The Center for Union Facts will ask parents, students and other
teachers Tuesday to nominate the "worst unionized teacher in America."
The center says it will choose 10 and offer each $10,000 to quit;
"winners" must allow the center to write about them on its website.
More here.
Thanks to Lee Spector for the link.
First, they should start within one school district. Second, I think the incentive to nominate a “friend” in order to collect the $10,000 prize is countered by the stigma of being the “worst teacher” — nobody wants that rep, esp. after years in the trenches. Even bad teachers have some pride/self-delusion left… unlike some reality show “stars”.
What a spectacular idea! There should be a full time organization dedicated to doing just this, in every field.
Nobody sees a problem with a system which prevents failures to just be fired without being paid off?
Wouldn’t it be more productive (and informative, if the process could be honest) to pay $10,000 to get the ten worst teachers (simpliciter) to quit? What’s the value in restricting the offer to unionized teachers?
How much should we pay to get the ten worst surgeons to quit? Millions, right?
> How much should we pay to get the ten worst surgeons to quit? Millions, right?
$0. Malpractice insurance premiums ”pay” them to quit. It’s more profitable not to practice if you suck, and no hospital wants a numbskull on staff due to institutional exposure.
Teachers are an entirely different ball game. The stakes are lower and the battles that much more bitter as a result. The AMA does not have anywhere near as much juice as the teachers’ union in California, for example.
The Link doesn’t work for me, takes me to a basically blank page.
this teacher is incompetent, and no we can’t fire him but in three years he will have his 35 YEARS OF SERVICE and he will retire.
My housekeeper’s kid has a social studies teacher who is completely incompetent. The guy talks about what he had for dinner the day before, tells them to go ahead and listen to their ipods during class – everything except social studies. The school can’t fire him because of the union. Their advice to the parents: pray he is not their teacher next year. That’s the school’s solution. Pray.
I can beat out “at”. For only $5,000, I will stop posting here.
Yep, you heard me right:
-No more addressing people by their full handles with underscores in place of blanks.
-No more make gratuitous references to my implausible Don Juan life.
-No more subtle hints that you suffer from mental retardation for merely attempting to refute my arguments.
All for the low, low price of $5,000!
If there’s a collective action problem, I can broker an aggreement that reduces transaction costs.
Don’t be a free rider! Sign up today, for the “Pay Person to keep away from MR” project!
Person,
will you cool it, please? “Mental retardation”?
There’s other outlets on the Internet for this type of discourse.
And don’t try to tell us you were being very witty.
G.ira: How about just letting their managers evaluate them? Yes, the results would sometimes be unfairly influenced by office politics or personality conflicts. We in the private sector deal with that, and still we manage (averaged over the long run and across many businesses) to improve our outputs, because (averaged over the long run and across many businesses) managers have incentives to reward good people and fire bad ones.
There are plenty of jobs in the private sector where the desired outputs are not easily quantifiable or universally agreed upon: receptionists, nurses (the worst 2% of nurses may kill patients, but there are still big differences between the other 98%), even engineers (the difference between a good and bad engineer is not how many bridges per year he builds) are just a few examples. Still, we rely on managers to judge these workers, based on how well their colleagues respect and get along with them, how often customers ask specifically to work with them or ask specifically to avoid them, and other criteria the boss might believe relevent. It’s not necessary that all bosses in the industry apply the same criteria for that job, or that those consuming the services agree on or even know the details of those criteria. For the industry as a whole to improve, it’s only important that the criteria of the average boss be correlated with customer satisfaction. Achieving that doesn’t require objectively measurable consensus criteria — indeed I would argue that imposing such a system impedes the very innovation that is the most important source of breakthrough improvements.
Any fool could, without any background in education, do better than pay-by-senority and never-fire-anyone. Give the teachers that many parents request raises. Fire the teachers that many parents ask to avoid. Is that the end-all and be-all of pay-for-performance in education? No. But it’s a decent start.
yeh well, my lawn guy’s niece has a friend whose teacher PICKS HIS NOSE during class. Unfortunately he’s only been there for 5 years and no one can fire him because the union would be upset by his loss of health benefits (by now his nose issue counts as a pre-exisiting condition).
Jeez …there are clearly problems with public education, but why do people give so much credence to stupid anecdotal 3rd-party accounts. I suppose the writers must be public school graduates.
Now obviously a lousy ten grand is just the equivalent of a Razzie award. But, beyond that how are we to define a lousy teacher? The harder ones won’t be popular as lots of teaching in Economics research shows.
Yet to lower standards in schools just means more reliance by the country on technically trained foreign elites. At USC only a small minority of computer engineers are traditionally ethnic Americans.
If we are to rely only on excellent teachers will there be enough to go around? More disturbing is that we know so little about good teaching that we could not define it in practice. My best teacher was an alcoholic college teacher who fallen down to the high schools. He was loathed by the students and with good reason because he had ridiculously high demands on students. He taught English literary criticism to dolts and somehow it caught fire with me and I went college prep not vocational. I didn’t understand or appreciate his influence as a teacher until I walked the podium for my doctorate. No way any measure of teaching will define such intangible and subtle influences. The very attempt to do so by units of education credits has lead to the bureaucratic, intellectually dead teachers of today. Its one more example of the evils of ill thought out so called “progressive” meddling in complex social functions..
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