Taking on the Teachers: Romney and Education Reform

Last night one of my Facebook friends posted a primer that supposedly compared Mitt Romney and Barack Obama’s stances on education on her wall.  She provided a summary of how, as a future teacher, she found it “crazy” that Mitt Romney wanted states to reduce teacher rights and that Romney wanted to institute merit-based pay for teachers.  She then said that Romney wanted to eliminate teacher certification and railed against that!  The primer can be found here on the site “Care 2 Make a Difference,” a site with a decided liberal bias that you see as soon as you open the link.  Except the funny thing is, if you read the whole primer, it makes the Romney plan sound WAY better when I know that wasn’t their goal.

The claim that Romney wants to eliminate teacher certification is debunked and destroyed within the first few paragraphs of the primer.  All Romney wants to do is modify some requirements for certification so that it is easier for good people who want to teach to realize that dream.  It’s no secret that our country doesn’t have enough teachers; all media outlets routinely cover that story.

As for teacher’s rights, those have gotten out of control.  The recent Chicago Teacher Strike is a very relevant example of that problem.  Chicago teachers now have the highest rate of pay before benefits in the country at an average of about $89,000.  And yet Chicago students rank near the very bottom in time spent in the classroom and the graduation rate in Chicago is only 60 percent!  The person who posted the primer and those who rose to her defense were practically making out the teachers to be the victims in this case!  And one said I was misinformed because Chicago has four of the top 10 high schools in Illinois.  Four schools do not a district make.

Yes, teachers have a somewhat limited earning potential.  Public school teachers know that when they get into the profession, they are becoming public servants collecting a salary from the taxpayer.  But teachers get paid more than enough to live decent lives and the longer they teach, the more they make.  My high school history teacher, probably my best teacher ever, retired in 2012 after over 30 years on the job with a salary 10 times his starting pay!  With hard work comes reward!  Right now, too much money is going into the teacher’s pocket and not into the student!  Just look at Maryland’s higher education system which I touched on last week!

My notion that tenure is “a good thing because it protects good teachers” is also ridiculous.  Fine, standardized tests aren’t the best measure of success and we all know that.  But if a teacher is a “good” teacher, then why do they need to hide behind tenure?!  Good teachers will have natural protection because students love the good teachers!

I was the victim of a tenured teacher in 11^th grade.  I disagreed politically with my English teacher and all year she marked me lower than the rest of the class.  I had proof.  But I couldn’t do anything about it because she had a union and tenure backing her up.  Had I tried to make a case out of it, I would’ve gone nowhere and spent a lot of money doing so.

Finally, what is so wrong with merit-based pay?  One person said studies have found that merit-based pay “doesn’t work as well as it was hoped”.  Really?  Several years ago, Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, developed a new labor deal (subject of this op-ed) that would have included merit-based incentives for teachers and removed tenure.  Under the plan, salaries for teachers performing well stood to rise substantially.  The maximum pay under the new system would have been $130,000!  But, because the union knew there were teachers in the system doomed to be fired under the plan, D.C. teachers rejected it and instead got much smaller raises.

The reality is that tenure and unions are holding America’s youth back.  The educational system is broken and needs to be reformed.  Unions need to be scaled back, tenure needs to be slowly reformed, phased out and replaced and merit-based pay needs to come to public schools.  Until then, students are at the mercy of unions and the threat of strikes.  Lost educational time from striking unions only makes things worse.  More money into teachers’ pockets means less money buying new technology or new computers for students.  I am confident that the Romney plan will reform education while cutting costs and that children will actually start learning more and performing better in school.  America needs to wake up and realize that.