This page was last updated on June 13, 2011.
Doomed to fail; Editorial; Beaver County Times; June 12, 2011.
The editorial says, “However, the sorting-out process should start long before these teachers set foot in a classroom. College and universities should have rigorous admission and graduation standards for education majors. School boards should hire the best qualified candidates, not the best connected. To attract some of the best and the brightest, society should show how much it values good teachers by paying wages and providing benefits that reflect the importance of the profession.”
As for “College and universities should have rigorous admission and graduation standards for education majors,” keep in mind the Times opposes standardized testing to determine what students learned.
As for “society should show how much it values good teachers by paying wages and providing benefits that reflect the importance of the profession,” that would happen in a free marketplace, as long as “the importance of the profession” means “the economic value of the job to district taxpayers/voters.” Unfortunately, this can’t happen unless school districts have a good way to measure an individual teacher’s results and the ability to hire, fire, and pay him based on those results. I could be wrong, but I can’t see PA’s teacher labor union management (AFT & PSEA) allowing this to happen until teachers are no longer forced to join a labor union and can negotiate their own employment conditions just like the vast majority (about 93%) of private-sector employees.
The editorial concludes with, “Let’s also recognize that outside factors influence education. Parents and peers have an enormous impact. So do family income, pre- and post-natal care and pre-school opportunities. Support and expectations from family, community and society also come into play. When will we realize that changes that don’t take all these factors into account are doomed to fail?” BCT editorials have included this comment for years yet I could find no editorials proposing ways to address those concerns. The purposes of the comment appear to be to stifle reform the BCT doesn’t like and to absolve administrators, school boards, teachers, and labor union management in poor-performing school districts.
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