In reading through these recent comments, I wonder why private schools don't have these problems. You never seem to hear about difficulties in assessing teachers at private schools. How is it that something can be so difficult as to inspire national debate in some schools, yet be a non-issue in others?
You're comparing apples and oranges, really.
1) Private school teachers are non-union, so teachers can be fired at will.
2) Private school parents are far more involved, because they are literally and figuratively more heavily invested in their child's education. Parents know their principals and teachers by first name. The feedback stream about teacher performance is extremely active.
One doesn't work without the other. You can't remove teacher protections without having highly-active parents, because otherwise, the only time you get any feedback, it's negative, and you have no idea if an individual complaint is an outlier or an indicator. And you can't be a highly-active parent if you're a two-income family or a single parent working crazy hours to scrape by. In the absence of reliable feedback and reasonable employment protections, principals will make hiring/firing decisions as badly as they typically make other decisions.
