States struggling to keep top teachers
Friday, January 29, 2010
A new study from the National Council on Teacher Quality paints a grim picture of how states handle everything from pay to discipline for public school teachers. States are using “broken, outdated and inflexible” policies that ultimately hurt how children learn, according to the report.
A few other key findings:
- All but four states allow teachers who are fired multiple appeals of their dismissal, leading to a process that can last years.
- Only five states have adequate preparation for elementary educators on how to teach reading, and only one trains educators to be effective math teachers.
- More than half of the states don’t require special education teachers to take subject-matter courses while in school and don’t test them on how much of the content they know.
- Nearly every state allows tenure to be awarded “virtually automatically,” which protects inadequate teachers and makes it difficult for schools to fire them.
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