Ideas in education
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The contours of this debate are well-known. One side claims that teacher tenure and due process protections render dismissal a practical impossibility; shielding ineffective teachers from removal in all but the most egregious instances. The other argues that the process provides only minimal protection against arbitrary or discriminatory dismissal, but that administrators fail to document poor performance adequately and refuse to provide struggling teachers with sufficient support.
A culture of indifference about the quality of instruction in each classroom dominates.
If districts could systematically identify which teachers perform at the highest level, they could use this information to inform teaching assignments, chronically low-performing teachers languish, and the wide majority of teachers performing at moderate levels do not get the differentiated support and development they need to improve as professionals.
Howeven 47 percent of teachers report not having participated in a single informal conversation with their administrator over the last year about improving aspects of their instructional performance.
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http://www.tntp.org/newsandpress/060109_TNTP.html
"On education, we will expand exchange programs, and increase scholarships, like the one that brought my father to America, while encouraging more Americans to study in Muslim communities. And we will match promising Muslim students with internships in America; invest in on-line learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo.
On economic development, we will create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries. And I will host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world." - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/obama-egypt-speech-video_n_211216.html
