Education professors are in step with some current reform initiatives targeted at improving teacher quality, but not others, according to our new survey of teacher educators.? A full 87 percent of ed profs favor making it easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers?even if they are tenured (see below).? The vast majority (79 percent) also favor requiring a minimum of 5 years before tenure is awarded and strengthening the formal teacher evaluation process. But ed profs balk at the idea of linking these reforms to test scores.? While they favor proficiency tests for both teachers and students in general (78 and 61 percent, respectively), they largely disapprove of giving financial incentives to teachers whose students routinely score higher than similar students. So basically ed profs favor? meaningful reform without accountability? Test scores may not be a perfect proxy for performance, but such metrics are unquestionably better than the evaluation systems we have in place now.? Seems these profs want to have their cake and eat it too.
