Teacher Competence Quotes

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

I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities.

Education of youth is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave to Ulysses.

I had, out of my sixty teachers, a scant half dozen who couldn't have been supplanted by phonographs.

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.

There is a great need for a new approach, new methods and new tools in teaching, man's oldest and most reactionary craft. There is great need for a rapid increase in the productivity of learning. There is, above all, great need for methods that will make the teacher effective and multiply his or her efforts and competence. Teaching is, in fact, the only traditional craft in which we have not yet fashioned the tools that make an ordinary person capable of superior performance. In this respect, teaching is far behind medicine, where the tools first became available a century or more ago.

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.

No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson.

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 can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can't relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he'll never be a competent teacher.

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

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.

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

Teachers who do not take their own education seriously, who do not study, who make little effort to keep abreast of events have no moral authority to coordinate the activities of the classroom.

If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired.