Will firing 5-10 percent of teachers make us Finland? is a new post at Valerie Strauss’ blog at The Washington Post. It’s written by Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute.

Here are some excerpts:

In the world of education policy, the following assertion has become ubiquitous: If we just fire the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers, our test scores will be at the level of the highest-performing nations, such as Finland. Michelle Rhee likes to make this claim. So does Bill Gates….

But anyone who says that firing the bottom 5-10 percent of teachers is all we have to do to boost our scores to Finland-like levels is selling magic beans—and not only because of cross-national poverty differences or the inherent limitations of most tests as valid measures of student learning…