Current national attempts at education reform focus on testing to find poorly performing schools, provide temporary assistance and ultimately close or reconfigure persistently failing schools.
The effects of these policies mostly have been visited on urban schools. Soon, many rural schools may begin to be affected as a grace period for meeting the standards expires. In many instances, both urban centers and rural areas share an important characteristic: They lack the resources and personnel to meet the standards. Some feel it is unclear how much further the testing approach can take us toward higher national educational achievement.
While not abandoning a program that seeks to raise standards, I suggest we get started now on an additional approach to education reform. I believe we need a variety of structural reforms of public education. Especially needed are market-based reforms to ensure quality staffing of public schools.
While most adults cannot remember the specific content of the courses of instruction they received as children, nearly all remember those special teachers who inspired them to reach higher. Thus, these proposed reforms focus on improving career opportunities for those currently teaching and those desiring to enter the profession. In many areas of instruction, administrators face a dearth of qualified applicants. Market-based reforms may both improve the applicant pool and create more flexible career paths for current teachers.
I propose we:
Abolish permanent tenure and replace it with renewable tenure. A teacher undergoes a probation period of several years. By that time, her moral and pedagogical fitness to be with children should be known. Grant the successful candidate tenure for five years. Why any tenure at all? A teacher needs protection against political interference from a school board carried away with anti-evolutionary zeal or a belief that any criticism of government policy is unpatriotic. At the same time, personal integrity and periodic professional self-renewal will be required to maintain a lifetime career.
Create a free market in teachers. Make pensions portable across districts and state lines. Many teachers find themselves “locked” in a district or state because they face severely diminished pension rights should they go elsewhere. In many jurisdictions, teachers do not qualify for Social Security benefits. They need pension portability.
Make certification portable. Why should a teacher from Georgia have to start all over again when he moves to Washington? National licensing exists for engineers and architects. Why not teachers? The certification maze is the creation of state education bureaucracies aided and abetted by the narrow interests of state schools. While a teacher can gain national certification, it is voluntary, available only to previously state-licensed individuals and costs the individual $2,500. It seems more like board certification for a medical specialty than a uniform professional standard for educators.
Certification in pedagogy should be a simple process open to any person with a college degree in a needed subject area. Opening the teaching ranks to non-education majors and allowing portable certification are market mechanisms that should be available.
Institute nationally or state-funded bonuses for critical specialists. We face a crisis in math, science and foreign language teaching. Employers in other economic sectors offer better pay and working conditions for these specialists. One reason for this crisis is the uniform pay scales of public schools. The fact that your specialty is scarce does not permit a school district to pay you your worth. This is so because unions and districts negotiate salary scales. Abolishing bargaining agreements would be highly disruptive to employee morale. Instead, I propose states and/or the federal government superimpose salary bonuses in addition to the basic salary for areas of great national need. This would remove a contentious issue from the purview of both union and district negotiators.
These reforms may create problems for districts that fail to attract a more mobile workforce. However, the impact will be gradual and allow time for necessary local adjustments.
Market-based reforms that create renewable tenure, portable pensions and certification, and specialty bonuses, will ultimately improve an education system that needs reform beyond standards-based testing.
Michael J. Maloy is a financial planner and retired middle school teacher.
