Firing Teachers: an alternative

I come from a university that started as a "Normal" school for teachers - a one year program to turn high school graduates into public school teachers on the the Canadian prairie.

I started at a large university some miles north where there was a huge Faculty of Education.  What was so painful was to see how very often the least talented went directly from high school into that faculty.

Nothing has ever convinced me that a Pedagogical Training Institute should be other than a graduate facility for those with a degree in a subject which they propose to teach.

In the case of the primary grades, I would relent this far: allow the fourth year of the degree to be spent in that institute for students of demonstrated teaching ability.

I would expect such an institute to have a high failure rate.

Compare the training of air traffic controllers.  When the solution to their training needs - full simulation environments - was demonstrated, their failure rate was reversed.  We lack any such demonstration.

What to do: only hire teachers with degrees followed by pedagogical training.  For every year that the teacher performs well - including the first, as there will be no probation because in my years of experience the first year was sometimes their best - for every year of teaching graded above 85%, one month of pay is earned in reserve to a maximum of 8 months.

Why in reserve?  So that after eight years, something close to the cost of a year at university to prepare to enter another field is available.  We do not want teaching to be a dead-end or perceived as a dead-end or as a carrer from which there can be no exit.

If a teacher has a year with a poor result, that first failed year is in abeyance with regard to the reserve fund: no credit or debit is made.  With each subsequent failed year that fund is depleted by one month.  Three straight years and or a zero-balance, whichever comes first, and termination is automatic.

We also need a mechanism to allow industry to free some staff for a short pedagogical course - in the case of fields such as applied science, this can be essential to providing technical training institutes more access to a larger pool of those in the field with an idea of what is not being taught - which they can often see from the interns they fail to hire in industry.

Surely some such mechanism is preferrable to what we have now:  a poorly paid profession in which some of the more talented exit too soon and some of the less-talented remain far too long.