I just typed a long post on blogging as a means of expression and then I accidentally navigated away from the post and promptly lost the whole thing, so maybe that’s another strike against blogging as a means of expression.  

Anyway, this blog was born out of an assignment for a class I am taking at CUNY Grad Center where I am getting a PHD in slow motion. (Brief digression: when I started teaching up in Washington Heights. one of my students asked me if had my PHD.  And I said “Well, I’m not certain it’s really worthwhile to pursue that degree if I am unsure about the job market for professors…” To which he said “No man, your PLAYA HATA DEGREE, cause you never let us play dice in the hall.” To this, I had no response.) Being forced to express my thoughts in written form was a challenge.  Those who know me know that I am never shy about giving my opinion, whether or not it is solicited. I’m not sure if this comes from being a native Brooklynite or genetics or whatever, but it’s definitely a part of me to love a good argument.  But the thing about verbal altercations is that they are ephemeral and protean.  You can argue about anything and then all your arguments and points vanish into the either.

This is not the case for blog posts (provided you don’t accidentally delete them before posting). Once you make a statement, it is there on the web for the whole world to see (though you are lucky if you can draw 10 people) and changing your mind or altering your points becomes tricky.  If you are not careful, your trail of posts can, python-like, crush you in their logic.  

Still, this is something that all writers have to deal with.  Every time we put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, and write something, we are destroying infinite potential other paths.  This is the dilemma attached to all action and all creation and it is the reason why it can sometimes be so hard to make things.  After all, each made thing is actually a monument to infinite unmade things.  But those unmade things are unmade, and the act of taking misty thoughts and transforming them into solid ideas is good for us.  Or at least it has been good for me.  Maintaining this blog has really allowed me to work through a lot of issues and help me make up my mind.

And just as I have been a blog producer, so too have I been a blog consumer.  My classmates’ blogs have been an awesome read. Nader who eloquently skewers wacky third party candidates while possibly envying their wildness.  Monxo, who writes about the Bronx, maps, technology, veganism and why Edward Said is a bastard. Carla, juggling issues of race while trying to help rebuild Haiti.  Tamar (soon to be a rich banker) wrestling with her mixed Jewish, Iraqi and American identities.  Chris—the funniest capitalist Marxist you’ll meet this side of Deng Xiaoping.  And, though it isn’t technically a blog, who could resist the incredible arguments of il professore?

Hopefully this blog will remain active and I will continue to use it as a tool to shape my own thoughts and maybe yours as well, dear reader?

The debate has raged on in the blogosphere: is it better to rent? Or to own? I have been a silent observer, but have been involved in my own life.

My parents were renters until 1981, when they plunked down a then-unheard of $200,000 for a house on what was considered “the wrong side of Court Street” in what is today called Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. There was a schoolyard on our block with nothing in it but a handball court.  Besides that it was just a featureless expanse of asphalt.  I used to ride my bike around in circles in the lot and all the kids there lived in the Gowanus Houses—projects on Hoyt Street, two blocks away. Slowly but surely. the neighborhood gentrified and Smith Street (one block away) transformed from crack dens, nail salons and bodegas to French restaurants, designer clothing stores and Korean bodegas.  Today that house is worth almost ten times what my parents paid for it.

My folks got divorced when I entered college and my father (for a number of complicated reasons) decided to give everything—including the house—to my mother.  He borrowed from his pension fund to buy an apartment for $100,000, fought like hell with the co-op board, sold it for almost $300,000 two years later, and bought a house in Fort Greene for $400,000.  The house he bought was on the wrong side of DeKalb—in fact it was just off of Myrtle Avenue.  As dicey as my block was in the 80s, it was Mayberry compared to Myrtle, which we all called “Murder Avenue.”  Needless to say, the wave of gentrification splashed ashore there as well, and now my father’s house is worth about three times what he paid for it.

