How to fix the public education system
Hollywood actor Matt Damon recently added himself to the list of people who praise public schools while placing his own children in private schools.
Damon is lucky enough to be able to afford private school tuition. Many other families are not so lucky. Public schools are where children go to die, and public school parents know they are condemning their children to misery. Between guns, drugs, and bullying, there is no hope.
Those who want to reform the public education system are met with fierce resistance from education unions. The protection of even the worst teachers at all costs supersedes the needs of the students. When a system needs modifications, tinkering around the margins is sufficient. The public education system needs to be blown up and recreated from scratch.
The reason America’s public education system has failed is because there is not even the slightest element of a meritocracy. Wall Street, professional sports, the American military, and various sales industries are all examples of meritocracies, where the cream rises and the garbage sinks. The solution to fixing the education system is easy.
On the last day of the school year, private consultants must be brought in. They need to have absolute authority to do their jobs. The consultants will be independent contractors hired by the federal government. Any school refusing them will be immediately shut down. Sadly, forceful intervention from the federal government will be required in the beginning.
The consultants will give every public schoolteacher in America good news and bad news to end the school year. The bad news is that every schoolteacher will be fired, effective immediately.
The good news is that they will all be allowed to interview to get their jobs back if they choose to do so. Summer vacation is three months long, but the evaluation process will be completed in less than one month. The right to a reasonably speedy evaluation is the compassionate thing to do.
The top 20% of schoolteachers will get their jobs back. In addition, they will be given 20% raises, effective at the start of the next school year.
The next 40% of schoolteachers will also get their jobs back, although without raises. Things will continue as before.
The next 20% of teachers will also get their jobs back without raises, but with one additional change. A note will be placed in their personnel files giving them one year to improve their job performance.
For these teachers not in the bottom 20%, any back pay lost during their temporary firing will be reinstituted.
The bottom 20% of teachers will stay fired. They will be banned for five years from the education industry. After that period they can then reapply for reinstatement. If they are denied, then they must wait an additional five years. If they reapply again and are turned down again, the ban will be permanent.
Any liberals caught howling about how this approach lacks compassion should speak to the top 20% of teachers getting their 20% raises.
Teachers who secretly know they are not in the top 20% will complain that there is no effective quantifiable standard for measuring teacher performance. Some teachers get stuck with terrible students. This hollow argument implies that just because no system is perfect, that no system should be used at all. At the very least , reasonable people can agree that teachers who are caught molesting their students are in the bottom 20%. Even those teachers take forever to be fired.
To make sure that teachers do not receive all of the blame, a significant number of assistant principals may also need to be terminated. Assistant principals are the equivalent in corporate America of middle management. Their jobs are often duplicative. Corporations needing to get lean and mean trim the bureaucracy. This again can be seen as heartless by people who have never worked in a corporation or understood how a business is supposed to run.
No industry tolerates failure like the education industry. Schools spend time explaining what prevents them from succeeding rather than just actually succeeding. The public sector approach has crashed and burned. Privatization is the only answer.
In corporate America, companies often declare bankruptcy so they can restructure bloated union contracts in an attempt to get solvent. By applying this same standard to public schools, the stranglehold of the education unions can be broken. The schools can then be reopened under new management with more flexibility to keep productive teachers and eliminate counter-productive ones.
Permanently closing down all public schools may have to be an option. Like the horse and buggy, some industries cannot be revived. Giving up on the entire industry and leaving charter schools, private schools and home schooling as the only options may be necessary.
Before taking that drastic step, it is worth finding out if anything redeemable can ever come out of the public school system once meritocracy is forcibly entered into the equation.
eric