms and psychological twaddle. To do research in Educationalization is to forget about (a) and (b) and make the mastery of (c) seem practically impossible. Those who can, do (it has been said), and those who cannot will teach teachers how to teach other teachers the art of teaching. This is the brotherhood of the Ed.D. and it forms a sort of campus with the campus; an enclave, as it were, of people committed to the study of nothing.
Peter's Predicament, Chapter 7, The Fur-Lined Mousetrap, C. Northcote Parkinson, Leviathan House Ltd, London & New York, ISBN 0 900537 05 I, no date (really!).
(If you ask me, eliminate tenure, break the teacher's unions, and fire the least performing 5% each year measured by before and after tests each year; with 5% yearly "mortality" we could use turnover to retain the good ones. And yes, eliminate pay raises based on continuing education and seniority, neither of which measure teacher effectiveness.
I think knowing how to make a teacher good is an impossible problem, but knowing whether a teacher is good or not is not very difficult, using a combination of peer and parent review plus before-and-after test scores.
But first ... break the unions and eliminate tenure and any special protection for teachers. I am totally pro-union when it comes to janitors and factory workers, but not managerial level staff; at best, it reinforces consistent mediocrity...)