The idea that some teachers are good teachers and some teachers are bad teachers is idiotic and belays almost every experience I've ever had in the class room. I am not a teacher, but have been a student for some five decades. Some teachers are bad for some students, while they are good for others. Just as dietitians will say there isn't any such thing a bad food, only the range of foods in one's diet can be bad. Eating that bacon cheeseburger once a year isn't bad, if one eats a balanced diet. Eating nothing but carrots will kill you, however important they may be in a good diet.

Take, for example, my beloved English teacher, Mr. Basher. The other students hated him. He drilled us on sentence structure week after week. He had us take apart ever more complex sentences and identify the parts. This appealed to my engineer mind. I saw how the language worked. If I could take something apart and putting it back together again correctly, I really understood it. The other students were bored and hated the class and, eventually, the teacher. I loved him. He was my favorite that year and remains in my top five. God bless you, Mr. Basher, wherever you are.

On the other hand, I just dropped out of a Photoshop class given by the most popular graphic design instructor because his lecture style was too frantic and haphazard for my tastes. Yet most student love him and learn well from him.

All students are not the same and one teacher and teaching method doesn't work for everyone. For a principal to say he can tell when learning is going on or not by a simple classroom visit is hubris, not reality. Perhaps he can see when many students aren't learning, but I can't see more than a trivial number of teachers failing to teacher every single student in their class. What appears to be chaos can often be the best learning. Seemingly attentive students sitting quietly in rows can mask the complete lack of comprehension.

Testing only tell us what the majority of students were able to demonstrate at the end of the year. That isn't the test of a good education. The test of a good education is what the students demonstrate over the course of their whole lifetimes. A truly accurate test of a teacher's quality can't happen until long after he/she has quit teaching and is likely dead.

I have several lectures I can give at the drop of a hat and use only a word or two to describe in my notes. Two cards with a word each does for several lectures. Teachers who've taught a subject for years might need only one word to remind them of the lecture of the day and, thus, be a perfectly valid class outline. For me and perhaps those teachers, a multi-line, let alone multi-page, outline would be more confusing than helpful.

The obvious, sensible, tried-and-true method of educating pupils and students well is to provide a wide variety of subjects, from rigorously academic to useful trade to the esoteric and artistic, taught in a variety of styles and methods, in small classes, in secure schools without distractions and have the students live in stable, economically secure households. Doing that would require considerably more money than we want to spend and demand a restructuring of our economy to provide the stable and economically secure homes. I don't see us willing to do that for our children, particularly while we are saddling them with massive public debt. We would also do well to make the school day from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and the school year eleven months long, but again, that would require real money and effort.

Lastly, the canard about the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher was once again repeated. Any principal who can't successfully go through the steps to fire a truly bad teacher should themselves be fired. It is neither that onerous, nor particularly lengthy. It happens every year in most school districts in the land. I've seen several fired over the years, more often for teaching in a way that annoyed the principal than actual bad teaching, but fired nonetheless. Firing does involve more than at private industry, but that protection is well-founded and ever more necessary. Often, the teachers principals want to fire the most are the ones the school and the students need most for those teachers are the one asking questions instead merely following orders, the ones trying new ways and ideas, instead of trodden the well-travelled path.

We can fiddle with details, but until the military is holding bake sales to buy needed battle ships and schools are funded enough that underpaid teachers aren't buying pencils and paper, we aren't really committed.

I couldn't agree more. I think that you managed to express much more clearly some ideas that I have been struggling to verbalize ever since I read this article. All I could do was come up with a list of questions like how exactly do you measure what is a good or bad teachers? And how do you measure success in school? And is 'success in school' automatically a positive thing?

I agree that while some teachers are good for some students, there are too many nasty, sarcastic teachers today. year after year parents flood the principal with letters requesting that their child not be placed with a certain teacher. that should be a bright red flag that there is a problem.

Unfortunately, many principals are trying to keep their own jobs and so the students are last on the list of priorities.

The obvious, sensible, tried-and-true method of educating pupils and students well is to provide a wide variety of subjects, from rigorously academic to useful trade to the esoteric and artistic, taught in a variety of styles and methods, in small classes, in secure schools without distractions and have the students live in stable, economically secure households.

Nice bit at the end there. "Have" the students live in stable, economically secure households. How, precisely, is any government at any level going to do that? Do we have a tried-and-true method for "having" a household be stable and secure?

(Note: giving a household money or a sinecure government job is a tried-and-true way of making it unstable and insecure. So, no, pouring great wads of cash over the local population (somehow) won't do it).

There are all sorts of things we can do and policies we can put into place that support stable and secure households, aside from simply giving them money (which can be done in ways that also supports households, such as the child tax credit and the mortgage tax deduction, but of which are direct cash benefits to a household and make them more stable and secure). The first and foremost of which would be to encourage, rather than discourage, union formation. Households with a union member are shown to be more stable, with fewer domestic violence calls, fewer days of hunger, and staying in one place longer. We could also increase taxation at the higher end of the income spectrum while lowering sales tax. We could eliminate at will employment provisions. We could mandate severance pay. National health care would greatly help.

There are also sorts of things we could do that would support families that we don't do. To pretend the only possible solution is direct cash payments is a straw-man argument.

