Toward Better Teachers Because of union contracts and tenure protections in place when he began the job, it was “virtually impossible to remove a teacher charged with incompetence,” he writes. Firing a teacher “took an average of almost two and a half years and cost the city over $300,000.” And the city, like the rest of the country, wasn’t (and still isn’t) managing to lure enough of the best and brightest college graduates into classrooms. “In the 1990s, college graduates who became elementary-school teachers in America averaged below 1,000 points, out of a total of 1,600, on the math and verbal Scholastic Aptitude ... Continue reading... http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/frank-bruni-toward-better-teachers.html
