Copyright 2000 The Baltimore Sun Company
THE
BALTIMORE SUN
June 18, 2000, Sunday ,FINAL
SECTION: PERSPECTIVE ,4C
LENGTH: 992 words
HEADLINE:
Merit, not money, will fix our schools; Remedy: Reward good teachers and restore
local control.
BYLINE: George Liebmann
BODY:
IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS, good teachers said they
could teach any child: All they needed was a book, a mountaintop and a stick.
Today, things have changed for the worse. Many educators say they can't teach
any child without computers, expensive teaching gimmicks and a mountain of
federal cash.
Our nation's schools suffer from that liberal notion that
any problem can be fixed by throwing money at it. For example, in early March,
during a visit to an elementary school in suburban Washington, Al Gore called
for increasing the federal share of school budgets to 50 percent. If taken
seriously, this would require $300 billion, 28 percent of the
proceeds of the federal income tax. Meanwhile, here in Baltimore, educators
continually call for more tax dollars to fix the ailing school system. They
never get as much as they ask for, and this shortage of cash has become a
convenient excuse for the system's failure. Schools in our nation need an
infusion of something, but it is not cash. We need to return to the days when
teachers and principals could run their schools without the threat of lawsuits.
We need better educated teachers in our classrooms. We need local school boards
that are empowered to increase teacher salaries by replicating the pay
incentives of the private labor force. And we need to create education merit
systems that reward outstanding workers just as the best public bureaucracies
do.
Despite the cries of the naysayers, school vouchers will not bring
down the public school system - vouchers would strengthen it. Vouchers were
proposed by Adam Smith and other classical economists as the best way to finance
education long before public schools existed. Their virtue is that they empower
parents and stimulate competition. The competition need not be limited to the
best students; vouchers could also be made available for educating learning
disabled and disadvantaged students. Vouchers produce not privilege but
accountability.
Public school teachers and some of their unions agree
that student discipline is a problem. The roots of that problem are found in two
federal laws. The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act
makes it impossible to suspend large classifications of students, including
"emotionally disabled" and violent students, for more than 10 days without
elaborate hearings and exhaustion of appeal rights.
The Civil Rights
Attorneys' Fees Act allows fees to lawyers for students who are even partly
successful in any challenge to school actions, while providing no equivalent
sanctions against those bringing unsuccessful suits. Principals know that the
safe course is to back off when challenged and that they lack real authority
within their schools.
Schools are as good as the teachers in them.
To be certified in Maryland, a would-be teacher needs nearly a year of
education courses. To become a principal, another year of graduate education
courses is required, while superintendents require a total of nearly three years
in the education schools.
These requirements fence out housewives,
retired police and military officers, and the best liberal arts graduates. They
say to teachers that the way to promotion is to take more education courses,
rather than courses in the subject they teach. They make leadership of county
systems the exclusive province of a few thousand holders of doctorates in
education who tour the nation, failing upward.
While Gov. Glendening
seeks to meet teacher shortages by providing scholarships for 18- year-olds to
be indoctrinated in the education schools, New Jersey provides alternate
certification procedures which admit 750 liberal arts graduates a year to the
teaching force; Maryland gets only 50 teachers a year through this method.
Maryland's teacher pay structure fails to offer incentives allowing
teaching to compete with other occupations. Only three Maryland county teachers'
union contracts allow extra seniority credit for teachers in scarce disciplines
such as math and science.
Seniority systems in many counties provide
automatic increases for teachers who have been in the system for 25 or 30 years,
while promising young teachers who are beginning to accumulate children and
mortgages are driven into other occupations by inadequate pay.
While the
public schools behave as though they exist in isolation from the private labor
market, they also have failed to adopt the selection and promotion systems of
the best public bureaucracies.
Prime Minister Tony Blair has boldly
addressed similar problems in England: "Equal pay for unequal performance is in
no one's interests. It does not enable us either to reward excellence properly
or to encourage improvements. Too many teachers feel they have little choice but
to take on more and more administration in order to improve their salaries and
advance in their profession. That's bad news for the children at their school."
Blair's proposals provide merit pay for half the teaching force. Also
provided are a fast promotional track for honors graduates and extra pay for
teaching mentors and teachers who specialize in scarce disciplines and subjects
of greatest need. Automatic pay increases are limited to the first 10 years of
service.
By contrast, the Glendening administration's approach - two
across- the board 5 percent pay increases, with a required 4-to-1 local match -
does nothing to improve education.
The remedy for the problems of our
public schools is not to be found in the courts, or at the federal treasury.
It will be found in an aroused public opinion that will push to let
principals run their schools, while clamoring for better educated teachers and a
system that rewards teachers in accordance with their value, dedication and
effectiveness.
Baltimore lawyer George Lieb mann is the author of The
Agree ment: How Federal, State and Union Regulations Are Destroying Public
Education in Maryland (Calvert Institute,1998).
LOAD-DATE: July 10, 2000
