(Teachers are already evaluated and it is a MYTH that they cannot be fired.)
Many of the teacher contracts include so many restrictions on firing a teacher that they make it near impossible to fire. When you have entire huge districts that include thousands of teachers result in only 1 or 3 teachers fired during a whole year, you know something is horribly wrong. Bad teachers instead get reassigned. The process happens so often that they have a name for it. They call it the dance of the lemons.
Chicago teachers are evaluated and can be fired. The problem is the firings are mostly political when principles don’t like someone personally or want to bring in a crony.
The situation with respect to not holding teachers accountable for performance and not weeding out the bad apples is the same in other self policing “professions” (ie medicine and law). The governing cartels (teachers union, AMA, ABA, and cartel controlled state licensing boards) control admission to the profession, the jobs, and the disciplinary process. How many incompetent lawyers at disbarred per year, how many doctors have their licenses revoked, how many teachers are fired? Certainly many fewer than the criminally negligent or incompetent players who are protected by the organized cartels that constitute the establishment.
Before I pulled my child out of public school I complained to the principal, superintendent and school board about poor teachers giving them very specific documentation. In the meetings I received the same smiles and patronizing promises to “look into it”. Nothing happened. Other parents received the same run around from the liberal Elizabeth Warren types administering our public schools and claiming to only care about the children.
I found a totally different experience at the private school. The teachers craved feedback from parents and took parent input seriously. The headmaster returned phone calls from parents on the same day, often within minutes. He also had answers and specific corrective action plans within one or two days. There was an entirely different sees of urgency but of course there were real market forces at work. The school knew the parents weren’t satisfied, they would withdraw their children and stop paying. This is why the unions fight vouchers.
It aggrevated me to pay outrageous property taxes to fund the public schools and have to pay private school tuition out of pocket in order to ensure my child received an education. However, my child is my legacy and worth every penny. It is unfortunate our public schools are filled with children who were the outcome of a casual one night stand and not nurtured by their parents. This societal disease is further compounded by a bloated bureaucracy of leftist social engineers overseeing a demoralized and sometimes marginally competent teaching staff weary from doing battle everyday with disruptive unloved children who receive no guidance at home and aspire to a life of crime or dependency.
Until we the people retake our public schools and enforce discipline, accountability, and real instruction in the basics (3 R’s)’, our culture will continue its decent to barbarism.