Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes

I hate tenure. Tenure allows teachers to put their feet up on the desk and possibly have a job forever. That's why I got turned on to charter schools. It's a business model. Every employee and every teacher will be monitored by performance.

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?

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

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.

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.

You hire a chief executive, pay him, and hold him accountable after a year or two. The time for so-called honorary jobs is over. What Pakistan squash needs is results, and that can only be achieved by professionals.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in pay for performance.

When I arrived at IBM, there were 'Team' signs all around. I asked, 'How do people get paid?' They told me, 'We pay people based on individual performance.'

We've done a lot of research on the characteristics of our teachers who are the most successful. The most predictive trait is still past demonstrated achievement, and all selection research basically points to that.

We should be firing bad teachers.

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.

I never wanted to get paid by the hour. If I was going to do more work than another guy, I wanted to get paid more.

Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

Sales and production work is amenable to merit pay. Try it with white collar knowledge workers, teachers, government officials, computer programmers and writers and you have a disaster after your first assessments. Merit pay requires performance measurement, and that means ranking staff. The half that come out below average are immediately angry at the system that labels them as below average. The second quartile looks at the first quartile and finds colleagues who to them are little or no better than they, and a few who don’t work as hard. Some of the people who are at the top and get bonuses like the system that is so perspicacious as to reward them. However, most in the top quartile because they don’t agree that the ones who rank higher than they are really any better become negative. So over 75 percent of the workforce is unhappy and thinks the system is invalid or the raters are biased or just arbitrary. Before you ever consider installing merit pay, find an organization like yours that has it and talk to the workers—not the executives—those who have been assessed for their merit.

Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it's no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won't improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that's led parents, students and educators to shout 'Enough!' all across the country.

I believe our schools will actually get better if layoffs are done carefully, such that only the very worst teachers are let go.

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

When it comes to public school education, we have been unwilling to measure our results. We've been unwilling to pay based on performance. We have tenure where, even if you can't teach, you can't get fired. We've been unwilling to invest in new schools.

There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.

We need to do everything we can to ensure every single child has an effective teacher every day, which means we need to identify who are the most highly effective teachers, and we should recognize and reward them for the incredible professionals that they are.

Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for bad reasons.