Give Top Teachers A Bonus

Little Rock rewards teachers; unions resist.

by Daniel Henninger - January 19th, 2007 - The Wall Street Journal (opinionjournal.com)

Is there a bigger scandal in America than the low state of [U.S. public] schools? Oprah Winfrey, utterly frustrated with the problem, last month discussed the $40 million she has spent building the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls--in South Africa. Ms. Winfrey said South African students want to learn, but in U.S. schools, "the sense that you need to learn just isn't there." Where'd it go?

There are multiple-choice answers to that question, and most of them are right. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York offered one answer in his State of the City speech Wednesday: The desire to learn disappeared down the bottomless well of centralized public-school bureaucracies. Mayor Bloomberg proposed greatly increased autonomy for school principals--one irrefutably proven answer to making a school better. He also wants teachers to prove they deserve tenure, an idea so obvious that it probably has no chance.

One measure of the tenure decision for New York City teachers would be their students' test scores. News accounts said the city teachers' union is "certain to fight" linking test scores to tenure. This, too, is among the multitude of correct answers for why students have no incentive to learn in [public] schools.

Public school bureaucracies and teachers unions are the major reason public schools in America are constantly getting worse, not better. Creating another bureacracy at the federal level with "No child left behind" has not fixed the problem, though there have been a few isolated success stories. Unless and until parents demand that schools stop experimenting with "new" education concepts and start teaching their children using the basics that have always worked, things will continue to get worse.

Parents of stone age children were able to teach their children. Frontier parents were able to teach their children. Back in the 60s we were able to totally ravamp education and create a focus on science and technology overnight. Sputnik happened on October 4th, 1957. We changed our education system, trained a generation of scientists, and went to the moon in only slightly over a decade.

ONE DECADE.

Education has been successful for thousands of years, until unions and bureacracies got in the way. For 40 years our children have fallen farther and farther behind as these education bureaucrats try new and supposedly better ways to teach with unions leading the cheering section for the attempts. In every case it creates higher paying jobs for some central bureaucrat and does nothing to teach our children.

When are we going to stop letting these bureacracies and unions destroy education?