"How Not to Lay Off Teachers" in today's Wall Street Journal (link) rather weakly repeats something that everyone who studies the education mess knows. It's worth your time if you have any doubts that seniority is not the right way to determine who should be paid public money to teach in public schools. Of course just because everyone knows something doesn't mean much.
The steep deficits that states now face mean that teacher layoffs this year are unavoidable. Parents understandably want the best teachers spared. Yet in 14 states it is illegal for schools to consider anything other than a teacher's length of service when making layoff decisions.
It gets worse. "Many people don't realize that teachers are not evenly distributed nationwide," says Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project, which has released a new report on the nationwide impact on quality-blind layoffs. "Fourteen states have these rules but about 40% of all teachers work in those states, and they're the states with the biggest budget deficits." In addition to New York, the list includes California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Actually it gets worse than that. Just because there is no law requiring school district executives to use seniority as the only criterion for laying off teachers doesn't mean that there can't be a rule negotiated by union collective bargaining in one or many or all of the school districts. One reason for the stalemate in Wisconsin is that the Wisconsin law strips teachers unions of the right of collective bargaining over such rules in all the state's school districts (as well as doing the same with regard to county and city employees who aren't in education). The unions have convinced the Democrat senators that since the Republicans have the votes to pass this in the state Senate and Assembly, and the governor will sign it, it's important that no state business be done at all, and the entire Democratic caucus in the state senate is camped out in Illinois.
It is now generally known that the key to school efficiency is better teachers, and that schools would often be a very great deal better off firing the worst teachers and dispersing their students among the other teachers in the school. There's a real productivity boost from firing the worst teachers. We will never get that so long as we have tenure and seniority in the public schools. Tenure is particularly silly: it may or may not make sense to have "academic freedom" in publicly supported institutions of higher education in order to encourage enquiry and research; but primary, middle, grade, and high school teachers aren't paid to do research and aren't expected to come up with new ideas. They don't need tenure to do the job they're being paid to do.
What are they being paid to do?
It is time that the American people began to think about the purpose of public education. It is treated as an entitlement, and the arguments are all given about the rights of the students, but that is a strange entitlement: many students would prefer not to be in the school, and truant officers are employed to deliver the kids so they won't miss what they're entitled to. They are going to get education, and with some teachers they get it good and hard. It seems that the teachers are not only entitled to their salaries and benefits, but also entitled to the attendance of students who don't want to be there.
The only rational purpose of a tax paid school system is to produce more productive and better citizens. If it doesn't accomplish that, there is no justification for making everyone pay for it. There is certainly no justification for taxing a person on a $44,000 income to pay salary and benefits including pensions to someone making $50,000 simply because the teacher is entitled to the money. (In California the top state income tax bracket starts at $44,000, and I think no tenured teacher makes less than $50,000. If those numbers don't apply in your state, supply your own, but you get the idea). The most effective way to get better and more productive citizens is to allocate resources in a way that benefits those who can benefit the most: make sure the best and the brightest regardless of their race or social or economic status get the most education. If you have a little more time to spend with a student, put that time into make the bright ones learn more rather than trying to make the dummies just a little less uninformed. Of course that is now what we do: the whole system, and particularly No Child Left Behind, is geared in the opposite direction. You can ameliorate that a bit by assigning the best and the brightest teachers to the best and the brightest students, but you can't if the unions are allowed to negotiate the work rules. You certainly can't accomplish much when saddled with tenure and seniority rules.
The American school system is a bad parody of an optimum allocation of resources, and nearly everyone knows it, but we always talk as if it were not so. Of course we never discuss the basic premises of public education to begin with.
Poster Comment:
Pournelle amost always makes sense, unlike buffoons...like Henry Makow.