Reply #225: I was in high school not long ago...

[mwei924]

..and they never checked up on teachers who had been there 10-15+ years. And many of them were the ones who needed it. On the other hand, I had a brand new French teacher who was practically being interrogated every class by an evaluator. The problem is-- the new French teacher was still 100000x better than my tenured AP Lit teacher who gets to do whatever. She never got fired or lost her AP class, I believe she stayed until retirement, even though no one was getting anything out of her class. The pass rate for her classes were much lower than the other AP Lit teacher, and there were even some great regular English teachers who would've done a better job. She definitely wasn't the only one who wasn't getting disciplined for sucking.

That's the problem with tenure-- they get tenured, and think they don't have to actually teach anymore. If some of the older teachers were being watched as closely as the first year teachers, they'd get their act together.