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Is the Teaching Profession Dominated by Bad Teachers? How Would We Know?

by David C. Berliner — March 28, 2018

This is a commentary about research being undertaken at Arizona State University on "bad" teachers.

Public discourse about teachers often centers on the pervasive notion of “bad teachers” who regularly fail their students and,
ultimately, are the cause of failing schools. Concerns about bad teachers in the literature on teacher quality has been
remarkably constant across more than 100 years of public discussion and education reform efforts (Goldstein, 2011; Kumashiro,
2012). The perception about the magnitude of this problem negatively affects the status of the teaching profession, drives
models of teacher preparation and teacher recruitment efforts, and often influences legislative policies. Yet for all the talk
about bad teachers, we have no reliable indicators about how many of these teachers actually exist, nor do we even have
agreement about what characteristics make a “bad teacher.” Having some accurate data and better understanding about these
issues is one way to make more informed decisions at the personal, public, advocacy, and legislative levels. We think that
beginning a serious conversation about how to identify bad teachers (qualitatively and quantitatively) will not only improve the
status of teachers but, perhaps paradoxically, also shine a light on the many good teachers that exist.
 
We should also be clear here that we are not trying to make the case that there are not bad teachers–teachers who do real
physical, social, or psychological damage to children–who should be removed from (or prevented from ever entering) a
classroom. We have no interest in protecting these teachers. Just the opposite: these objectively bad teachers bring down the
reputation of the many, many talented and passionate teachers we know and have worked alongside and seek to prepare
through professional education. It is in the interest of teachers everywhere to identify those who do harm to the profession–
and, more importantly, to the students in their care–and remove them. The challenge is, however, how to move conversations
about teachers from being anecdotally driven to being empirically driven. This is an issue of broad significance and importance
for public education writ large, but remains an area that has remarkably little trustworthy data from which to make policy.
 
Defining bad teachers is often subjective, and different groups have myriad ways of judging teacher quality. Parents may base
their opinions on brief, informal interactions with teachers, or on limited evidence of stylistic choices a teacher might employ
in instruction or in building relationships. Students, on the other hand, have more direct interactions with teachers, but may
lack maturity or an understanding of the overarching goals or learning objectives that influence their teacher’s performance.
Policy makers often base decisions on student achievement measures, though these may be flawed metrics and also ignore
other critical aspects of a teacher’s performance (Amrein-Beardsley, 2012; Berliner, 2014). News media often rely on shocking,
often horrifying anecdotes of bad teacher behavior (haven’t we all seen the mugshot of the arrested slimy teacher?), firing up
the public’s imagination about the number and impact of all those bad teachers (Goldstein, 2014). Our work asks if it is
possible to find enough common ground between all these perspectives to come up with a satisfactory definition of a bad
teacher, one which we think will include a spectrum and combination of behaviors.
 
We want to emphasize that the impacts of public narratives and assumptions about the prevalence of bad teachers are
profound. At times, they lead to legislation and curriculum policies that seek to overcome the effects of bad teachers by
constraining a teacher’s role to that of a content delivery mechanism, effectively ignoring their often deep and practiced
knowledge about how to teach students in general, and some students in particular. Education reform efforts are similarly
founded on dealing with bad teachers, often by getting rid of them for reasons that span political and ideological spectrums.
One New York Times article from 1936 illustrates the prototypical bad teacher narrative, one that sounds eerily familiar nearly
a century later:

There are at least ‘several hundred’ incompetents now in the school system [says the superintendent]. Other
observers think there are several thousands, while still others insist that ‘several’ would be nearer the mark.
Whether these incompetents were unfit to teach at any time, or have been rendered unfit by the passing
years, is a matter of opinion. The question is, why are they allowed to remain? (Quoted in Weisberg, Sexton,
Mulhern, & Keeling, 2009; p. 2)

In this discourse, bad teachers are the key to education reform, if only they could be identified, counted, and removed. Others
argue that the current system already removes most ineffective teachers, and that reform efforts are instead motivated by a
neoliberal ideology hostile to teachers unions and indifferent to segregation and resource inequality (Kumashiro, 2012). From
this perspective, the bad teacher narrative serves to distract from deeper structural issues in American schools. While the
latter is a perspective we authors tend to align with, it is essential to understand just what makes for a bad teacher and to
then estimate how many of them are present in our schools before making the kinds of decisions which affect thousands of
schools and millions of students and their families.
 
