"TNTP today released a report based, in part, on a survey of teachers in Cincinnati. And I have two shocking bits of information to share with you about the report:
1.) One of the questions asked of teachers was the following:
“Are there continuing contract teachers in your school who you think should be terminated for poor instructional performance, but have not been?”"
Having interacted with dozens, if not hundreds, of urban teachers over the past 5+ years I'm not sure if I can think of a single one that would say there's not a single teacher in their school who shouldn't be fired. I think teacher quality was far from the biggest problem at my school, but I would've responded "yes" to that question in a heartbeat -- there were clearly some teachers without whom the school might have done better. And I would think the vast majority of lawyers, nurses, social workers, accountants, etc. would say the same thing about their organizations -- there are some people that deserve to be fired. So I expected that the number of teachers who said "yes" would be somewhere around 90%. Maybe closer to 2/3 because of social desirability concerns. So I was surprised when I saw the actual number . . . 34%.
The number is almost laughably low. I find it almost completely implausible. I can think of three explanations:
1.) Cincinnati has an awful lot of schools without many remarkably bad teachers
2.) Teachers don't like saying bad things about each other