Who's saving our schools?
Written by Alexander Cooper, NPRI policy intern.
On July 30, Reason.TV correspondent Michelle Fields attended the Save Our Schools Rally in Washington, DC, to interview some of the protesters about school reform, including Matt Damon.
For the most part, the jargon was familiar to those accustomed to the education debate. Attendees asserted that it's always been possible to fire teachers, that teachers are paid poorly, that teacher tenure doesn't bring down education, that charter schools aren't any better than private schools, and even the totally out-of-the-ballpark claim that we shouldn't cut education funding because the worth of an education can't be quantified.
Anyone making the first claim apparently hasn't heard that, between 2000 and 2010, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven teachers - and only succeeded in firing four. They also probably haven't heard about New York's rubber rooms (which were ended just last year), in which teachers being considered for termination just wasted time, sometimes for months, while still receiving their full salaries. In Nevada, until the recent legislative session, it was about as difficult to fire post-probationary (or, tenured) teachers.
Then, according to Matt Damon, teachers are so poorly paid that they must already be performing their best. Teachers, however, are not poorly paid once you consider the number of hours they report working and when you count their generous benefits on top of that. The best teachers, however, often put in many more hours outside of school, and they might rightly think they are underpaid. Performance pay would align pay more closely with performance, but even that idea has met union resistance. In the Clark County School District union-negotiated contracts instead require that teachers be paid on the basis of their degree and their length of time with the school district.
The real problem with teacher salaries is that they are usually unrelated to teaching ability.
The third claim made in this video is particularly disconcerting. When asked how much money should be spent per pupil in our education system, one woman quickly responded, "Billions!"
This is absurd. How absurd? We would need to raise taxes to $51 quadrillion (rounded to the nearest quadrillionth) to fund this. (Nationwide there are 50,829,079 students as of 2009-2010.)
Regardless, more money is not the answer. Both here in Nevada and nationwide, massive funding increases have been followed by stagnant results or minute gains in educational achievement. (In Nevada alone, inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending has tripled during the last fifty years, and we've seen where that's gotten us.)
Finally, it is worth addressing the claim that charter schools aren't any better than private schools. Studies show that although charter schools might not make a huge impact in areas with already high-performing public schools, students assigned to low-performing zoned schools are more likely to succeed when they attend a charter school, according to a study of voucher winners in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.
Parents deserve the right to select the best schools available to them - schools that pay their teachers on merit, that swiftly remove ineffective teachers, and that spend their money efficiently. It's time to recognize the importance of school choice.
Update: Changed the sentence on the time teachers work to more accurately what the Bureau of Labor Statistics studied: time teachers reported working, not the minimum number of hours they are required to work.
Also, added that this blog was written by Alexander Cooper.
