I realize that I’ve ranted quite a bit in the past few months about the local (Windsor, Connecticut) school system, inasmuch as its performance is disappointing as compared to its level of funding.
In my daily reading, I came across this Cato commentary that I’m so very tempted to send to the town Board of Education:
Many readers will remember the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, celebrating real-life Los Angeles public school teacher Jaime Escalante. Mr. Escalante painstakingly built a rigorous math program at Garfield High School, enabling an unprecedented number of its low-income, mostly Hispanic students to take and pass the Advanced Placement calculus test.
His results were so good that many observers literally couldn’t believe them, and his students were forced to retake the test – on which they succeeded admirably once again.
In a competitive industry, a star like Mr. Escalante would have been rapidly promoted. He would soon have been designing curricula and training teachers for the benefit of thousands or even millions of children. He got threats and hate mail instead.
Because he successfully taught difficult material to classrooms of 50 or more students, Mr. Escalante drew the ire of his own colleagues. The local union contract stipulated that teachers could not serve more than 35 children per class, and Mr. Escalante’s achievements made that stipulation seem gratuitous and self-serving. The union balked, the threats started, and Mr. Escalante’s chairmanship of the math department was revoked in 1990. He left a year later.
The dysfunctional incentive structure of our public school monopoly is not only incapable of sustaining excellence, it actually works to crush it by setting the interests of school employees against those of students and parents.
No, that’s probably not quite the situation locally. However, that story struck me as a perfect example of idiocy that can emerge sometimes in union-negotiated contracts.
No, I’m not saying that unions are necessarily bad or idiotic. However, when justification for increases to the school budget are “contract obligations”, and performance isn’t improving..it seems that common sense has gone out the window.
Unions and contracts do not alleviate the need of employer and employee, or citizens and government to expect that some measure of common sense, fiscal responsibility, and accountability be maintained.