The presence of unfit teachers in schools across the nation is an indisputable fact, as is the extreme difficulty in dealing with them. Incompetent teachers not only hamper students’ learning, but also tarnish the image of professional educators. Despite this, schools and education authorities are at their wits’ end trying to get rid of them.
The reason is teachers often shield one another. The main authority charged with handling cases of unfit teachers is a school’s teacher evaluation committee, more than half of whose members are teachers who do not concurrently hold administrative posts.
When the review mechanism allows teachers to act both as player and referee, it is not surprising that the administration is incapable of taking action, while unfit teachers can rest easy.
Under heavy pressure from parents’ groups, the Ministry of Education has finally completed its draft amendments to the Teachers’ Act (教師法). Under the proposal, when a school convenes an evaluation committee to review cases of unfit teachers, teachers who do not hold administrative posts must comprise less than 50 percent of the committee to help ensure impartiality.
This is the first step toward ending the practice of teachers shielding one another. This policy is long overdue, and parents’ groups have described it as “belated justice.”
As a veteran educator, I think the ministry has done a good job, but it still has room for improvement: The ministry should have taken the opportunity and moved a step further by setting clear-cut criteria defining “inability to teach.” Compiling a list of inadequate teaching and negative behaviors, for instance, would have been an even better start.
Since its promulgation in 1995, the Teachers’ Act has been amended 13 times, but none of the changes have addressed the issue of unfit teachers. This time around, the ministry stiffened its resolve, completed the changes and announced that the issue would be the top priority in the current legislative session. Hopefully, the legislature would approve the amendments quickly, allowing schools across the nation to achieve a new milestone in dealing with unfit teachers.
Among the nation’s 250,000 elementary and high-school teachers, only about 10 are fired each year for being deemed unfit to teach, data show. This number is a far cry from estimates by experts that about one-10th of all teachers are unfit to teach.
Once the amendments take effect, unfit teachers would no longer be shielded by colleagues and dismissing them would be much easier. An effective and rigorous mechanism to reward outstanding teachers and eliminate unfit ones would bolster the spirit and image of teachers as professionals.
While the proposed amendments focus on teachers who are “unfit to teach,” “unfit” or “incompetent” is a rather abstract concept, and different people may have different definitions of what it means.
The ministry should come up with a clear-cut definition, and the most ideal way would be to compile a list of what constitutes unsatisfactory teaching performance.
The list can serve as a guide for teachers to work harder and avoid making mistakes, as well as a reference for school administration and teacher evaluation committees to deal with unfit teachers.
The ministry should adopt a proactive approach to promote a more comprehensive policy so that unfit teachers would soon become history, and students would not have to rely on luck, thinking that having a good teacher is a blessing while being taught by incompetent ones is just bad luck.
Having served as educational supervisor, I have witnessed a myriad of unfit teachers. The most outrageous case was a teacher listed as “incompetent” for whom the school had to arrange a mentor to teach him so that he could teach students.
There was also a mathematics teacher who did not even know what a parallelogram is. In another instance, a teacher with bipolar disorder went ballistic and threatened to beat a student to death.
Even if the school administration had the courage to deal with unfit teachers, the teacher evaluation committee often revoked the decision. It is difficult for outsiders to understand this frustration and anger.
I am glad to see the ministry taking the initiative to solve the issue, as it really is belated justice. Teachers should continue the fight and use the amendments to put an end to the disgraceful history of unfit teachers who hurt students, create chaos in schools and tarnish the reputation of education.
Someone who deals with unfit teachers once said that even sending them to work part-time at a gas station would be a mistake.
Addressing the problem with teachers shielding one another, former K-12 Education Administration Division head Chiu Chien-kuo (邱乾國) said that it is just something one hardly can do anything about.
As a veteran education worker, I have always regarded the quality of teachers as the most vital factor in educational reform. Competent teachers bring positive effects to education and benefit both students and parents, while unfit teachers hinder reforms and render all efforts futile. As such, educational reform should always focus on teachers.
It is a joy to see the ministry finally taking the issue seriously and adjusting the composition and number of members on the teacher evaluation committees with determination and resolution. This policy is a concrete measure that should effectively stop teachers from shielding one another.
Hopefully, the ministry would continue the effort by setting up clear-cut criteria to define what constitutes an unfit teacher to help schools take prompt and appropriate action so as to reduce undesirable disputes and controversy.
Tsai Jr-keng is a retired elementary-school principal.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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