David Strom, The Daily Record Newswire
There is something really screwy when kids have to sue their schools to get a decent education.
Last Tuesday a California Superior Court struck down five laws that nearly made it impossible to fire bad teachers for poor performance. The reasoning of the court was simple: California demonstrably employs a lot of poor-performing teachers, and the consequences of that poor performance are hurting students. The legal barriers to replacing those teachers had a particularly harmful impact on poor and minority students, creating a civil rights nightmare.
The judge in the case compared the decision to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that struck down “separate but equal” school accommodations. After examining the evidence and considering the arguments, it was clear that the school system was no longer being run for the benefit of the students, but rather for the entrenched interests who make their living off of it.
It had to stop, and the judge stopped it. At least, if the decision survives appeals — which will be led by the teachers unions.
The statutes that were struck down 1) defined teacher tenure; 2) made firing teachers for cause difficult and expensive; and 3) required hiring decisions to be based solely upon seniority instead of quality. The case was Vergara v. California.
Let me be clear on one thing: The establishment of free public schools is one of the most important factors in the rise of America and its becoming the economic powerhouse that it is today. Americans are among the most productive people in the world, with some of the highest standards of living, largely because we have a culture that believes deeply in the value of education, and we act on that belief.
Good public schools made America what it is today, and without a well-run education system, America tomorrow will be worse than it should and could be.
But the public education system has evolved into the General Motors of the public sector. It is big, lumbering, weighed down by work rules that undermine productivity and excellence, and is essentially run by and for unions that are only tangentially interested in turning out a quality product. We talk about reform, we pass laws that feint at reform, but never actually DO reform the system in any meaningful way.
Teachers as a class are like everybody else: There are exceptional ones, average ones and bad ones. If you create a system that treats them all the same, and makes weeding out the bad ones nearly impossible, you will eventually get what you got at General Motors: a sick and eventually bankrupt organization that needs to start over.
GM’s workers weren’t bad people, and its management (on the whole) wasn’t stupid or incompetent. In fact, by all accounts GM’s engineers were among the best and most innovative in the world. But the constraints and incentives within the corporation created an environment in which failure was inevitable and poor performance became a norm. Who didn’t see bankruptcy coming at some point?
Teachers unions have done a masterful job of tapping into the warmth people feel toward good teachers, and the desire people have for a good education for their kids. By associating these feelings with themselves, the unions have acquired enormous political clout.
But a teachers union is not a teacher, and a below-average teacher is a menace. The unions exert enormous pressure to put job security and equal pay for unequal results above giving students the excellent education that they need.
If doctors had a union that protected the job security of bad doctors, there would be outrage. Yet we take it as a matter of course that a teacher should get lifetime tenure unless they commit gross offenses.
Teachers have an enormous influence on the future of our children. Rather than celebrating and protecting all teachers as if they were Mother Teresa, we should identify and promote the best of them, and weed out the worst — just like we do with all professionals.
Teachers are professionals with one of the most important jobs in society, yet school districts are restricted from treating them as the professionals they are and demanding the excellent results that we all know are important and necessary for our children to succeed — and for our society to survive.
Simply put, we can’t afford to run our public schools as GM did its factories. Working to rule, strikes, lifetime employment, and seniority-based employment have no place in mission-critical places like public schools. No amount of portraying unions as advocates “for the children” can make it true.
Schools across the country are failing the most vulnerable children today.
We can’t afford to keep on blaming minority students for their poor graduation rates — and that is precisely what today’s public schools are doing. We pour enormous amounts of money into the public school system, yet only 56 percent of black students and 58 percent of Hispanics graduate high school, compared to 85 percent of whites.
That is a travesty — and the teachers unions throw roadblocks in the way of just about every reform.
Other states should take a lesson from the findings of that California Superior Court ruling and reconsider their approach to dealing with underperforming teachers. Is it really too much to demand that students, not adults, be made the principal beneficiaries of our school system?
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David Strom is principal at Think Write Do, a public affairs consulting firm. He is also a senior policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment.
