Bad teachers: We can get rid of bad rookies, but we're stuck with the veterans

Teacher-evaluation reforms were a flop, explains Tim Daly, who worked hard in his days at TNTP to get bad teachers out of schools.

Cameron Diaz played the lead in "Bad Teacher"

Using value-added scores to evaluate teachers confused and alienated everyone, he writes. It was way too technical. Teachers believed -- correctly -- that teachers with challenging students in high-poverty schools would not be judged fairly compared to teachers with "easy-to-teach" students.

Reformers should have focused on achievable goals, such as "improving the feedback teachers receive" about their teaching, writes Fordham's Michael Petrilli

Little changed --"almost every teacher in the country still receives positive evaluations from their principals" -- except for increased hostility to testing, he writes.

It's impossible to fire experienced but not very effective teachers in all but a few states, Petrilli believes. But "we could make significant progress on weeding out bad teachers in their first few years of service, before they get tenure protections or come anywhere close to a pension payout."

In other countries, it's more common to "pay teachers well but keep the rest of the staffing system lean and mean," Petrilli writes. Classes are larger with "fewer non-instructional personnel, fewer administrators, and in general fewer teacher-helpers."

We have embraced a system whereby we pay teachers relatively low salaries, which attracts mediocre candidates (on average), and then we hire coaches, instructional aides, and myriad other personnel to try to help those mediocre teachers do a better job with their students.

That doesn't leave money to raise teacher pay significantly.

Denying tenure to ineffective rookie teachers is doable, Petrilli writes. "We can usually tell within the first few years if someone is likely to be a strong teacher."