Len Lipkin

Fire Bad Teachers [Video]

Fire the bad ones! An AP poll found 78 percent of those surveyed believe there should be a better way to get rid of under-performing educators.

Len Lipkin

Make Every School a Charter?

Mary Beth Hertz (a.k.a. mbteach on Twitter) over on the Philly Teacher blog recently posted a very thought provoking article–A New Model for School Reform: Could it Work?. With all the talk of Charters and Renaissance schools lately, it was great to read such a well thought out and well articulated model of school reform. Her idea in a nutshell–do away with catchments and let every...

Len Lipkin

School Success Criteria Vol 2: Teachers

In yesterday’s post, the first of a series outlining what makes a school successful, I started the article by stating that I was unhappy that teachers are disproportionately punished for bad performance in schools. Newsweek’s cover story this week is titled “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers” tells the other side of the story–that teachers should be blamed when blame is due, What...

Len Lipkin

Reactions to the New Philadelphia Teachers Contract

I posted before that I feel positive about the contract from what I had heard at that point but that I was interested to hear what the experts had to say.  Here are some more reactions from local media sources. Valerie Russ, The Daily News, 1/23/2010, Teachers, school district approve contract Dale Mezzacappa, The Notebook, 1/23/2010, AFT president: New contract a breakthrough Ron Whitehorne, The...

Len Lipkin

New Philly Teacher Contract Has Performance Incentives

It is definitely nice to see a contract negotiation that has such a prominent component targeted at improving the system, not just boosting the (admittedly low) salaries and benefits of teachers in the district.