[jmuguy]

More people need to be encouraged to become teachers - full stop.

Its a valid concern that there are some teachers that are not good, and would be weeded out by performance based metrics. However - everyone else at the school knows who the bad teachers are. They're obvious. They're the ones leaving their class unattended. Doing the bare minimum.

These people can't be weeded out right now because there's a shortage of teachers. The need to keep a warm adult body in that room outweighs the need to discipline and then fire teachers that aren't doing their jobs.

As a thought experiment would we also suggest performance based police salaries? Or do we acknowledge that being a cop potentially sucks and that one aspect of making sure we don't only have bad cops is making the job attractive enough that we're not just picking from the bottom of the barrel.

/edit

To be clear - I'm suggesting we encourage more people to become teachers by paying them more and secondarily making them deal with less bullshit.

[jackcosgrove]

I hope you intend to encourage more people to become teachers by incentivizing them with higher pay (however that is distributed within the profession). Moral suasion can only get you so far, and is kinda suspect if you're encouraging people to walk into a bad situation.

[skirge]

Hire mature and experienced people as teachers. It is easy to assess someone mature based on their life achievements. No need to attract greedy ones as greed isn't the most desired competence for people who will work with children.

[lupusreal]

The worst, meanest most bitter teachers I ever had were all old. The younger ones didn't have time to turn sour yet.

[gadders]

>>These people can't be weeded out right now because

I thought one of the causes was unions? qv "rubber rooms" etc.

[jmuguy]

I'm speaking from the experience of being married to a teacher at a very large highschool in a medium sized city here in the US. In all the years of her talking to me about her work I don't think she's ever mentioned her union. Maybe she's just not at the admin level and dealing with it but given the number of vacancies at her school (which is considered one of the best in our city) - I don't even think the union is coming into play. They need staff.

[gadders]

Maybe it's location based.

Looking at other HN stories today, maybe we swap all the Software Developer H1B visas into teaching :-)

[goda90]

Substitute teachers typically aren't part of unions but schools are forced to keep bringing in the ones that don't care at all because there's just not enough.