Whitney Tilson Quotes

We should be firing bad teachers.

I think higher ed in the U.S. is fairly healthy, and by global standards it dominates, and it makes people more productive. But a lot of our K-12 is a disaster. And the single most important reform would just be to fire the worst ten or 15 percent of teachers in the lot, and we would have massive improvements.

Many of the best teachers I know are being laid off because their unions value seniority over intellect, passion, creativity, and drive.

The unions say 'last hired - first fired,', we say hire and fire based on merit. We want the best and brightest in the classroom.

You wouldn't tolerate an underperforming surgeon in an operating theatre, or a underperforming midwife at your child's birth. Why is it that we tolerate underperforming teachers in the classroom?

We are fortunate to have some of the greatest and best teachers in the world, but we want to make sure that those few that try to sneak through the system are caught in advance.

President Obama and Secretary Duncan have made stronger teacher evaluation a key part of their education reform efforts. Under their signature plan, called 'Race to the Top,' states can win federal support for schools by improving teacher evaluations.

Put together, what we want is a system that supports, protects, and properly pays good teachers and makes it possible in a responsible and fair way to remove teachers judged to be incompetent or abusive - that's it.

We need to identify the least effective or ineffective teachers and for those people we need to either quickly accelerate their practice or move them out of the profession. That's what I believe and quite frankly I have never met anybody at least to my face who said they disagree with that notion.

There are far too many ineffective teachers and, in particular, far too many truly terrible teachers who are harming children and poisoning the system.

It's the way tenure works, together with dismissal protections that tenured teachers have, that no other public employee has, which makes it almost impossible to remove a grossly ineffective and incompetent teacher or, in some cases, even an abusive teacher.

I think the problem with schools is not too many incentives but too few. Because of tenure, teachers' unions, and the fact that teachers generally aren't observed in their classrooms, they can do whatever they want in class.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

We're not trying to be the only route into teaching. We do put enormous energy into understanding what differentiates the most successful teachers.

We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.

I see the root of the education crisis in the primary and secondary schools. Academia is doing a fairly good job. The root of the problem is the teachers. Some are great. But too many of them are not capable of being good role models. They can't control the classes. They lose too much time trying to create a learning environment.

We have seen that, in another unfunded mandate, the so-called No Child Left Behind Act, which created tougher standards, and we all support that, but Congress did not provide the money to attract and hire the best teachers.

…all the teachers henceforth to be employed be provided from some Model School, with a certificate of their competency, that will aid us in a work of great difficulty, to wit, … placing youths under the direction of competent teachers, and of those only.

While I agree completely that attracting good teachers is difficult, and we need to spend more time doing that - in part by paying them more money - I don't think there's any evidence for the idea that somehow tenure attracts good teachers. In fact, I think the evidence is to the contrary.

The key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't.

The quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers.

Now things have changed for the better. Our reforms end seniority and tenure so we can hire and fire based on merit and pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms - and we can keep them there.

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

Teacher compensation isn't the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.

It's critical that states improve how teachers are trained, recruited, evaluated, compensated, advanced, and retained.