It is also important to note that while conversations about bad teachers are common, other professions don’t appear to face
the same public scrutiny so frequently. There are undoubtedly “bad” doctors, dentists, accountants, and bankers, yet these
individuals fail to capture the public imagination or produce the level of policy debates that the profession of teaching does.
Are there no more bad teachers than there are bad dentists or doctors? Is it the very public nature of teaching, where
practitioners interact directly with dozens or hundreds of students daily, and who operate within very visible systems of
accountability and school performance rankings, that drives both assumptions about and discussions of bad teachers? Are other
professions more hidden from widespread public view, thus shielding them from such scrutiny? Or is it that the knowledge base
in other professions is considered more arcane than that of teachers, and so their behavior is less likely to be judged as bad?

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Looking at the rates of bad performers across different professions may reveal other distinctions associated with this issue. It
may also, we propose, reveal that the rate of bad teachers is more similar to the rate of bad practitioners in other professions
than public discourse now suggests.
 
Indeed, it is possible to argue that American educators are, by and large, highly effective. American achievements in numerous
areas, over many decades, suggests that the 90% of students who attend public schools have been getting remarkably good
educations. Let’s not forget that the 20th century has been called the “American Century” because of our leadership in the
world. Were we really “A Nation at Risk” (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) because of bad teachers, bad
curriculum, and bad schools? Or was that all a “manufactured crisis” (Berliner and Biddle, 1996) to point the finger away from
America’s (then) failing auto industry? While it is true that we credit good schools with having good teachers, we also
acknowledge that these are complicated contexts with myriad variables and a wide spectrum of outcomes in a country where
contempt for and criticism of public education is growing.
 
There are other ways of quantifying how American educators help develop our students. For example, American workers, the
vast majority of whom were public school-educated, are among the most productive workers in the world by far. For example,
American workers in 2014 turned out $67.16 in GDP per hour worked. Finnish workers (a nation considered to have one of the
best school systems in the world) turned out only $54.13 of their GDP per hour worked, and South Korea, often a top-scoring
nation on international tests, has workers that produce only $30.19 of their GDP per hour worked (Levin, 2017). We were first
on the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index in both 2014 and 2016 (Autio, Acs, & Szerb, 2015). On the OECD’s 2016
ranking of innovative nations we were ranked number four (OECD, 2016). We were similarly ranked number five in the 2015
Global Creativity Index (Cornell University, INSEAD, & WIPO, 2015). Although we have a public school system that does not
uniformly produce the outcomes we desire, data like these suggest that American schools, with all their warts, are not exactly
failing in their mission.
 
The first step in what we hope is an ongoing conversation is coming up with a definition of a “bad teacher” that could satisfy
parents and politicians, statisticians and students. Bad teachers must be distinguished from ones that, in the eyes of parents,
colleagues, or administrators, might be unpopular because they are engaged in behavior that is not universally assumed to be
positive: they may be thought to test too much (or too little), give too much homework (or too little), spend too much time
with high (or low) achievers, or give too much (or too little) time to special needs students in their classroom. We do not want
to label a teacher as “bad” if they are simply displaying preferences and styles for conducting classroom instruction that are
not popular with some administrators, teachers, or parents, but which nevertheless represent reasonable choices of method.
Reasonable choices about instruction, discipline, homework policy, test preparation, and even ways to celebrate the birthdays
of classmates must be distinguished from unreasonable choices. A bad teacher, then, is one who, for whatever reason, either
cannot teach the intended curriculum (e.g., because of recurring inadequate preparation for their classes, lack of knowledge of
the subject area, problems of classroom control, extensive absences) or is harmful cognitively, physically, or socially to
students or their families (e.g., displays prejudice, punishes excessively, criticizes in demeaning ways, or is uncommunicative
or disrespectful of parents or colleagues).
 
