[dufekin]

The problem with many failing schools is that the teachers simply don't teach anything whatsoever. If we hire these teachers as tutors for their own students, that's giving them a bonus (incentive) to keep NOT teaching. (Those who don't teach probably wouldn't tutor either. Many of these teachers themselves don't know enough to pass the class that they're purporting to teach.) Because this incentive lasts only as long as the school remains in failing status, it gives teacher-tutors an incentive to perpetuate failure. Although your personal intentions may be good, we don't want yet another government program to degenerate into subsidized failure.

[summer]

Again, I am sympathetic to your point. And, true, some teachers who are not teaching in the first place would not want to then tutor.

[ClaireSolt]

Although I worked in a lot of different schools around the country, there is only one story I know about teachers who don't teach. In about 1970 my mother went to my brother's high school and a disgruntled white teacher informed he that he was just not going to bother to teach because the school was being racially integrated. Maybe that was widespread and created an atmosphere where it was accepted. Then, of course, with racial and ethnic preferances in teacher hiring we got a lot of teachers who just didn't know anything, but I think the standards movement may be counteracting that.