Love your kid’s teachers? Love your school system? Love being 26th in the world on test scores? Love seeing those foreign students are kicking our kids’ asses on entrance test scores like the GMAT’s for MBA schools? Always vote yes to raise property taxes so your schools can keep teaching well? Want to buy some swampland in Florida? I’m asking because you are obviously uninformed about the what’s really causing American kids to be non-competitive against the world.
First, it ain’t money. We spend more than any other country not educating our kids.
The truth is its incompetent teachers. That’s hard to say and even harder to write. We remember our teachers fondly. We all have friends, neighbors, or relatives who teach. How dare I say such a thing? Well, because I have the facts, and it isn’t charter schools in the inner city. You will tell me the best students go to charter schools and it distorts the facts.
It’s Wisconsin. Since Scott Walker took the unions out of the schools in Wisconsin, here’s whats happened. They eliminated tenure and seniority work rules. They hire and fire based on merit, and pay based on performance. They have put the best and brightest in front of the classrooms. Guess what? Graduation rates are up, ACT scores are up–second in the nation now-and third-grade reading scores are up. Basically, the schools are better. No more money spent, just weeding out the weeds. Rewarding the good performers and expecting good performance.
So, it’s up to you to bring Wisconsin to your school district. Demand the system be changed or it will never change. Stop buying the baloney about why scores are going in the wrong direction. It’s up to you to insist on change to get any change.
Unions create mediocrity. If you ever worked in a union shop or managed a union shop, you know that. The new head of the VA said he has over 1,000 employees who need to be fired, but each one must go to a judge to do that. You think the Department of Motor Vehicles wants to keep the people you have to deal with when you go there? Where you have a union you have employees who are surviving because of the union and good people can’t be hired to replace them since tenure and seniority prohibit that.
Face it, you know it already. But, you think you can’t fix the problem. Scott Walker proved you can. Now you have no excuse not to accept your job to step up and get it fixed in your schools.