With that definition in place, two important questions are raised. First, can we empirically identify such teachers? Second,
once we do, what is to be done with them? As this is an initial attempt at a comprehensive approach to the issue of bad
teachers, we will focus primarily on the first of these questions before offering a brief idea about the second.
 
One way to identify bad (and good) teachers is through their students’ standardized test scores. This is logical but subject to
many problems, chief among them that standardized test scores are much more sensitive to social class and other demographic
variables than they are to teacher effects, and they are notoriously unreliable year to year. Nevertheless, amidst the noise
surrounding standardized test scores, a signal may still emerge. If, for example, one finds a teacher who, on a measure of
tested growth in achievement, was in the bottom 5% or so every year for three or four years, this may indicate a problem.
Though imperfect, data sets where student achievement growth is judiciously analyzed can help to identify bad teachers and
give us estimates of their frequency within a population.
 
A second way to identify bad teachers is with formal observational systems in which raters are well-trained and allowed to
observe a teacher multiple times. Over a few years, such ratings might yield low enough scores on enough of the variables to
identify a particular teacher as bad. Depending on the observational categories used, the teachers’ ratings in those categories,
the number of observations made, and the number of years such data were collected, these instruments could also provide
estimates of the rate of bad teachers. Informal systems of observation (walk-throughs by principals or department heads, for
example) may also be used to identify bad teachers, but may not be as useful since the standards for observing may not be
reliable enough for use in any legal battle over a teachers’ ability to function professionally.
 
A third way is to survey those with the most at stake in avoiding a bad teacher, namely students and parents. What do they
know about instruction and climate in classrooms? And how might their knowledge or opinions be evaluated? And if they
described what they consider bad teaching, would we agree? Or would we consider it a style or preference issue, not sufficient
grounds for dismissing a teacher (though perhaps useful in designing training for that teacher). When “triangulated” with the
previous data sources, such input from students and parents may reveal that there is indeed a major disconnect between the
presumed rate of bad teachers and the actual occurrence of them.
 
A fourth way to address this issue is to survey the general population in the U.S., perhaps with Gallup, using their methods for
the Annual PDK poll. It would also be informative to get members of state legislatures and members of school boards to weigh
in on this issue. Perhaps, with new technology such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we can get respondents in other countries as
well. A national and international survey of citizen views on this issue has, to our knowledge, never been done. But, like a
survey of parents, it may reveal interesting and illuminating perceptions in the public imagination that are driven by ideological
and/or stylistic beliefs rather than providing researchers with a reasonable metric with which to work on this problem. An
international survey might also highlight particular contours of discourse specific to Americans and our political and media
narratives, in addition to our personal ones.

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With such disparate data sources, we expect we could revise our general definition and that it may prove viable enough to
compare these data sources and arrive at an estimate of the number of bad teachers in our public schools. We also anticipate
that the first two data sources (student growth data and formal observation) would likely show evidence of far fewer explicitly
bad teachers than those derived from the perceptions of respondents in the second two data sources, i.e. in the public
imagination. A next step in such a research agenda would be to examine this disparity (if it does indeed exist) more closely and
to look for ways of understanding why public assumptions about bad teachers are so prevalent. Our research is designed to look
at the many facets of the concept of a bad teacher, and from that analysis estimate their prevalence among the 3.2 million
full-time public school teachers in our nation.
 
After we complete those analyses, we can then return to the second major question raised above: what to do with these bad
teachers? Often the answer to that question is outright dismissal. This is a seemingly reasonable choice; a teacher who
physically or emotionally harms a child should not be in a classroom. But for some of these bad teachers, we wonder if the
behaviors that placed them in the bad teacher category can be remediated? Can professional development (on curriculum and
content areas, classroom management, or culturally responsive pedagogy) increase the effectiveness of these teachers? Or are
they indeed irremediable? Obviously, to answer these important questions we must first come to some robust and acceptable
enough definition of a bad teacher that allows us to identify them and analyze their characteristics. From there, we may be
able to recommend more satisfying answers and solutions for what, exactly, to do with bad teachers in order to promote and
support the many, many good teachers that exist. We hope other researchers will join us in our quest.
 
References

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Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: March 28, 2018
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