A good way to spot bad teachers

Re “Readers react to 2 hot topics,” Column, April 1

I retired from public school teaching after 35 years. I found Steve Lopez’s argument that there must be a way to weed out bad teachers to be right on the mark.

In my career, I knew about 140 teachers well enough to determine their effectiveness. Most of them were fine teachers, some excellent. However, a couple dozen or so shortchanged their students. They could not or would not relate to students, and they did the minimal amount of preparation for their classes. I also knew a few teachers who abused their power over students, trying to indoctrinate them, evaluating them arbitrarily or conducting inappropriate relationships with them.

Despite claims to the contrary, there are objective ways to evaluate teacher performance that do not depend on a principal’s cursory visit. One such method uses a longitudinal picture of each student’s progress in reading, math, science, language arts and social science to provide a measure of expected progress for the coming year. This can become one gauge of a teacher’s effect on student learning.

Steve Murray

Huntington Beach