Bryan Hassell: It's just as important to leverage great teachers as it is to remove the bad ones

Kill tenure. End due process. Fight the unions.

A panel of legislators and education leaders at the 2011 National Summit on Education Reform advised tough love for making school change.

But education policy analyst Bryan Hassell said that it’s not enough to just make it harder for bad teachers to continue in the profession.

“There are 3.2 million teachers in the country,” Hassell said. “There is no profession where we fill up the entire profession with excellent employees.”

So for those who wish to reform education, it’s just as important — and maybe more important — to identify ways to find ways to identify and efficiently use great educators.

In a K-6 setting, for instance: “if you’re a great math teacher, why not spend all of your time teaching math?” Hassell asked.  

He further suggested that education leaders look to leverage technology to bring great teachers into more classrooms. “There are many schools in the county that will probably never have a great physics teacher,” he said. “Technology allows great teachers to reach across those divides.”

It will take years of political battle to reach results that reformers believe will make it easier to discharge bad teachers, Hassell said.

By contrast, initiatives to identify and re-position highly effective educators can begin immediately. Hassel said, “we ought to be thinking right now: Who can we be identifying excellent teachers and then leveraging their time?”