I was reading Action Research Paves the Way for Continuous Improvement from Journal of Staff Development, Winter 1998, and they had a slightly controversial recommendation.  They said

Invite teachers to read education literature.  There is some debate among those who advocate action research about the need for teachers to read professional literature as part of the research process.  Sagor (1992) feared teachers would not do action research if they first had to read research.  Our findings, however, suggest that when teachers review the literature on their topic and explain what they have learned from that literature, their inquiry is informed by their reading, and they come to consider themselves part of a broader educational community.
 

So the question I have is, if the research isn't intended for teachers, to such an extent that teachers who want to get involved in performing research would be turned off by having to read it, then who exactly is audience for the research?

Problem teachers

My Intro to Ed professor mentioned the problem of ineffective teachers, and questioned whether we make it too difficult to get rid of bad teachers.  Since there is a variation between states on the amount of unionization in teaching, we can run an experiment on whether unions prevent bad teachers from being removed, thus dragging down the profession.  I believe that there's no correlation between the presence of unions and the presence of bad teachers, although I'm not sure how to find statistics that measure that.  Unions aren't the only impediment to removing teachers, but they do seem to be the one most identified in political discussions of this issue.  I'm pretty sure that there is a correlation between unionization and per-pupil spending.

But perhaps the most interesting approach to this question is through the sociology of the schools.  How would the learning environment change if the low performing teachers were constantly aware that they could lose their jobs?  If we had a system where, say, the bottom 10 percent of teachers were removed, how would the eagles soar when the turkeys weren't around anymore?

About that background...

How is a sunflower a math problem?

Youtube has the answer.

And mo' money ain't one

Hi!  I'm Bruce, and I'm going to be a math teacher.  My foci for this blog will be math and education.  If you need an explanation for the blog title, check out Wikipedia's 47 discourse.