San Francisco the Latest Lake Wobegon for Teachers
Aren't we all?
This excellent article appeared in today’s New York Times. Only 2% of teachers in San Francisco are rated unsatisfactory, and not a single tenured teacher there has been terminated in the last 3 years. And yet only 37% of San Francisco’s fourth grade students are proficient in reading.
Rethinking Evaluations When Almost Every Teacher
Financial productivity next step for schools
Charles Miller sent me the following editorial, published in yesterdays’ Dallas Morning News. It is a provocative and timely, considering the massive budget shortfalls Texas is facing, and some indications that the legislature will neglect its responsibility to pay its share of the costs of K12 public education, leaving either the costs, or cutbacks, on the backs of local districts and local property taxpayers and their children. No matter that happens in Austin this session, however, we need to recognize that our schools, though underfunded, are in fact also financially inefficient in many ways. So there is no time like the present to examine how we do many things in K12 public education, and make changes to improve it. Cutting the things that don’t work will save us from the far worse pain of cutting things that do work. It’s our choice.
