Clearly there are teachers who could be weeded out. But I am extremely suspicious of state/district imposed “accountability’ schemes that fail to consider the student’s obligation to the learning process. Sixty to seventy percent of the variability in student learning is related to factors over which teachers have little or no control.
I agree. It’s easy to think immediately of the ‘lifers’, there in body only, keeping their teaching jobs till early retirement just because the union protects them. They need to go. As to the other factors that teachers can’t control, it seems the solution to that is merely raise taxes and throw more funding at programs, successful or not....