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.