Which brings me to me.  After my wife and I decided to have kids, we moved into the duplex above my father in his building.  We don’t live rent free—my dad still has to pay his mortgage. Today, our apartment is comprised of me, my wife, our two kids, and her mother.  Things are getting cramped and we’d like to move.  Should we rent or should we buy?

My parents’ experience tells me that buying property in New York is a winning bet, and that things are going to keep getting better for years.  Increasingly many suburban kids are moving to New York to partake in the culture, while the suburbs are getting poorer and poorer. These kids gentrified me out of my mother’s neighborhood and now have just about gentrified my out of my father’s as well.  It’s hard not to want to stake a claim before it’s too late.  I sometimes feel like if we don’t buy now, we will be eventually consigned to the wilds of Staten Island or even… Teaneck.

On the other hand, I know that thinking like this is what led to the housing bust.  I also know that past success does not predict future outcomes.  I also remember a time in the early 90s (as well as much of the 80s) when New York seemed like it was getting worse and worse, not better and better.  Not to mention the fact that the mostly atrocious school system makes it very hard for middle class parents who are forced to plunk down five figures for a good private school or scam their way into a “gifted and talented” program if they don’t want their kids getting beat up every day at their zoned elementary school. Renting would allow me to hedge my bets. It would mean that I would not have to spend hours bent over a busted hot-water heater, wondering how to make it work, or force me to confront a possibly belligerent tenant or to worry about the kids hanging out on the block blasting that infernal “rap” music.

So what should I do?

When I was very little, my parents owned a tiny blue Datsun—I remember that it was almost always in the shop.  When I was about four it died for good and after that my father began bicycling everywhere in the city.  He was a biker way before it was trendy or cool; it was his main method of transportation.  Just living in New York City in the early 1980s was a major logistical challenge; biking in it was even harder.  Every day he would leave our house and bike down Atlantic Avenue, a major automotive artery, to his workplace: an under-resourced junior high school in East New York where he taught Social Studies and English as a Second Language.  In those early days, he seemed like some sort of incredible road warrior.  One time he got mugged by guy with a sawed off shotgun.  He was chased by unleashed junkyard dogs.  He battled with cars—always barely avoiding being “doored”—a phenomenon in which a careless motorist opens his door directly in front of the biker, leading to airborne consequences.  One time he even won my mother a bike in some sort of race and managed to bike home from the race while pushing her bike in front of him. 

I was involved in the biking as well; my father attached a seat to his battered Kabuki (a Japanese brand prized by purists and bike thieves—my father had three stolen) and he took me with him.   He would bike me to school in the morning and then he would journey to work afterwards.  One time we biked all the way to the Bronx Zoo: a trip that took so long that by the time we got there, we had to return back home immediately.  Of course the result of all this was that I started biking as soon as I was able, and by 5^th grade I was also braving New York City traffic to get where I  needed to go.  I felt then and continue to feel that biking is the best way to experience a city.  On foot, you never get beyond a neighborhood or two, by car things whiz by too fast, and on a subway you poke up out of the ground like a mole and never piece the sections of the place together. Biking really allows you to see how the tree-lined streets of Fort Greene give way to Bed Stuy which in turn yields to Brownsville and so on.  My high school was in Downtown Brooklyn and when I had free periods I liked to bike back and forth over the Brooklyn Bridge, weaving around the tourists—many New Yorkers found them infuriating, but I always felt flattered that people from all over wanted to come to my home and gawk. Also, giving them directions made me feel important.

I always thought that my dedication to biking was iron-clad, and that I was deeply devoted to the chain grease stains that were always appearing on the inside of my right shin.  But after I started teaching and got a salary, I discovered that my biking habit was almost entirely due to poverty.  Now that I could afford it, I was taking the subway constantly.  I even bought a car—albeit a 1987 Oldsmobile Delta 88 that had the habit of occasionally stalling when the car was going more than 50MPH.  When it stalled, the power steering would fail and I would literally have to muscle the car into the hazard lane; these were moments when I definitely missed the simplicity of bike travel. I remember when the car died; I would open up the hood and stare at the engine.  To me, the mechanical systems of the car were as inscrutable as obelisks engraved with Sanskrit, but I always hoped that somehow I would see the problem right there—like a timing chain that flashed red before breaking and shredding the valves. “Change me quick!” it would exclaim. 

