Education

Off With Bad Teachers’ Heads?

By Bryan Toporek — February 24, 2010 1 min read
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Robert Pondiscio wonders, “What would happen if we simply adopted policies of systematically removing the most ineffective teachers?,” as recently proposed by Stanford University economist Richard Eric Hanushek:

Here's my guess: we'd have a brand new bottom 6%, while doing nothing to make the other 94% any better. There's nothing wrong wanting to improve teacher quality—who wouldn't want to replace the worst teachers?—but we'd get further, faster if we attended to curriculum and pedagogy, rather than simply looking at bad teachers and shouting "off with their heads!"

A version of this news article first appeared in the Blogboard blog.