Having been to pretty good, but also pretty inconsistent public schools, I agree that finding some way of identifying the least effective teachers is probably going to be useful, but only in combination with some system for confronting this problem. And this system is going to have to come through agreement between teachers and administrations, otherwise it will either not work or simply drive more people away from teaching as a profession.

As a start, how about -- instead of assuming that bad teachers are simply "bad teachers," and must be ousted -- thinking of teaching as a set of skills, and not a wholistic vocation that people either have or don't have? In that case, it makes sense to identify not just good and bad teachers, but to differentiate skills, and identify better and worse practitioners of those skills. Sure, this is hard to do, and might involve a lot of in-class observation and more subtle evaluations than adding up test scores, but it might also be much more useful.

The suggested apprenticeship program sounds like an ok start, but how do we know that apprenticeships (more than degrees or experience) will make any difference? Shouldn't mentoring, evaluation, and training be something that happens throughout the career, instead of something that happens only at the beginning (when apparently we don't have any good predictive data anyway), and then once later on, when the administration wants to purge out all the "bad" teachers and start over?

I like your point that teaching is a set of many different skills. I only had one truly horrible teacher in high school, but he was also a talented coach who put in as many unpaid extracurricular hours in as he did paid hours. He was an intelligent man, but not an overly academic one. Why he was hired to teach computers and not physical education will forever be beyond me.

I know that here in Canada, there is mandatory career development throughout a teacher's career, but that truly meaningful participation as opposed to paid days out of the classroom is somewhat voluntary. Both my parents took advantage of this early in their careers, and my father was involved in training younger teachers later in his career. My father-in-law wasn't as involved on the academic side, but helped to develop a lot of coaching programs for school sports.

What they have told me is that one of the major factors in the success of these programs is the level of support from the school board. There is a dollar factor involved, but beyond that, the board needed to be as passionate about the programs as those involved, and to go the extra mile to get the best development leaders & teachers. In election cycles where the board was dominated by wanna-be career politicians, development programs that pay off ten years down the road didn't happen. If the board had enough members who believed in the children & teachers, the programs tended to be more successful.

My belief in this area is that if someone promises an easy solution with clear, easy-to-understand results, they're either an simplistic idealogue or more concerned with advancing their career than with the children's future. If someone is passionate about the kids & education and has an open mind, then I will consider voting for them on the next board election.

My last comment is that grades & academic achievement aren't the only concern of the education system. Teachers & schools also teach moral values and social skills, even if they don't appear on the curriculum or standardized tests. Coming up to my 20-year reunion in a few weeks, my friends who were labelled too stupid to go to post-secondary education & told to become plumbers & electricians all managed to put a roof over their heads & look after their families, even those who came from broken homes. Those of us who were streamed into university have had more career shifts and a much higher divorce rate, and most of us earn less than the plumbers & electricians. Which group really learned the most important lessons.?

Even though I went to excellent public junior & senior high schools, I still had a couple of really bad teachers. I should clarify this, they were unqualified the subjects that they taught me. I had a metals/woods teacher that taught me world history, and a baseball coach that taught me geometry. No doubt, there was just a lack of teachers for these subjects at the time, but my classmates and I ultimately paid the price.