All of this leads me to my current dilemma.  New York City Transportation Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan is one of the most bike-friendly civil servants ever.  Since she has taken over her current job in April 2007, bike lanes have sprang up like Athena from the head of Zeus.  The Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge now sports a paved circular spiral leading to the roadway as well as a protected lane on the street below in which bikes have their own traffic light as well as cement walls to protect them from traffic.  A greenway is under construction that will allow bikers to cycle the length of the Brooklyn side of the East River—a veritable Hipster Highway that will go from Williamsburg to Fort Greene to DUMBO to Red Hook.  And all of it shielded from cars.  I have to say, I am feeling incredibly ambivalent about all of it.

The fact is that these protected lanes are often empty except on warm summer weekends.  I am a big supported of alternative ways to travel—indeed, alternative ways were my only ways for most of my life.  Still, walled off and protected bike lanes may be more trouble than they are worth.  Not only are they under-trafficked, they have another adverse effect: they rob bikers of their street smarts.  Biking in traffic is just something that you learn to do in New York City.  You exist in the maelstrom of traffic and you learn to thrive there.  Separating bikers from traffic also gives drivers a sense of entitlement on roads where there are no bike lanes.  They figure that those are places exclusively for cars and are correspondingly more aggressive.  Sometimes the best way to integrate bikes and pedestrians is to do nothing and let them find their own solutions. I don’t think there was a single bike lane in the city back in 1981, but my father did fine without them and they probably made him stronger as well.

My students and I have just finished reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and Mill had some interesting things to say about education: 

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government… An education established and controlled by the State, should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence. 

It’s pretty interesting to hear this argument for educational diversity made way back in 1859, but much of what Mill says bears reflection.  On the one hand, it hardly seems true that public education in America has contrived to mold people to be exactly like one another.  After all, one of the characteristics of our educational system is the fact that it is totally splintered, with states controlling their own standards and then devolving that control to cities and counties beneath.

Indeed today, many educational reformers believe that the solution to America’s educational dilemma is to create a standardized federal curriculum.  The main problem with No Child Left Behind, they say, is that it only encouraged states to force their students to progress and left no mechanism to force them to do so. . 

Perhaps Mill’s arguments are simply not relevant for our moment in time.  After all, he was writing in the midst of the Victorian England—a time and a place where conformity and social convention acted as a heavy weight, keeping all people in their appointed stations.  Maybe the United States in 2011 is simply too chaotic and loosey goosey to accomidate true diversity in our schools.  In this editorial, the New York Times makes a strong case for a true national curriculum.

And if this weren’t enough, a recent study seems to indicate that charter schools—which can create educational diversity within a school system—may not be working at all.

On the other hand, in this piece, controversial thinker Charles Murray makes an interesting argument:

We’ve known since the landmark Coleman Report of 1966, which was based on a study of more than 570,000 American students, that the measurable differences in schools explain little about differences in test scores. The reason for the perpetual disappointment is simple: Schools control only a small part of what goes into test scores.

As a teacher, this is a hard fact to swallow.  On the other hand, ask anyone who has struggled to educated kids in under-resourced schools and the first thing they will tell you is that their biggest challenge is that they cannot control what goes on on in the home. When I used to teach seventh grade in Washington Heights I would constantly see my students on the stoops hanging out at 11pm on school nights. And the schools that are the most successful—schools like KIPP Academy—keep their kids in school for six day weeks and 10 hour days.  Ultimately the goal here is to have the kid out of the family zone for as long as possible.  So it goes without saying that the summer break is reduced to only a couple of weeks.

