For Gov. Schwarzenegger, a controlled burn in education
Published: Friday, April 30, 2010
Updated: Friday, April 30, 2010
Last week, Governor Schwarzenegger voiced his support of a bill that removes tenure as a basis for firing public school teachers. In tenure’s place, teacher effectiveness and merit would ideally be used when considering layoffs. The governor cited private companies as a rationale for this legislation, positing that just as a private company fires bad employees, so too should schools fire bad teachers.
For the sake of this opinion, a few assumptions will be made, no matter how unrealistic they sound. First, this assumes that should this legislation pass, that such powers granted will not be abused in any manner. Secondly, this assumes that this legislation will provide the power to eliminate every ‘bad teacher’ currently employed. Finally, we assume that there are no socioeconomic, psychological or other forces contributing to poor student performance and that this piece of legislation will enable ‘better teachers’ to be hired.
That being said, where are we going to find those better teachers?
Every politician and parent has called for the firing of ineffective teachers and hiring teachers radiating enlightenment from their very being. Surely such mythical creatures exist for the hiring. But…
This is where that little thing called deus ex machina is supposed to happen. Cue Julie Andrews or some other similar miracle-worker to drop out of the sky, save the day and ensure that everyone in that classroom ends up going to Ivy-League colleges. Well, at least, it was supposed to happen that way on no less than a thousand whims. If it hasn’t yet, I wonder why.
Well, they’ve got their reasons. They might just have to do with respect, pay and stability of position (or the lack thereof).
Seeing as nobody has managed to find the missing link known as the good teacher, despite their best attempts and their reiterations of the same, we’ll just ask the most next logical question.
How did we let in so many ineffective and underperforming teachers through the state’s certification process to begin with? After all, the great state of California had to place its stamp of approval on everyone we have teaching in the state! Usually, those teaching credentials ensure that the person in question should never give reason to be fired and can at the very least teach your children how to add, subtract, read and write, as well as do any and every permutation of the aforementioned.
One cannot help but notice that by this point, politicians of all creeds have been crusading about this issue since before most of the student body was born. To briefly quote from an aggregate pool of promises from politicians, they have suggested increasing spending for schools, hiring more and better teachers, more supplies, more money, more and larger classrooms and better teacher-student ratios. Based on last year’s standardized testing results, none of this has possibly come to pass.
Politicians are infamous for crying for
‘good teachers’—and then doing little to answer their own demands. That is, after all, why education remains a hot-button issue in any political race at any level in the US.
Our governor and our politicians owe it to California to be done with these games and political posturing and to stop
