SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Bad apple teachers

I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “Bad Teacher” (by all reports, you shouldn’t - it’s lousy), but the film’s light-hearted attitude towards a teacher who drinks, uses drugs, cheats, blackmails, steals, and curses at her students is fairly typical in education circles. Some real-life examples include teachers marching in DC to protest the dismissal of ineffective teachers, the attempts to excuse the educators involved in the widespread Atlanta cheating scandal, New York’s rubber room for teachers under a cloud of some sort, and the list goes on. In Ontario, Mike Harris tried to address the problem more than ten years ago by bringing in teacher testing, but this measure was successfully defeated by the Ontario education establishment - and no subsequent government has even acknowledged the problem of incompetent teachers.

Generous teacher salaries and benefits mean that bad teachers are strongly motivated to hang on to their jobs, and teacher tenure rules mean they can.

As the evidence mounts of the importance of good teachers, policies protecting bad teachers are increasingly unacceptable. Every profession has its bad apples, and it’s long past time that they were sorted out and discarded.