I'm back after a week's vacation (yes, I believe in extra-curricular activities in my own life too) and see that Flypaper has been buzzing along. But I also notice that we failed to mention Jonathan Alter's hard-hitting Newsweek column taking the teachers unions to task for blocking meaningful school reform. Atler writes:
Teaching is arguably the only profession in the country with ironclad job security and a well-honed hostility to measuring results. Because of union resistance, NCLB measures only schools, not individual teachers. The result is that school districts fire on average only one teacher a year for poor performance. Before recent reforms (which have boosted test scores), New York City dismissed only 10 of 55,000 teachers annually. What business could survive that way?
Hear hear, though teachers are right that today's tests are hardly the best instruments for measuring their performance. But we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good; if we harnessed the resources we currently spend on our fifty-state system of tests for one common system, we could afford to measure subjects beyond reading and math, online, in a way that encouraged intellectually-challenging schoolwork rather than test prep. Then the rest of Alter's suggestions would make sense:
Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure. And the next time he addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance--or face extinction.
Good ideas all--and they would make sense for a McCain Administration, too.
