Re: “Colorado’s crawl to mediocrity,” April 29 Mike Rosen column.
Here’s a plan that even Mike Rosen can’t refuse: let market forces determine how much a teacher is paid. Neither doctors nor lawyers nor other professionals have tenure. Here’s what would have to change. First, teachers must have the ability to go from one district to another, nationally, and be paid for the experience, knowledge and education that they have acquired both in and out of education. Currently, no teacher with more than seven years experience on average in America may move from one district to another without losing steps and benefits. If teachers could go wherever they could find the most advantageous positions, like everyone else in the U.S., they would not have to worry about tenure or poor management any more than anyone else working in a corporation or organization. Of course, “at will” hiring and firing may be counter to the kind of continuity one would like to have in a public school, but what of that? Wouldn’t schools improve if they had the ability to hire the best teachers they could find no matter where they found them? Paying for these teachers who are the best that public schools could find might be a problem, too, but, certainly, if they’re that good, the public would find the money and would pony up more taxes because it’s just what the market would bear. It would be American free enterprise at its best.
Second, since teachers would be free to move anywhere and schools would be free to hire at will any teacher they could find, all those people waiting in the wings to be teachers would be jumping at the chance to get hired. It would be a jobs program that would get the economy going again. After all, anyone with a degree can be an effective teacher.
Third, and this is my favorite part of the plan, parents should be fined for being bad parents. If they don’t read to their children, help them with their homework, participate at school functions, communicate with their children’s teachers, make sure that their children are fed and clothed, given money to take advantage of academic opportunities, provide their children with all of the necessary materials and computers, and take care of their children’s physical and mental health including their learning disabilities, then they should be assessed financial penalties for being bad parents. Teachers should not be expected to accommodate these social ills in their classrooms, and should only be expected to, well, teach.
Urge your legislators to consider my plan. Of course, preparing teachers well to begin with and paying them fairly might be an alternative, but that doesn’t seem to be the American way.
Rex Wood is an English teacher at Lakewood High School. EDITOR’S NOTE: This online-only guest commentary has not been edited. Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to columns@denverpost.com. They will be subject to editing for length, grammar or accuracy for our print editions.
