The parents expected their children to be disciplined in school when and if the child misbehaved, and if the parent found out, the kid got it again at home...
Oh, yeah, I recall the old "two-fer." Whatever meted out at school was peanuts compared to what I could expect at home.
That dual-policy withered away after my folks started sending me to gov't schools. They figured out what I lived: that half of my teachers rated mediocre to competent, a quarter were incompetent, and a quarter were mentally unstable who had no business being near kids.
That only works if you can ensure completely random assignment of students to classrooms, and average it over many years. In the real world this isn't possible. In the real world, parents request teachers they like, or whom their friends like. It's common for a teacher to seem to get lots of kids from the same neighborhood (or, "side of town") year after year, just because of parent requests. When they are not bending to parent pressure, administrators are putting the tough case children in with the more experienced teachers. High-performing kids go to the less-experienced teachers. I think this a wise approach for obvious reasons, and it is probably the most beneficial to the children in the long run. If you are going to fairly asses the teachers based on the performance of their students, this practice will have to go away. You'll need to enforce some kind of random assignment system, which can not be altered. You would need to pass laws defining the punishments for tampering with class lists. And for what? Remember you started down this road for the children. Now we have more tough kids with new teachers, and more easy kids with veteran teachers. Is that the idea situation for the kids? make the kids suffer but at east we have established a pecking order for the teachers, right? I would not be surprised to see that order roughly following "years of experience", which just happens to be the same metric which currently defines job security and pay rate.
So the reward for extra effort on the part of a student is a lower quality teacher? Uh, uh, bad idea. We have few enough programs for gifted students as it is, and effectively punishing them for achievement is not only wrong, but wrong-headed.
Yeah, that idea of CNYC's is the Wrong Answer
TM. Along the lines of "group work," but worse.
It is the smartest kids that will grow up make any improvements or achievements worth more than a thimbleful of spit. If my tax dollars are being extorted to pay for gov't education, I want the best & brightest to have the best instructors, thanks.
Also, am I the only one who doesn't really give a rat's *expletive deleted*ss if we find a wonderfully valid, fair, & duplicable-across-schools teacher evaluation system for the gov't schools? I have this wacky notion that gov't education ought to be focused on educating the kids.
Slicing teacher evaluations that fine is an utter waste of time and (more importantly), my tax dollars. Any teacher who is anywhere in the
vicinity of mediocre ought to fear for their jobs. There are plenty of other mediocrities being extruded out of college Ed Depts every year. Heck, initiate a Jack Welchian "automatically fire the bottom 10% every year on GP.
