Education Reform 2012: Here we go again...same old failed ideas | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Republicans in the General Assembly think they can fix what's wrong with our public schools. Here we go again.

    Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger reached back in history and pulled out the worn out ideas of eliminating teacher tenure and merit pay. Been there. Done that. All we got was a tacky T-shirt.

    As we've said here before, the reason teacher tenure was devised was because local school boards abused teachers who crossed up some parent who had the ear of a local school board member who got enough votes to tell the superintendent to get rid of the teacher. In Beaufort County it was repeated because a group of teachers challenged a reading program that was universally rejected by every school system that tried it. Turns out the reading program was nothing more than a money laundering scheme whereby the owners of the program made big political donations to get education bureaucrats to give out grant money to implement the program. The wife of the current Beaufort County School Board chairman was running the program for the State and Mac Hodges saw to it that the teachers who objected to the foolishness were shipped out. The teachers sued and Mac lost, but dumped the legal bill on the taxpayers.

    Teacher tenure is not the problem. A good principal can terminate a poor teacher now for any of fifteen reasons. All he/she's got to do is do their job right by documenting one of those fifteen reasons, including poor performance. I know. I have been involved as a principal and superintendent in terminating dozens of poor teachers and never lost a single case that went to court or before a tenure review panel.

    If Sen. Berger wants to fix the tenure system he should look to reforming local school boards. And if he really wants to fix much of what is wrong with local school boards he will change the Open Meetings law to prevent them from dealing with personnel (or anything else) behind closed doors. The idea that "confidential personnel matters" protects employees is a farce. No, what it does is allow school boards to give teachers the shaft without the board members having to account to the public.

    Secondly, Sen. Berger should eliminate "governmental immunity" for individual school board members in teacher termination cases. Make those who abuse teachers' constitutional rights pay out of their own pocket for their legal fees and any damages awarded against them. But above all, let the press report how school boards do their job.

    Likewise, merit pay is a bigger farce. Merit pay always degenerates to spreading the money around so that everybody ends up getting some eventually or it is used by unscrupulous administrators to reward their buddies. Sen. Berger need look no further than the staff in the Legislative Building. Let him make a merit pay system work for people in that building before he tries to mess with all the schools in North Carolina. And if he gets it right with the Legislative staff, let him then get it right in DOT, DHHS and Commerce and then show us how that works out for him. And if, by the Grace of God, he gets that to work, let him then fix the UNC system before he wastes a lot of time and money on merit pay in the public schools. It would be much better if he would just give parents the right to choose their children's teachers and then paid the teachers for the number of students they teach.

    Another Berger idea is to add five school days to the school year. Sounds simple and seems to make sense, like many good liberal ideas, but reality is a different story altogether. You can add as many days as you want, but if you do the same ole thing on those days what you get is more of what you've always gotten. If Sen. Berger wanted to increase learning time he could do it much simpler and cheaper by just moving the End of Grade tests to the last week of school. Every parent knows what goes on after the EOG's are over. It's party time!

    Then if Berger really wanted to reform our schools he would focus on the teacher training program. He should look at who applies, who is admitted and who is licensed. Then he should look at what happens in the certification programs. There is way too much emphasis on "pedagogy" and not nearly enough on subject content. For example, we have elementary teachers who never take a course on the constitution or even basic civics. And it is worse with history, not to mention science. There simply is too much emphais on "how" to teach and not nearly enough on "what" is taught.

    And that is really what it all comes down to. The best way to "reform" public education is to get the politicians out of it. Just let parents control the system. Require the school boards to operate in public and be held accountable for their decisions. Let the parent choose which school their child attends and which teacher teaches their child. Pay teachers a base salary and then a "bonus" for each child above that base that they teach that makes the amount of progress each of those children should make in a year's time.

    And let Sen. Berger clean up his building before he takes on all the schools in the state.

    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.