The unions are killing our children's future ... | Eastern North Carolina Now

because our good teachers accept their protecting poor teachers

    Thousands of teachers are on strike as this is being written. And what they are striking for is the biggest threat to America we have ever faced. They want every teacher, both the good ones and the poor ones, to be treated equally.

    Beverly Perdue wants to be known as an "Education Governor." That's not new. Every governor in recent history has aspired to the same label. Some more than others, but every one of North Carolina's governors has tried to claim the title.

    But we would suggest here that Beverly Perdue will be eventually known as the absolute worst Education Governor simply because she had the best chance any governor has ever had to really transform the schools and she has blown it.

    The opportunity is the budget crisis. But Perdue proposes to "save every teacher's job." And while that is a laudable goal looked at one simplistic way (i.e., that you support education, schools and teachers) the most honest thing that could be said for it is that it fails to recognize a simple truth every single one of us who ever went through school knows: The quality of our education (what we learned) was more dependent on how good the teacher was than on anything else, including our own cognitive abilities. Good teachers produce good results and poor teachers produce...well, typical results. And typical results usually means "minimum results."

    So what Bev Perdue should have done was to use the necessity to cut expenditures as a way to eliminate poor teachers.

    Now if you have any doubt that poor teachers are "the problem," read this. Adam Smith was exactly correct.

    We should add here, before the teachers come out of the woodwork and begin the usual "blame someone else" mantra that poor teachers is not the only problem our educational system faces. Adam Smith was exceedingly correct about the suppression of excellence in the university faculty system. And there is no doubt that good schools do not long endure unless they have good principals. Moreover, I would suggest that one of the greatest impediments to good solid learning (note that I did not say education) is the bureaucratic maze that we have established to "manage" public education since the "progressive movement" swept this country and we adopted the notion that parents are stupid and those in the high echelons of the bureaucracy are omnipotent.

    There is no doubt teachers, and particularly excellent teachers, have an uphill battle and are severely handicapped by the external forces that demand egalitarian approaches and results from teachers.

    But be that as it may, all that could and would be changed if we did one simple thing in this country and something Bev. Perdue should have done. The teacher unions should be annihilated by policy and the place to start with that is simply to reward excellence in student performance and punish severely (via dismissal) those who fail to produce what they are paid to do: Produce student learning.

    We have a crazy system in education which operates on the most false premise conceivable and that is that all teachers are the same. We train them the same. We assume that each one of them who possess a certain piece of paper (license) is equally competent to teach specific subject matter and then we pay them the same thing whether their students learn or not and we allow them to keep their jobs even when they fail to produce even minimally acceptable learning. In short, it really does not matter whether you do the job or not, you get to keep your job regardless of whether you produce what you are paid to produce and you get paid more each year by simply continuing to breathe.

    We don't need to make the argument to any reasonable-minded person that we have some teachers who should not be teaching. Everybody knows that. The teacher across the hall, those down the hall, the parents, the principal, the people who work in the office and even the students know who those teachers are. But we pretend we can't identify them and if we don't identify them, we insure nothing can or will be done about them.

    The reason for this, again, is the teachers' union. And yes, every member of the NCAE is a member of the union. And every NCAE member pays big bucks each year to the union to protect the system that protects poor teachers.

    And the really sad part about that system is that, second only to the students these poor teacher harm, the other most severely injured parties are the good teachers. They not only have to make up the slack and teach students who should have already learned what they should have learned, but they have to carry the organizational water for those who are slack. Every good teacher knows that. But even worse than the intangibles, every good teacher gets paid less than they should be paid because the union guarantees that the poor teachers get paid the same thing the good teachers get paid and that results in the marginal teachers slipping backward rather than striving to excel.

    What Bev. Perdue should have done was to recommend that NCGS 115C-325 be repealed. That's the tenure law. Secondly, she should have recommended that the uniform salary schedule be abolished and replaced with a system that pays teachers more if their students perform better. And that performance pay should be implemented immediately after we implement a system to track how much a student actually learns compared to how much that student could scientifically be expected to learn. That's it. That's not all it would take, but those changes are essential if we want to transform our schools.

    And in anticipation of the reaction this will get from some teachers let me say this: I'm talking about getting rid of probably less than 15% of our current teachers. Most of our teachers do a good job and many of them do a terrific job. But not only do our students deserve to be protected from the relatively small cadre of poor teachers, but our good teachers and teachers who can be good deserve to work in a profession that appreciates their excellence. It is their excellence that is the best "tenure" they can have and it is their excellence that offers the best chance of their being rewarded as they should be rewarded, both intangibly and materially.

    Bev Perdue knows all this. She just does not have the backbone to stand up to the union. And that is the fault of every member of the NCAE. They should demand that the NCAE stop protecting poor teachers and a system that treats good teachers just like the poor teachers are treated and get on with developing a system that rewards performance.

    Delma Blinson writes the "Teacher's Desk" column for our friend in the local publishing business: The Beaufort Observer. His concentration is in the area of his expertise - the education of our youth. He is a former teacher, principal, superintendent and university professor.