Imagine a system where of 500 teachers, 25 that have a track record of doing much worse than average are let go. You then roll the dice to get new teachers.
Could you pay more to attract better teachers in that situation and get better overall value for the kids being taught?
So how do you identify poor teachers? I would guess that if you let each member of the faculty vote for the 25 top teachers and then have parents do assessment of their children's teachers and then average the results over 3 years, you could come up with something that has virtual no false positives as to who the worst teachers were.
Evaluating teacher quality is difficult and impossible to do perfectly. Even a simple effort to evaluate quality would be vastly superior to the current state where quality isn't even a consideration.
I agree with the ensemble of evaluations approach - student tests at the start and end of year show student attainment, student and parent feedback, peer feedback, and administrator feedback. Come up with a weighted average and experiment with it. Retain average and better teachers, reward rockstars, train underperformers, and let the bottom ranks and those who don't improve with training go.
Could you pay more to attract better teachers in that situation and get better overall value for the kids being taught?
So how do you identify poor teachers? I would guess that if you let each member of the faculty vote for the 25 top teachers and then have parents do assessment of their children's teachers and then average the results over 3 years, you could come up with something that has virtual no false positives as to who the worst teachers were.