Murray’s argument basically boils down to the idea that school choice is important not because it raises test grades, but because it facilitates parent choice and allows for diversity. He writes:

There are millions of parents out there who don’t have enough money for private school but who have thought just as sensibly and care just as much about their children’s education as affluent people do. Let’s use the money we are already spending on education in a way that gives those parents the same kind of choice that wealthy people, liberal and conservative alike, exercise right now. That should be the beginning and the end of the argument for school choice.

Mill certainly favored diversity for its own sake as well.  His biggest worry was the stifling influence force of social convention.  Murray seems to be getting at the same thing in his own way.  And it’s true that everyone hates standardized tests.

On the other hand: here is the 2009 sixth grade New York State reading test.  Don’t you think that most sixth graders should demonstrate proficiency on this test?  I actually think that most second graders should demonstrate proficiency on this test.

Diversity is well and fine, but certain standards have to be maintained—regardless of the opinions of Mill and Murray. 

Like most union-dominated workplaces, the New York City Department of Education maintains strict seniority rules. No matter how great or bad you are, if you are a first year teacher your job is in jeopardy.  During my first couple of years, I was definitely low man on the totem pole, which meant that at least three times I was in real danger of losing my job.  Once, only a last minute sabbatical by a senior teacher saved me: I found out I would be returning for the school year about a week before the school year began.

This always struck me as unjust. No doubt, there were some incredible older teachers.  But there were just as many who were bad or simply mediocre.  Not only were these lifers immune from firing, they also were paid (at the time) something like triple my salary.

The truly talentless and the obtuse among the senior teachers insisted on giving low grades, arbitrarily favoring certain students and living on the edge as administrators tried (and generally failed) to remove them.  But they were always a minority. 

More interesting were the bulk of the old timers; many of whom had developed tricks that allowed them to thrive—tactics that kept criticism at bay.  One teacher concocted a system in which he divided all of his students into groups and had them writing their own constitutions and designing their own cities for government class.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?  Creative education at its best.  But this system was created so that he could read the Village Voice at his desk while his students ostensibly did their assigned tasks.  What really happened was discussion of the dismal prospects of the Knicks and gossip on who was dating whom.  He even solved the problem of grading: he gave each team a certain number of points and then they were responsible for grading themselves.  Everyone got a 91. The only work that was ever submitted were papers written by each group.  After this particular teacher retired, I taught a class in his old room. After the day was done, in his abandoned closet, I discovered boxes and boxes of dusty and totally ungraded papers.

The longer I spend inside the system, the more convinced I become that everyone’s a running a racket.  Whether it’s the teacher who gives all of his students a base grade of 93, or the one who has student monitors grade all her papers, it seems like very few people are actually working. Do they know something I don’t?  Why are there so few old and good teachers? They are out there, but they are a small band. 

The fact is that many “seasoned” educators know that so long as they give high enough grades, they can float by.  This is the reason why the proposed legislation to end teacher tenure is so threatening.

In “Last Teacher in, First Out,” New York Times reporter Jennifer Medina—who is really working the Ed Reform Beat—goes into some of the reactions to this idea.  Teachers everywhere are angry and upset about the prospect that the sacrosanct rules of tenure might be threatened. 

But really, the odds of passage are grim:

“[The legislation] wasn’t just dead on arrival, it was dead before it was put in the mail,” [State Senator Eric] Schneiderman said of the legislation. “It does open the conversation about how to ensure there are quality teachers, but the idea of giving the administration total discretion to pick and choose who is fired with no standards is not going to fly.”

The truth is that I really don’t know what to think.  I hate tenure and I hate seniority as a concept.  I do believe that principals should be able to fire whomever they want and pay teachers for merit, not years in the system.  But how can I ensure that the principals are good?  Many of them are walking examples of the Peter Principle. 

I like to think of myself as a good teacher.  I spent the whole day grading papers in a Starbucks next to a bearded man who reeked of Nag Champa and Clamato instead of playing with my kids.  

What do those old schemers know that I don’t know?

