Just how many ineffective teachers are out there?
How many New York City public schoolteachers are so incompetent that they should be fired? That’s the 250-million-dollar question that must be addressed by both sides wrangling over what kind of teacher-evaluation system the city is going to build. For months now, despite a state mandate to build such a system, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s Department of Education have been locked in a stalemate with the United Federation of Teachers over the terms of a teacher-evaluation process that, by law, must be agreed to via local collective bargaining. The parties have already missed a Jan. 17 deadline set by the governor, sacrificing a 4 percent increase in state aid for education to the city. But the governor and other state officials should have known that punishing the city and its children by withholding this aid—and future funds as well—would be both bad public policy and an ineffective strategy to force an agreement. This dispute is about principles that each side believes to be far more important than the money at stake, and at the heart of the disagreement is just how many teachers we’re talking about calling incompetent—and therefore unsuited to educating our kids. The