As a former public school student myself, let me tell you that there's nothing idiotic about the notion. There were some teachers who were truly inspirational; many who were clearly good teachers whether or not you liked their teaching style; some who clearly knew their material but didn't quite know how to best teach it; some who didn't know their material at all; and others who may have been good at teaching, and may have been knowledgeable, but I'll never know because they didn't try teaching at all. You seem to be confounding preference with competence .

Your conceit is that you believe students (except yourself, I imagine) and administrators are too stupid to separate the two, when in fact I find the majority are not. In high school, we had a biology teacher who was a strict disciplinarian who pushed hard, overloaded us with work, and was almost universally despised--yet not one of us didn't come out feeling that we learned the material far better than other students, even though not all of us would want to go through it again.

Your nutrition analogy is more appropriate than you realize. A balanced diet means a mix of all your nutritional needs--not eating the fatal all-carrot diet you describe, but having a good mix that meets all your dietary requirements. But, to use your own phrasing, it's idiotic to assume all foods are created equal, and that all teachers are foods. Students need proteins, they need carbohydrates, and they need vitamins. A healthy diet pretty much requires vegetables, grains, and some sort of meat, dairy, or beans. It does not require a hamburger once a year. And a teacher like a greasy hamburger--one that students enjoy, but basically offers empty calories, a heart attack waiting to happen, and almost as an after thought, a little bit of real nutrition--is not one you want teaching all year, any more than you'd want your kids eating hamburgers all year. And let's not forget the truth, which you've somehow been spared for fifty years, but which almost any student who's gone to an average or below average public school quickly learns: some teachers don't even meet the bare minimum as "food." Some are shredded newspapers mixed with sawdust, put into the flour as filler, and some are just lead paint chips.

The two teachers you describe might have reflected different student preferences, but they at least taught. I've had teachers who put on Jerry Springer, and have us read to ourselves from the book year--assigning homework was rare, grading it and giving it back to us rarer. I've had teachers who used their political leanings in class to inspire those who agreed with them, and to spur those who didn't into working extra hard to argue against her intelligently, but how does making obvious racial comments qualify as a "special style of teaching?" YOU might think that the teacher who makes it clear to his students that he doesn't expect the 'ghetto' blacks, Asians, and Hispanics to succeed, so he won't waste his time teaching them (had two in my HS) is simply "a cucumber" that wasn't "to my preference," but personally, I think he was an asbestos sandwich that I don't think any student should be forced to swallow. (I suppose you'll argue that to the white students and the minorities from one of the few more affluent neighborhoods, he WAS a good teacher, but as one of them let me tell you, I disagree.)

To characterize all teachers by the actions of their worst colleagues is unfair, and to accept politically motivated firings is even more so, but to deny such unambiguously bad teachers exist is idiotic, and to keep them in schools for the sake of maintaining this illusion is tauntamount to sacrificing our children's futures to make a point.

I find it most interesting that you managed to slip in the political point about encouraging unions. The statistic regarding households with union members is interesting, but I wonder, where does it come from, and how does it compare union and non-union? (i.e., does it compare jobs at a comparative pay scale, do professional organizations, such as the Society of Engineering Professionals (or equivalent) or the state bar? Also, it makes an explicit assumption that being in a union causes more stable households, when in fact you've only proven correlation (if that).

Also, while I realize that often, different students and administrators 'like' different teaching styles, dwelling on the point completely ignores the fact that often times bad teachers get into the system, and while it might be hard to right a rigid set of criteria defining a "bad teacher," identifying them and getting them out. If you're concerned this gives too much power to the judgment of one person, then give ultimate power to multiple administrators, or to a committee, one that may only include a representative of the teaching union if they don't have veto power on firings. Or institute a tiered system, where bad teachers get a second or a third chance in a new situation--a "good teacher" with an unorthodox teaching style may not have found his or her niche at first, but should be able to after a move or two.

By the way, if you're asking yourself "whether 'success in schools' is a good thing," you're probably part of the problem. The primary job of public schooling is to teach "book smarts" and maybe instill a love of learning in general; social conditioning, emotional development, education in 'common sense' are all great side effects of a good education, but that education is still the main point, and questioning it seems like a convenient way to defend an incompetant teacher.

Just take one of your old liberal canards there: that the mortgage tax deduction is a benefit to families that makes them more secure. In fact, we know now that it was a means of enriching bankers by encouraging people to buy homes they couldn't afford. Now, the whole American economy is in dire risk of serious depression because homeowners were encouraged - above all by this deduction - to be irresponsible.

The fact is, there is no way to "give" children stable families or "make" households be prosperous. Period. Any attempt to do so makes things worse - that's the lesson of history that liberals will never learn.

A public school will succeed for the majority of its students if it has two things. (1) It definitely needs teacher-leaders. In my 30 years in the classroom I never knew a teacher who didn't show up for work. They all tried. The best were those who worked with others to succeed. There are lots and lots of these teachers. (2) A successful school will have a majority of its students from families earning a living wage.

This second requirement leaves out the school districts in inner cities, and the rural poor. These schools are invariably grist for the mills of all those out there campaigning against public education in the U.S., and teachers' unions. The majority of public school students, and teachers, with their unions, are not in these schools.

The surest path to success for students is to give their parents decent jobs. Every teacher knows that, and every knowledgeable critic.