Incompetent Teachers

Julia Gake
            Have you ever had a teacher who did not know what he or she was talking about, clearly did not want to be there, or was just going through the motions? Teachers are an important part of learning, and having a single bad teacher can seriously impact both future interest in learning and the ability to learn. Many American teachers are hard to fire because they earn tenure after their first few years of teaching. The process of tenure was started because teachers used to be fired and replaced by friends of the principal or by younger people willing to be paid less. Today, tenure for teachers has made it nearly impossible to fire because of poor performance, leading to the United States status as a mediocre country in terms of education.

            Before teachers earn tenure, firing them is simple, but after, it becomes an expensive mess that states do not want to deal with. In New York City, 3 of 30,000 teachers were fired in 2008; while in contrast, 1 out of 97 lawyers lose their license to practice law. The reason for this is simple: teacher unions require costly, dragged out court battles in order to fire teachers.  On average, firing a teacher in New York State lasts 502 days and costs over $216,000, according to the Albany Times Union. School districts often avoid these battles by simply rating teachers as satisfactory, even if they know that they are not or by pushing teachers to schools in low-income areas where students are most likely to need support from their teachers.

            In order to try to improve test scores in the US, states have implemented standardized tests and standards teachers are meant to teach by, but research suggests that one of the most important pieces of getting a good education is having good teachers. “The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover," says Kati Haycock of the Education Trust and coauthor of the 2006 study "Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality.” Although most teachers are well-qualified for their jobs, there are more bad teachers than one would hope. “A lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent,” admits Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers Newark, New Jersey has a 30.6 percent graduation rate, yet only one of 3,000 teachers is fired annually. This inability to fire teachers who perform poorly has an impact on the overall education level in America. If the United States wants to compete with other countries in terms of education, teachers need to improve as a whole.

            Monitoring teachers and weeding out those who do not live up to standards will require change in the educational system. One option is to extend the amount of time required to be eligible for tenure or to weaken the amount of power unions hold when it comes to firing teachers. Another option is to follow the example KIPP schools have set, by requiring much greater time dedication from teachers. This standard helps them maintain high graduation rates across all 82 KIPP schools, which are found mainly in the inner city. A third option is to expand the Teach for America program which hires graduates from elite colleges to teach in the inner city for a few years, 61 percent of whom continue teaching after their time is up.

            If the United States wants to catch up to the rest of the developed countries in the world, teachers need to be held to higher standards. The fact that a teacher has been a teacher for a long time does not mean that he or she is actually good at teaching and should not mean that he or she has greater immunity from being fired than someone with another occupation. Increasing the quality of teachers requires weakening the power of teacher unions, requiring greater dedication from teachers, or hiring teachers with a higher level of education. In order for students to learn, they need to be interested in and engaged in what they are learning about, which will not happen if a teacher does not care about what they are doing.

Works Cited

         Feistritzer, Emily C. "Profile of Teachers in the US 2011." Ncei.com. NCEI, 2011. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.

         "Getting Rid of Bad Teachers." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 15 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

         Hands, Phil. "Madtoons: August 2009." Madtoons: August 2009. N.p., 19 Aug. 2009. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.

         "Protecting Bad Teachers." Teachers Union Exposed. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.

         Reber, Dave. "No Teacher Is an Island." Mississippi Association of Educators. MAE, n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.

         "Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers." Newsweek 5 Mar. 2010: n. pag. Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers. 5 Mar. 2010. Web. 20                    Oct. 2013.