It seems as if we’ve always been having this fight, but it certainly flared up a little in the last year. Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan made headlines with Republican legislatures and/or governors taking big steps on education and public union reforms.
Union members and allies are screaming at the tops of their lungs that these reforms are just union-busting, political attacks. Reformers say it’s for fiscal health. Both claim they’re on the side of the students.
When sorting this out, it’s important to make a value judgment. What are our goals? For this columnist, and I imagine most people, the goal is a high-quality education for all children in the country.
If we can fire every teacher in American and educate our kids successfully, I’d do it in a second. If we need to buy new books, new desks, or iPads, I’d do that too. If the problem is the length of the school year or school day, we should address that.
In general, whatever makes our kids more successful is what we should do. The problem, however, is that is not what we are doing. We have three broad problems in education: parents, teachers and money.
The biggest problem is at home. Successful students have parents who care about the education of their children and take an interest in it. However, this isn’t a problem government can solve, at least not within the policy process. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll have to leave this issue aside.
Let’s turn to the two issues government has control over, because these are the issues we can fix.
Teachers are a problem in two ways. First, we have some bad teachers in our schools. Yet because of union contracts, it is next to impossible to fire them.
It is mind-blowingly irrational to argue we don’t have terrible educators in our schools, every profession has them, but most professions get to fire them, so they change careers early on in life. That is not the case in education.
We have a terrible system for evaluating teachers and we need a better one so that we can get bad teachers out of the classroom.
We should consider test scores, but we need to put observers in the classrooms. Fellow teachers, administrators, students and outside firms. We all know a bad teacher when we see one, just like we all know a good one.
If we scale ratings 1-100 and say anyone over 50 is safe, anyone 25-50 is on a three-year warning, and anyone under 25 is on a one-year warning, we’ll have a system that is fair to teachers and helpful to the students.
It’s silly to suggest teachers can’t be judged by their peers and supervisors. Everyone else in the world gets judged like that. We need to stop coddling educators just because it’s “kinda tricky” to put a number on it.
The other problem with teachers is their union. It is simply too powerful and self-interested. The goal of the union is to make sure teachers are treated fairly by administrators, but administrators don’t profit from oppressing teachers. So really, the teachers’ union is a counterweight to taxpayers.
Why is this a problem? Teachers deserve to protect themselves and work out a deal that is best for them, right?
Absolutely, but let’s go back to that value judgment. We care about the students, not the teachers. What is best for the teachers is not always best for the students.
I want a system that works for the kids, not the teachers. Obviously, we want happy and talented educators, but they support a system that gets in the way of what’s best for the kids.
They are resistant to change and resistant to serious evaluation, and we can’t do anything about it because they have a strong union.
Finally, funding is a problem. Most importantly, we don’t know what a good education really costs because we budget based on the past and the past hasn’t worked.
We need to let local districts and states find out what a good education costs. Give them five years to try radical ideas and then come back and tell us what education really costs.
Also, we simply don’t have enough money. We need more. We fund education mostly through local property taxes and then assistance from other governments. It’s worse in poorer areas.
Michigan’s current funding scheme, which is about 17 years old, doesn’t really seem to have made things better.
To reform this problem we need to decide what level of government should be responsible. The bigger the better from a funding sense, but the national government is probably too big and too diverse to make it work.
The state seems most rational. Eliminate local property tax funding plans. Generate revenue statewide and divide it equally by population. One district shouldn’t have better schools because the tax system makes them better.
You have to do some kind of statewide revenue sharing or poor communities are never going to get better. It’s in the interest of the entire state to make everyone living there well-educated. If a kid starts in a bad school, he or she doesn’t have a chance and that just isn’t right. This is once place where redistribution is necessary.
Parents, teachers and money are all causing problems in our schools. We can’t fix the parents directly, but we can solve the other problems. Weaker unions and better teachers matched with more funding and smarter spending will make our schools better.
It’s time to put the students first and actually create a system that caters to them and not to teachers. But we also can’t expect to build great schools without paying for them.
Education is expensive, very expensive. But it’s also really worthwhile. We’re going to have to pay more, and teachers are going to have to accept changes for this to work. We can’t get away with subpar schools for much longer.