The math teacher walked up to my desk in the windowless computer room where I was grabbing a bite to eat while catching up on the British leader’s debate on C-SPAN’s website. “I have a question for you,” he asked. I was excited to explain to him the details of the Westminster system, but instead he asked “do you support the new law that would allow principals to remove teachers without regard to seniority?”

Well, there’s another peaceful lunch period shot to shit, I thought.

According to this Daily News article, Jonathan Bing from the Upper East Side and Ruben Diaz from the Bronx have indeed made such a proposal.  And there I was, surrounded by teachers, all looking to see what I thought.

So what did I think? Ultimately it was and is a variant of what I already thought and think… that is to say that I believe that principals should be able to fire whomever they want. Of course, this is not realistic option until principals themselves are put under such pressure that they will have a strong disincentive to get rid of quality teachers. And we are a long way from that world, so in the short term giving principals more power would just empower a huge corps of mediocre administrators to purge their schools of personal rivals.

But I didn’t say this in the teacher’s lounge. Instead, I stuffed the remainder of my roast beef sandwich into my mouth and garbled that “just because I support educational reform doesn’t mean that I support every example of education reform.”  

It’s hard for me to do this—my instinct is always for more conflict and more combat.  Maybe it’s because I’m a native New Yorker, or maybe it’s because I’ve seen in the poor neighborhoods the results of bad teaching, but I’m not afraid to say that incompetent people should be fired.  But if you have to work with these people then you sometimes have to take a softer line and angrily chew your lunch.

Last week, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers joined together to make a stunning announcement: New York City’s infamous rubber rooms are finally going to be closed. 

Amazing!  Astounding! What are the rubber rooms again?  If you haven’t read this article by Steven Brill or listened to this episode of This American Life or haven’t heard of this documentary, the rubber rooms are a series of offices around New York City where teachers accused of malfeasance sit all day, every day, and still collect their salaries.  This costs the city something like $30 million a year.

These rooms, informally named after the padded cells of a mental asylum, were designed to keep teachers away from students. A teacher at my school got sent to the rubber room after she appeared drunk in front of her class of freshmen and started regaling them with stories about her sex life.

These rooms exist because they prevent bigger problems from happening.  The Department of Education uses rubber rooms because they are a way to keep teachers that have not gone through the extremely time consuming arbitration process away from students.  The Union has supported them because teachers in the room are paid their full salary—which is sometimes in excess of $100,000—even if they have been accused of serious crimes.

But now, if we are to believe Chancellor Klein, UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Mayor Bloomberg, rubber rooms will soon be gone. The city plans to hire new arbitrators to speed up the process of disciplining rogue teachers and there also is going to be a new rule that teachers must be charged with an actual offense within 30 days of any accusation.  In lieu of being sent to the room, teachers will be given “administrative duties” inside and outside of schools—and this whole process is to begin in the fall.

It’s hard to evaluate these changes yet because talk is cheap.  The city has trod this path before, only to fail because budget constraints prevented the hiring of enough arbitrators to make the system move any faster.  The big issue, though, is that the underlying cause for the rubber rooms is still present: it is really hard to fire and discipline New York City public school teachers. This difficulty is leads to a need to warehouse kooks and thus we have rubber rooms.

It’s important to note that while some of the rubber room inhabitants are genuine perverts, many others have been placed there as a result of thinly sourced accusations.  Oftentimes a principal with a vendetta against a teacher will blow a minor incident out of proportion and use it as an excuse to send someone to the rubber room.  

The easy solution would be to allow principals to fire anyone they want.  If this happened, bad seeds could be immediately eliminated. And if a good teacher was the victim of a principal’s vendetta? Well; those are the breaks.  Plenty of good workers get shitcanned by stupid bosses in the private sector.

But that solution is problematic.  A for-profit entity can only fire so many good workers before their bottom line starts to suffer.  In the world of the market, removing competent people is a risky proposition.  In the public schools there is no profit and no generally accepted metric for measuring progress.

