As a teacher, I have a few questions:

If schools should always fire the bottom quartile of teachers, what happens when they reach the point of having a whole building of successful teachers (by whatever measures you use)? Do they fire the bottom 25% anyway and replace them with new hires? If not, then the policy will need to draw a line somewhere, sooner or later.

Will the policy give brand new teachers any chance to get in and learn, or will they be fired every year because lack of experience is sure to result in some mistakes and a lower success rate, even among the best prospects? I wasn't the most effective teacher my first year--I had no curriculum, two classes I had never taught before, no mentor, and no equipment. I did my best, but I know I could have done better if I'd had the experience that I have now,

If a teacher who has consistently performed well has a bad year (say, is out because of cancer for most of a year, as one of my colleagues was), is that cause for firing? Her students probably wouldn't measure up as well as others, since they had a procession of substitutes instead of an excellent veteran teacher.

I mostly teach students who are are lower-achivers, in part because I am very good with them. One of my colleagues teaches AP and advanced classes. My students probably make more measurable progress in a year, since hers are already at the top of the scale and you can't show improvement in a subject that isn't tested by the standardized tests. Does that mean she should be fired?

I am in favor of trying to weed out ineffective teachers and in rewarding teachers when their students make progress, but these policies must be examined closely and the consequences considered, lest you end up firing good people for bad policy reasons. Once you see people as something to be measured, it is rare that any of them will measure up for long.

i agree with you, and i wonder where all these replacement teachers are going to come from(from where they will come...god forbid a teacher make a grammar mistake on one of these posts). one of the challenges facing any school district is that when the bell rings there has to be someone, anyone behind the desk...a classroom is not a cubicle and cannot be left unsupervised, even by a crappy teacher.

so saying,"fire the losers" is certainly appeals to our desire to elevate the quality of education, but the logistics of it are a bit more complicated.

Jack Welch was the very successful and very well know CEO of General Electric for 20 years. He was famous (some may some infamous) for his 80/20 rule: The top 20% of employees got promoted, the bottom 20% lost their position (fired, layoff, or demotion) and the other 60% kept their current position. I agree with the previous posts that this probably wouldn't work for teaching, but I thought it was an interesting true story to share.

I am not a teacher, but this issue is of great interest to me. Please understand my perspective is coming from the private industry and there may not be things I understand about the teaching profession. So that said:

1) How do we *not* fire the good teachers because they might not be as good as experienced teachers their first year? At my place of employment that is a well understood concept, and new people with no experience are not expected to be at the same level as the person with several more years experience. It would be up to a manager to make that call of "based on this person's performance, are they a good investment for the future of this enterprise?" More often than not, the new person makes outstanding errors - we all do, but I have found that a decent to good manager will ask how the person dealt with their mistakes, a telltale sign of whether or not an employee will be solid in the future.

It has also been my experience that in that first year, employees who are good seem to stress out the most about their first review. Once they've been through it and passed, they 'get it' - they realize that they aren't the 'bottom 20%' that people keep talking about, and from my own experience there it feels pretty good :) Bottom line: having an annual performance review aint' so bad. If it *is* bad, then you really don't belong there. (Yes, there's always going to be politics and such in individual cases where a great teacher might get screwed, happens all the time in the private sector. That's a human failing, not a system failure IMO).

2) Where will all these new teachers come from? Is the thinking here is that more people who otherwise would be considering higher paying jobs in the private sector might start considering teaching as a career? I know I would have. From my POV, there appear to be two inputs to any child's success (Teachers and Parents) and there is little that can be done about Parents. We should stop paying lip service to this concept, and stack the deck in our favor and compesate teachers in a manner that truly reflects their value to society.

I am interested in your thoughts, and again, since I am not a teacher, there are things I am missing here and am perfectly willing to listen to what those might be.

i can only speak from my own experience, but my yearly evaluations are usually just rubber stamped...which was fine with me, because i don't usually have any problems with management and discipline and so forth, and i suspect that since i am a good teacher, administrators choose to spend there time elsewhere. if i want feedback, i usually seek the help of fellow teachers. and as far as my content area goes, i am a language teacher, and my supervising administrator has no knowledge at all of the language i teach...so, there is little we have to talk about there. it does seem a bit odd though, all this talk of holding teachers accountable, and i could be sacrificing goats in my class, and no one would know. in my administrator's defense, he has to spend an awful lot of time on discipline, and i don't think he has much time left over to do much of anything, much less go evaluate an experienced teacher with no real issues.

dangbuddy, in answer to your 'where will all the new teachers come from?" I have to ask, 'Where will the money come from?" School boards don't like to pay teachers' salaries as it now stands, let alone higher ones.