Steve Chapman on Why the Chicago Teachers' Strike Illustrates the Need for Choice

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The conventional public-school model often wraps the bad, as well as the good, in a cocoon of tenure and automatic raises. And the crucial thing is not getting outstanding teachers into the classroom but getting bad ones out. Stanford University scholar Eric Hanushek says research indicates that if the worst five to 10 percent of teachers were replaced with merely average ones, "the achievement of U.S. students would rise from below the developed country average to near the top if not at the top." As it turns out, writes Steve Chapman, good enough teachers are good enough.