I just caught a bit of the President's "virtual town hall" on TV, and it happened to be his answer to an education question. ????He provided a solid and sympathetic description of charter schools and noted that many are accomplishing great things. ????He also said that some aren't doing so well and that they should be closed. ????But he added an interesting aside: low-performing traditional public schools should be closed too. ????I like that.
On teacher pay, rather than defending the merits of performance-based compensation systems, he explained why teachers shouldn't be evaluated based solely on a single "high stakes" test at the end of the year (and added a quick swipe at NCLB for evaluating schools that way). ????He wants to work with teachers to develop alternative ways to evaluate performance. ????He said that he talked to Bill Gates yesterday about ways technology can be used to help teachers learn effective methods. ????Sounds like what these folks are up to .
Finally, on the subject of removing low-performing teachers, the president tried to get a teacher in the audience to admit that during her 15-year teaching career, there were at least a couple teachers that she had known in whose classrooms she wouldn't have placed her own children. ????The audience member demurred, but he made his point. ????As he put it, some people aren't made for carpentry or nursing, and some aren't made for teaching.
Overall, nothing groundbreaking, but his views are becoming clearer: He really understands and likes charters, he thinks performance pay systems need to be based substantially on non-assessment-derived data, and he thinks getting rid of low-performing teachers is commonsense. ????And of course, for each of these, the devil's in the detail.