[rnemo]

I clicked on the link to this article expecting some thoughtful questions on why poor teaching is a contributing factor to poor education overall in America, and how the system is doing much about it, but I feel like I read an entire article that can be summarized as "A lot of teachers are doing good work, sometimes under tough conditions, but plenty of them need firing too. We need a way to figure out the ones that need to be fired, somehow. Possibly involving test scores."

In my opinion, the question we need to be asking is not "how do we find bad apples" but "how do we improve the quality of the apple tree." Good education is hard to come by regardless of what teacher, or indeed, school district you come from. The problem may not be how good is teacher performance, or even how good is student performance, but what is the quality of the teaching goals and design of lessons. Once we've successfully answered that question, then we can focus on the teachers who consistently have "losing seasons."