[jtbigwoo]

I did a fair amount of volunteering in my kids' school. There is a huuuuge difference between the effective teachers and the teachers that parents like. The school is a public school that uses a lottery to determine admission because 200-250 kids apply for 100 spots each year. Because of this, parent involvement is considerably higher than an ordinary school. You’d expect that this would be the kind of school that would embrace great teachers.

There are a few terrible teachers at the school but they aren't the ones that the parents complain about. As long as a teacher is nice and most kids get good grades, nobody complains. The most hated teachers are the ones who actually try to get kids to behave better and learn more. This is because most parents look at test scores when choosing a school, but they don’t really care about their kid’s score. (It’s easy to rationalize a poor test score--"The test doesn’t measure what’s wonderful about Taylor.") Instead, parents mostly want their kids to be happy and stay out of trouble. A teacher that doesn’t make her students work very hard and doesn’t demand good behavior meets those criteria perfectly.