Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman are both talking about firing teacehrs. Being moderate, wonkish guys rather than fire-breathing ideologues, they mostly say sensible things– Kevin notes that it’s really difficult to document bad teaching, and Mark has a particularly good point about teacher pay:
[T]he brute fact is that we’re not currently paying teachers enough to attract an adequate number of high-quality teachers. The only way to fix that is by raising wages for the kind of people we want to attract. Without that, making firing easier is mostly a matter of rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. It’s still worth doing for the incentive effect; you can’t really hold a principal accountable for the performance of an organization whose composition he or she can’t change. But to divorce that discussion from the salary problem makes sense only if your goal is union-bashing rather than educational improvement.
This is something of a hot-button issue for me, as those who have been reading this for a while know, but neither of these pieces is all that outrageous. The one problem I have with them is that both discussions rest on two implicit assumptions: first, that demonstrably incompetent teachers who can’t be fired are a significant problem for the public education system; and second, that the situation is actually better in the business world.
I’m not sure that either of those is really true.
Granted, I don’t have any data to support my suspicion, though I do have plural anecdotes.
The incompetent teacher trope is one of the standard assumptions of the debate about education in America, probably because everybody can think of at least one example from their own school days of some teacher who was just horrible at what they did. I’m not talking just about teachers who didn’t connect with particular students (though I’m sure that doesn’t help), but teachers who were genuinely bad. My father was a teacher, his siblings are teachers, and most of their friends are teachers, and after spending most of my impressionable youth surrounded by people who work in public schools, my impression is that every district has one or two idiots, and all the other teachers know who they are.
The question, though, is whether this is really a significant problem, compared to the other issues in public education. First of all, the fraction of incompetents is really pretty small– A district like the one I went to, with about 150 students in a graduating class probably has something in the neighborhood os 100 teachers on staff, and the number of total idiots was probably less than five (I’m trying to think of teachers I recall being totally hopeless, and not coming up with that many). The fraction of incompetents is certainly under ten percent, which isn’t too bad (though that does underestimate the problem, in that a really bad person in a key subject can be really hard to avoid).
Given the other issues facing publcic schools– overcrowding, lack of resources, discipline problems– this just doesn’t seem like it’s all that serious. It’s also hard to see how one idiot in ten or twenty teachers can really be held responsible for sinking a whole school, let alone the entire education system.
The other question that has to be asked is whether the situation is actually any better in the “real” world. That is, are the incompetent people in a typical white-collar job really fired at the sort of rates that people pushing teacher firing as educational reform would have you believe? Or, to put it in the same sort of terms used above, what is the fraction of people in a typical office who are hopeless at their jobs who nevertheless go for years without being canned?
If you’ve ever listened to a white-collar worker talking about work, the fraction is clearly not zero. The whole “work story” genre is built around idiots who thwart the heroic protagonist (i.e., whoever’s telling the story) through their general incompetence. And yet, some of these people evidently stick around for years, to become office fixtures. My vague impression is that the number of long-term idiots in a typical office is actually not that much lower than the number of teachers who are genuinely incompetent and protected by tenure.
These are questions that ought to be empirically testable, but it would be damnably difficult to figure out fromr eadily available data. On the education side, there’s the problem that Kevin notes of documenting poor teaching, while on the business side, it’s probably hard to sort out firings for incompetence from all the other reasons that people leave companies.
This seems like the sort of thing that a really clever economics students ought to be able to figure out how to measure, though….