An excellent interview with Bill Gates and the head of the American Federation of Teachers

From Newsweek. The whole interview is worth your time, but here's a preview

What about this notion of giving tenure to teachers? That seems ridiculous.

Weingarten: Well, tenure is a proxy for fairness and a proxy to ensure that teachers are not treated arbitrarily and capriciously. But it shouldn’t be lifetime job security, and I think that when you start thinking about how to have good evaluation systems that actually align with the due-process system, then you have the best of both worlds. We do not have an epidemic of bad teachers. But we don’t support our teachers the way countries that outcompete us do. These other countries spend a lot of time figuring out how to prepare and how to support teachers and how to align teachers’ work with what kids ought to do.

Gates: No, we spend more on professional development than they do. We spend more on salaries than they do. We spend more on pensions than they do. We spend more on retirement health benefits than they do. But we have less evaluation than they do. In many districts you have to give advance notice before anybody can come into your classroom. That’s part of the contract. So there are some real differences in terms of the personnel system in these other countries.