Life in "Progress" City

From the great city of Cincinnati, who hasn't had a republican run the city since Bach was kicking out cool music (and not that Skid Row clown)......

Just one of 37 failing Cincinnati Public Schools in 2008 fired a tenured teacher for poor performance that year, according to a report out Monday.

In the past five years, CPS has fired only seven probationary teachers and two tenured teachers for performance reasons.

Those are two of the most striking highlights of a report published Monday by the New Teacher Project, a New York-based nonprofit that studies the profession.

"The Widget Effect" examined teacher evaluation processes in 12 school systems across Ohio, Arkansas, Illinois and Colorado, and panned all of them - saying the highly educated professionals are too often treated as interchangeable parts.

Most simply don't have evaluations that accurately assess teachers' work or help them improve, said Tim Daly, the group's president.

In all 12 districts, including Cincinnati, a majority of teachers received the highest rating possible in their last review.

"The primary use of evaluations in most districts is to identify incompetence," Daly said. "That means that the job of the evaluator is merely to say, 'Is this teacher so poor that they can't be in front of children?' And if that is not true, then typically there is not much more work done to distinguish levels of effectiveness above incompetence

According to the study, 57 percent of administrators and 43 percent of teachers in Akron, Toledo and Cincinnati schools said they personally know of a tenured teacher who is so inept that they should be fired, but are not.

What's most hilarious is that people who most want to condemn charter schools are more than happy to send those kids back to these schools.

What's so damn "progressive" about crappy public schools?

Article here