MY VIEW: Schools should be a national asset
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In order to have a productive discussion on education, we should all agree on a few basic points: The very best public schools in America are as good as the very best schools any place in the world. The best schools in America and around the world are staffed with union teachers who belong to innovative and dynamic unions. Even Bill Gates has decided that unions are not part of the problem but are part of the solution, and he is now working closely with the AFT. Diane Ravitch, a former Bush education researcher and former champion of school choice, vouchers and charter schools, and a previous advocate of No Child Left Behind, has dramatically changed her mind about these issues.
Some charter schools do an outstanding job, but most of them perform no better than other public schools. Most teachers, like most workers, are not motivated primarily by money and merit pay. Performance-based pay is not a silver bullet and it will not produce the miracles that both Bush and Obama have counted on. In addition, the mechanism for evaluating teachers is flawed, and in many of the current discussions the number of bad teachers, lousy parents, clueless administrators and