Posted 12/9/2010

TEACHER TENURE: LEGAL EXTORTION?

The West Wing TV series showed Congressman Matt Santos being denied the Democratic nomination for President by the teachers union over the issue of teacher tenure. (Sitting President, Democrat Josiah Bartlett, eventually rides to the rescue and secures the teachers union's support in the five key states, which give Santos the nomination.)

While The West Wing was a fictionalized view of the federal executive branch, the issues covered by the show are not. Teacher tenure and the control of the Democratic Party by the teachers union are true in fiction and true in real life. Today, the teachers, tort lawyers and service worker unions share the levers of power in the Democratic Party.

Teacher tenure means you can’t fire a teacher, no matter how bad he is.

The teachers union is so powerful that it can extort whole communities and politicians at local, state and federal levels to do its bidding. By threatening strikes, the union creates terror in the hearts of all families with two wage earners. (Teachers perform an essential child care function for working parents.)

The wage earners who pay the taxes which support the teachers can be fired, but the teachers cannot.

Is this fair?

Please realize that all professions operate on a “bell curve” of talent. About 68 percent are average, 14 percent are good and 2 percent are exceptional. But another 14 percent are “poor” and an additional 2 percent are terrible.

The 16 percent who are “poor” and “terrible” are the ones who should be fired. They not only are incompetent professionally, but additionally, they tend to drag down the performance of the average and good teachers as well.

If the fourth-grade teacher is incompetent, her students will fall behind. The under-taught fourth-grader is then passed on to a good fifth-grade teacher, who has to waste time and energy attempting to bring poorly taught students up to speed. Sooner or later, good teachers become discouraged by a system that rewards and protects the incompetent.

This is most obvious in math, where at least half of all teachers are incompetent. This results in a nation which cannot produce the scientists and engineers necessary to keep up with emerging countries like China, India and Brazil – let alone mature tigers like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and Germany.

Teacher tenure results in a lower quantity and quality of math and science students, which results in the loss of manufacturing jobs – which depend directing on math and engineering skills.

It isn’t just math. English is so badly taught at the K-through-12 levels that students graduating from college have difficulty in writing to a decent standard. Business surveys claim that 40 percent of college grads can’t even compose an intelligent memo.

And keep in mind that all bell curves are not alike. The taller the bell curve, the greater the quality of the people in the profession. Financial services companies boast the highest bell curves, followed by medicine, engineering and sales – with the profession of teaching way down the list.

This means that the average person going to Wall Street is of far higher quality than the average person going into teaching.

Why the difference? Two factors:

1. Salary

2. One can be fired and the other cannot be fired.

Actually, the teaching bell curve looks less like a bell and more like a turtle shell.

Which is entirely appropriate, since teachers are improving education at the speed of a herd of sleeping turtles.

While much of the rest of the world runs by us.

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