Dawn Editorial Shorthand Passage from Article "The worst of Worlds" dated 08.01.2021 Part-II PDF with Dictation @ 95 WPM
The worst of worlds
BY FA I S A L B A R I 2021-01-08
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If the objective is to have good teachers in our public system, yet we cannot select people who have a higher probability of becoming good teachers based on more nuanced evaluations than just their academic performance, then the only other way we can impact the average quality of the teacher pool is by weeding out bad teachers.
We allow people to enter the teaching profession through the `objective` set-up so that there is confidence that their recruitment is `merit-based`, but know that this allows no effective selection for good teachers. Then, as their performance becomes clear with time, we try to train those who are not performing well, but if their teaching does not improve over a certain period and up to a certain minimum level, we fire them. That is the only way the pool of teachers can, over time, improve the average quality of teaching.
Again, the literature shows that teachers tend to improve their teaching over the first three years of their career and then they tend to plateau. Three years seems like a long enough period for teachers to come up to a certain minimum standard of teaching quality. If they do not, they get fired. Some provinces do have a `probational` period of three years before teachers are made permanent.
But the probation period is not used to ensure that teachers improve their quality of teaching. At the end of the three years,if a teacher does not have any major disciplinary issues against them, they are confirmed. The quality of teaching and/or improvements in quality are not variables that are looked at when confirming teachers.
This implies that we cannot `select` good teachers and we cannot weed out the weakest ones. How, then, is the teaching pool to improve in quality? We recruit 100 teachers on the basis of their academic performance. We do not know how many amongst these 100 are going to be good teachers. Even witha long enough probation period long enough to give us a good idea of how good a teacher a person can/will be we do not use it to either incentivise teachers to learn or to weed out the weaker ones.
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