So what we need is an an adequate yardstick to really chart how well a student is learning.  If we can find that, then we can use it to put pressure on principals and remove the bad ones. And those remaining will then need the good teachers—their good work will be what preserves the principal’s job.  Then the principal will only have a desire—as well as a need—to fire the bad teachers.  

And then you have a real solution to the rubber room fiasco.  All we need is that perfect test of student achievement.  How hard could finding that test be?

The image above is taken from the annual Cheese Rolling competition in Gloucestershire, England,  in which teams compete to roll a giant wheel of cheese to the top of a steep hill.  The federal Race to the Top competition is similar, except in this case the states are competing for cheese rather than transporting it—$4 billion, to be exact.

But no one told New York State; our entry in the national competition was as stinky as day-old-limburger.  

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has one foot in the world of educational reform, having come up under Chicago School CEO Paul Vallas, but has also managed to maintain good relations with the unions.  That said, it was clear what he expected from the winning entries: reform, cutting of red tape and all around innovation.  

The details of his remarks can be found here, but it’s pretty clear what he wants: 1) No dumbing down of state standards.  No Child Left Behind required that all schools make Adequate Yearly Progress, but dumbly allowed each state to create its own test.  Unsurprisingly, states have totally gamed this system, producing tests that only show the illusion of progress.

2) A strong system that monitors how individual schools and districts are doing.  When Duncan talks about the need to “identify effective instructional practices,” he means that we have to figure out which curricula work and which don’t.

3) Here, let’s let Duncan speak for himself:

It is no secret that when it comes to schools, talent matters—tremendously. To boost the quality of teachers and principals, especially in high-poverty schools and hard-to-staff subjects, states and districts should be able to identify effective teachers and principals. At the local level we want to see better strategies in place to reward and retain more top-notch teachers—and improve or replace ones who aren’t up to the job.

Attract and reward good teachers while dumping the bad.  

4) Bad schools must be closed and destructive school cultures that have tolerated failure must be gotten rid of.

These four goals shouldn’t be controversial—indeed, they seem like obvious steps forward.  And $700 million was the prize for the winners of Round 1.  But New York totally failed in almost all respects.  

New York State exams are definitely shady—New York kids’ scores keep going up, yet we are flat in the federal NAEP test (see this earlier post for a more detailed description of the NAEP). We have used a hodge-podge of curricula across schools and the state, making it very hard to determine which ones work. As far as having quality teachers—well, let’s just note that it is New York State law that teacher pay cannot be tied to student performance on exams.  Supposedly, Duncan let it be known sotto voce that this law needed to be repealed for New York to have any chance of winning funding.  The law remains in effect.  Finally, New York City has tried to close some of the worst schools, but were recently blocked by a federal judge. Here’s a gripping inside account of the insanity of one of these schools, Paul Robeson High. 

If all this weren’t enough, the state has foolishly capped the number of charter schools at 200, and this has also hurt our chances.

The result is that of the 16 finalists for round one (and it’s amazing we were in the finals at all), we came in 15 of 16.  

We must do better—money is on the table; all we need to do is to grab that cheddar.  More likely it’ll roll back down the hill.

Way back when George W. Bush was still trying to loudly proclaim that he was a “uniter, not a divider,” education reform was one of his hallmark initiatives.  Working hand in hand with the late Ted Kennedy, he passed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) —one of the most ambitious laws ever to try to mend the flaws in American education.

Now, almost nine years after its passage, the Obama administration is talking about making major changes to NCLB. According to this piece, by the New York Times’s Sam Dillon, Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants to dispense with NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) measure. AYP was bureaucratic jargon for a simple idea—schools had to be advancing their students academically.  And this would be measured by tests.  The problem was (and is) that the tests designed to measure AYP are created by the states themselves.  As a result, many states have deliberately watered down their standards in order to meet AYP.  The proof of this is that when a random sample of students from each state was asked to take National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam, the results did not match up with the improvement that the states had claimed.  (Here are the gory details for 2005).

