And the witch hunt begins!

[proud2BlibKansan]

New York teacher rating scales were released on Friday.

Sill waiting for the parents whose children are in the best teacher's class to demand an increase in pay for their children's teacher.

Queens parents demand answers following teacher's low grades

The city’s worst teacher has parents at her Queens school looking for a different classroom for their children.

Pascale Mauclair, a tenured $75,000-a-year educator at PS 11 in Woodside, ranked among the very bottom out of more than 12,000 fourth- through eighth-grade math and English teachers citywide.

“I need to speak to the guidance counselor and switch my daughter to another class or change the teacher,” said Md Haque, 42.

“Every parent expects their children to grow up smart, and it takes a competent teacher for that to happen.


Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/cursed_with_the_worst_in_queens_f5wLhEdDRN1Wl9h1GQgxAM#ixzz1nVlTxHO6

[bluestateguy]

1. I wonder what they do in such situations

There was one teacher (not mine) at my elementary school who was so bad that there were masses of parents wanting to transfer their children out of her fifth grade class and into my fifth grade class. Only a couple could be accommodated, and a few other parents transferred their kids out of the school all together. The other kids had to bumble their way through fifth grade with a bad teacher. Years later they told me that they did not learn anything that year.

This teacher didn't quite seem to grasp that she was not very good at her job.

[proud2BlibKansan]

2. The administrators are responsible for firing them.

If administrators do THEIR job, bad teachers do not remain in our schools.

The situation you describe is also not remotely related to the OP, which is about using student test scores to rank teachers. It's a random, unreliable method which will only lead to witch hunts. And the rankings for individual teachers will vary wildly from year to year, with different groups of students.

[bluestateguy]

3. I agree with you

It is the administrators job to fire the bad teacher, but that can take 3-5 years. I have seen it happen, and in the meantime a child with a bad teacher is stuck for the year. You only get to be in fifth grade once and you can't get that year back.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. It should never take 3 to 5 years.

I've seen it done right. It's a 90 day process.

[saras]

6. Yep. If it takes years, it's because the administrators want it to.

Or much more rarely, they are so incompetent that they don't know how.

And in extremely rare cases, but becoming more common, the administration itself is so gutted by cost cutting that they simply haven't the staff to do all the jobs required of them by law.

[JDPriestly]

8. Teachers do not have tenure in most states (if at all) until after they have taught several years.

So, yes administrators can fire a bad teacher if they catch the problem early on.

Do teachers succeed in teaching when they first start and then somehow begin to deteriorate?

It isn't enough just to label a teacher as a bad teacher. We need to find out why a teacher is not succeeding.

Sometimes the stress of teaching just becomes too great. I have seen that in friends of mine. They teach with great enthusiasm for many years, win awards, do a great job. Then their situation changes. They are required to take courses they find absurd or useless. They are not given the opportunity to be creative in the classroom. They become depressed, and one day I hear that the teacher who was written up in the newspaper for having received teaching awards is being fired.

Something is wrong with the system. Otherwise an outstanding teacher would not become a disillusioned, failed teacher.

[JDPriestly]

7. Why do you think the teacher was not effective in the classroom?

Was it a matter of personality? Failure to organize? Lack of knowledge? Lack of patience? Lack of enthusiasm? Wrong race or ethnicity? What was the problem? What could someone learn from that teacher's experience?

Did anyone do anything to try to help that teacher improve his or her teaching?

[WingDinger]

5. The real enemy of equal educations is, our property tax funding scheme.