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Will firing 5-10 percent of teachers make us Finland?
In the world of education policy, the following assertion has become ubiquitous: If we just fire the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers, our test scores will be at the level of the highest-performing nations, such as Finland. Michelle Rhee likes to make this claim. So does Bill Gates.
The source and sole support for this claim is a calculation by economist Eric Hanushek, which he sketches out roughly in a chapter of the edited volume Creating a New Teaching Profession (published by the Urban Institute). The chapter is called “Teacher Deselection” (“deselection” is a polite way of saying “firing”). Hanushek is a respected economist who has been researching education for over 30 years. He is willing to say some of the things that many other market-based reformers also believe, and say privately, but won’t always admit to in public.
So, would systematically firing large proportions of teachers every year based solely on their students’ test scores improve overall scores over time? Of course it would, at least to some degree. When you repeatedly select (or, in this case, deselect) on a measurable variable, even when the measurement is imperfect, you can usually change that outcome overall.
But anyone who says that firing the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers is all we have to do to boost our scores to Finland-like levels is selling magic beans—and not only because of cross-national poverty differences or the inherent limitations of most tests as valid measures of student learning (we’ll put these very real concerns aside for this post).
Before addressing the argument directly, it bears noting that this policy, even if it went down perfectly, would not be a quick fix. The simulation does not entail a one-time layoff. We would have to fire the “bottom” 5-10 percent of teachers permanently. Then, according to the calculation—and if everything went as planned—it would take around 10 years for U.S. test scores to rise to level of the world’s higher-performing nations.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/will-firing-5-10-percent-of-te.html
