Ed. Headlines from Chicago Discography: Look Away

How do you plan to define charter schools, and how do you plan to define effective teachers?, Bonnie Breeze, 15-year veteran English teacher at Overbrook (public) High School in Philadelpia, PA asked President Obama in Thursday's online town hall meeting. (Her question begins at the 60:00 minute mark in the video.)

Toward the end of his response to the latter, Obama noted that, if we've done everything to improve teacher pay, training, and development, and there are still teachers that don't belong in the classroom; it can't be impossible to remove "bad" teachers from the profession.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend NCTQ's "Help or Hindrance: The Impact of Teacher Rules, Roles, and Rights on Teacher Quality." When asked whether teacher rules, roles, and rights helped or hindered teacher quality, DCPS Chancellor Rhee responded:

"It's incorrect to demonize teacher unions for why districts struggle. Unions don't impose contracts--two parties have to sign off on those. The leadership of the district bears as much burden for contract provisions as anyone else. We need to move toward knowing collective outcomes that we want, and then decide what practices will lead us to that. Obama and Duncan have a different understanding of challenges of urban education and the support and resources needed to take on those challenges."

Rhee's response, and recent literature (notably, Dana Goldstein's "The Education Wars" in The American Prospect in which AFT prez Weingarten said, "There's a difference between shaking up and demonizing.") seem to take a sort of everyone--unions and so-called reformers--coming to the table for the good of improving education stance.

And yet, Bonnie Breeze looks away when Obama talks about ejecting "bad" teachers. Is more flexibility to fire "bad" teachers a difficult reality whose time has come? Who/what determines whether a teacher is ineffective?