Though nothing concrete has been released yet, Obama’s main idea will most likely be to replace AYP with a larger goal—that all students in the United States be able to graduate from high school and college prepared for the workforce.  And this goal should be accomplished by 2020.

On the one hand, the attempt to improve NCLB—a well-meaning, but flawed law—is laudable.  On the other hand, it is likely that no combination of carrots and sticks will be able to turn the educational sow’s ear that is Mississippi into a Massachusetts silk purse.  And all of America’s students: college-ready by 2020?  I hate to be a cynic, but its probably no coincidence that by the time that this date rolls around, Obama will be rearranging the furniture at his presidential library in Chicago.

The major question that all educational reformers need to ask themselves is whether the United States should embrace a national system of education.  Yesterday, the New York Times called for national assessment of all students.  They didn’t go into details, but it’s likely that they would want the NAEP to move from being given to a sample of students to becoming the actual test that all students would have to take.  Carefully, the Times notes that “this is not a call for a national curriculum.” Is this caution warranted?

This is a tough one. We are a federal nation, and being divided into 50 semi-autonomous regions provides us with many advantages.  On the other hand, all the nations that really thrive in nation-by-nation comparisons are unitary countries that set and enforce nationwide standards.  Should we do the same?  Do we need a national curriculum?

It’s possible that in a perfect world this would be the way to go, but the United States is simply too divided—ideologically, geographically and culturally.  It’s hard to imagine some mandarins in Washington dictating lesson plans to every school in the nation—and the amount of money wasted would probably be incredible.

So, in the end, I have to agree with the Times.  Let’s assess all states with one national exam, but let each state use whatever methods they want to achieve those standards.  Perhaps a list of the best and worst could be published—in the international community they call this “naming and shaming.”  It’s not perfect, but a method like this may be the best way forwards.

This week was Newsweek’s Education Edition; consequently, I had a lot of material to work with.  Probably the most controversial article was the piece entitled “Firing Bad Teachers.”  Here, Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert advocate, unsurprisingly, the firing of bad teachers. Most of the article is an interesting exercise in stating the obvious—yet in the Bizarro World of education, the obvious is incendiary.  So: should we fire employees who don’t do their jobs—employees who fail to educate students?  Sounds like an easy call. After all, if you mess up enough widgets on the assembly line, you are out on your ass.  But if you mess up the youth of America, year after year, you just build up a bigger pension.  The data are pretty conclusive—most sources cite Stanford Professor Eric Hanushek, found here (PDF). Put bluntly, the only variable that seems to directly lead to educational success is determining who bad teachers are and then getting rid of them.

 Also notable is how basically no tenured teachers are ever fired.  From the Thomas and Wingert’s piece:

In New York City in 2008, three out of 30,000 tenured teachers were dismissed for cause. The statistics are just as eye-popping in other cities. The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability. The responsibility does not just fall on the unions. Many principals don’t even try to weed out the poor performers (or they transfer them to other schools in what’s been dubbed the “dance of the lemons”). Year after year, about 99 percent of all teachers in the United States are rated “satisfactory” by their school systems; firing a teacher invites a costly court battle with the local union.

These facts speak for themselves. But there’s something more important to remember and this is that, most likely, everyone reading this piece has gone to school and interacted with teachers for most of their pre-adult life.

So ask yourself these questions.  Did you have great teachers? Did you have terrible ones? Did the good ones inspire you, shape your thinking, possibly even put you on the path to your current career or educational field?  And what about the bad ones?  Did they put you off a subject?  Did you swap horror stories about  bad teacher eccentricities like baseball cards with your friends in the hall? If you were like me, then I’m guessing that the answer to all of the above questions is “yes.”

Let me add a proviso here.  Many educators passionately devote themselves to a low-prestige career with zero administrative support in communities that simply do not value learning.  The desire to enter into this most noble of fields, despite its current woes, ought to be commended.

But not everyone can hack it. Those that can’t should go. After all, think back to your bad teachers.  They made you miserable, but didn’t they seem miserable too?  Maybe a new job for them would have solved their problems and yours.