(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Need an antidote to Whinegarten in the Journal? Try Robert Enlow in USA Today:
If this president and Congress really wanted to help children and benefit teachers, it would emancipate students so their parents could use their own tax dollars to obtain educational services wherever they wanted — at charter schools, virtual schools or with a voucher to transfer to the private school of their choice. But that’s not really what they want. Instead, they want to maintain a status quo that is designed to benefit the adults rather than brighten the future of children.
It’s not just this $23 billion bill, it’s the whole stinking system that’s one big slow-motion perpetual bailout. What are the odds you’ll get serious change without school choice? 3,720 to none.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Somewhat related:
http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/merit_pay_is_not_a_good_fit_for_schools/
Well, this post isn’t about merit pay, but that EPI report is kind of silly.
Professionals in all those other fields they look at are 1) hired based on their true ability to do the job, not meaningless pieces of paper and hoop-jumping; 2) paid based on how well they actually do the job, as measured by delivery of services to the satisfaction of the client, not just how many years they’ve punched the clock five days a week; and 3) fired if they don’t actually do the job.
Now, the only reason anyone anywhere is even talking about tying dollar amounts to quantitative measurements in teacher salaries is because right now the teaching profession has none of those things. So I’ll make you a deal. You let us introduce numbers 1, 2 and 3 above, and we’ll quit pushing merit pay. Deal?
I agree with you, but how do you measure a teacher’s “true ability to do the job?”
If my district could find a teacher to do my job better, then I would hope they would hire them! Students absolutely should have the best that’s available!
I believe that introducing competition to the profession in some way could potentially be very beneficial to students.
I agree with you, but how do you measure a teacher’s “true ability to do the job?”
Check out what I wrote under item #2 in my last post – “as measured by delivery of services to the satisfaction of the client.” There is really no other ultimate measurement of any organization’s job performance. In the final analysis, an organization exists only because somebody out there needs its services. So the only ultimate measure of success is whether those somebodies are getting good service. And the only people who are reliably in a position to know that are the somebodies themselves.
If you let anyone else but the “client” or “end user” be the judge of quality, that boils down to letting the organization decide for itself whether it’s doing a good job – and we all know how that story ends.
That’s the ultimate principle behind school choice. Parents should be the judge of whether a school is doing its job, because they’re the ones who know. If you had that, then schools would in turn evaluate teachers based on whether they deliver a good education as measured by parent satisfaction. Again, any other system becomes self-serving and therefore self-defeating.
If my district could find a teacher to do my job better, then I would hope they would hire them! Students absolutely should have the best that’s available!
They’re not allowed. Union rules govern hiring and firing. So, for example, you can’t just go out and look for better teachers any time you want. You have to wait for an opening. Then you have to fill the opening by transferring an existing teacher who wants that job, and then deal with the opening left by that teacher – maybe by transferring another teacher who wants it. By the time you’re done shifting the opening around from school to school and can actually hire, by definition you’re hiring for an opening that nobody wants. So every time schools hire, they have to hire for the very worst position in the entire system. And people wonder why we have trouble hiring teachers from even the median, let alone the top, of the academic spectrum? And that’s just the beginning of the headaches the union rules cause.