The Start of the Paper ... EEP

So I actually... just changed my subject, although interested at first in reading development, I recently was taught/watched a very intriguing video that immediately made me passionate about something new, my now subject.  Wanting to be involved in the education system, the public school system is going to be a pretty large part of my future life.  I have experience with it as do most of you, and we all recognize some of the common failing and problems that schools face.  This is what my paper is about:

Question:

 What are the problems facing public schools in America? How can we go about solving these problems?

Thesis:

  Despite once leading the world in academic achievement the United States has now fallen behind in test scores in the subjects of math, reading, and science.  Through the practices such as tenure, tracking systems, and an incredible amount of inequality, public schools are becoming less likely to produce well educated students.

Here is the start mostly focusing purely on tenure :),

Tenure and the Effect on Public Schools

            If a teacher was doing a bad job they would be fired.  Is this a true or false statement?  Under the agreements tenure offers, this statement is false.  Tenure or “strong job protections for teachers” makes it nearly impossible for a school to fire an underperforming teacher. (King and Hechinger 1)  Once receiving tenure, this job security, some teachers, bad teachers, stop teaching in class and this, however, doesn’t stop them from being paid.  How could this happen?  Why don’t people stop this?  This is one of the main problems facing American public schools today.

            In any other job that requires licensing the person practicing can lose his or her license.  Doctors and lawyers are examples of this.  In the documentary, “Waiting for Superman”, they list the statistics for doctors and lawyers losing their license compared to that of teachers for the state of Illinois: “One in 57 doctors loses his medical license and one in 97 lawyers loses his law license, only one in 2,500 teachers loses his credentials, because of union rules.”  Tenure has made it nearly impossible to rid public schools of bad teachers. 

            Solutions have been thought of but unfortunately they don’t result in great benefits for the students or the schools.  In some situations as shown in the film, teachers that are awaiting misconduct hearings in New York City sit in a room for seven hours a day doing nothing except collect salary (in the end costing the state about 65 million dollars a year), in others bad teachers are rotated from school to school in a process called the “dance of the lemons” as schools try to rid themselves of the worst in hopes of gaining a better teacher from another school.  In both situations the problem is not resolved.  Quoting Bill Gates in an interview with Kenneth Whyte,

“We've ended up with a personnel system that essentially does no evaluation. It doesn't identify whether teachers are weak or strong and gives them no incentives for improving their weak points. Nor does the system identify the few teachers that don't belong in the profession because they either don't have the ability or they're just not trying hard enough.” (Gates)

More will be added most likely tomorrow but I think splitting it into shorter sections for now will make it easier for review.  Happy reviewing :)