by Drew Johnson
posted November 28, 2007
Earlier this month, a Johns Hopkins University study labeled 37 of Tennessee's high schools "dropout factories," sending high school principals and state education bureaucrats into a tizzy. According to the report, 14.2 percent of Tennessee's public high schools failed to graduate at least 60 percent of their students.
While the study has been widely criticized for not taking into account students who change schools during their high school careers, it raises an important question. Why are so many of Tennessee's public schools unable to educate and graduate their students?
Higher taxes and more spending won't fix this crisis or the state's subpar education system. The Memphis school district spends $9,300 per student in their attempts to educate- second most in the state. Yet the district's educational outcomes are the worst in the state. State and local officials, try as they may, can't simply spend their way to educational success.
State educational data may hold the secret for improving education in Tennessee. According to state research, teacher quality explains 68 percent of the variation in student performance. Good teachers, not greater per-pupil spending or palatial hi-tech school buildings, make the biggest difference in educating children.
The key then is to incentivize the best teachers to stick around the classroom and force the worst teachers to leave as quickly as possible. The easiest way to do this is by applying the same common-sense approach to teacher pay that guides salary and benefits in nearly every other profession in America.
Teachers who are good at their jobs should be paid more than those who are not. It's that simple. State leaders should scrap the state's teacher tenure and pay systems and install a performance-based salary system - one that treats all teachers like the professionals they are.
The state's current Communist-flavored system of teacher pay is based on longevity rather than ability. Since they are not paid what they deserve for teaching children well, good teachers often flee the profession for better pay in the private sector. Worse, the bad teachers, who are overpaid for the quality of their work and enjoy job security, stay to teach students.
This simple idea of performance-based pay is a promising way to improve every school, not just the "dropout factories." Beginning with the inner city schools that need immediate help, Tennessee should remove tenure and install a system of teacher pay based on their students' educational improvement. Performance-based salaries will weed out bad teachers and allow good teachers to thrive. As a result, even children in the state's worst schools will have the chance to receive a high-quality education.
Drew Johnson is president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization committed to achieving a freer, more prosperous Tennessee through the ideas of liberty. Visit TCPR online at: www.tennesseepolicy.org.
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While I strongly agree with Mr. Drew Johnson that we need "to incentivize the best teachers to stick around the classroom," we need to even more heavily invest in providing incentive to all students to stick around the classroom. Some of those investments overlap. Others are new, like the 350-pound gun vault bolted to the lobby floor in our inner city middle school lobby here in Dallas.
We bolted this vault to the floor in our middle school lobby three years ago to connect and focus our students onto their own futures. We put it under spotlights in an obvious place of respect. All students entering the school for the first time quickly know this vault holds letters eighth-grade students write to themselves. Someday it will hold their letter.
They learn they will place their letter into the archive after a photo is taken of them standing with their language arts class holding sealed envelopes, with their letters inside, in front of the archive. They then will place their envelope onto their class shelf in the archive. They know the letter will stay in the archive until their 10-year class reunion. Copies of that photo are given to students in the photo. It has reunion plans and contact information on the back of the photo.
At the reunion students know they will also be invited to speak with then-current students about their recommendations for success. Students are told to prepare for questions that may be asked by the younger students 10 years in the future, such as: "Would you do anything differently if you were 13 again?"
Thinking now of answering such a question helps current students see current work differently, and stay in school.
Today we have 101 more students than last year in our junior class. They were the first class to put letters in the archive three years ago.
This project cost taxpayers almost nothing other than paper and envelopes, and eventually postage and reunion expenses as the 10-year reunions are set up and letters returned to alumni. It is a simple win-win.
Bill Betzen, LMSW (Emeritus)
Quintanilla Middle School
Dallas, Tx.
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Mr. Johnson's letter is similar in tone to one submitted to the Nashville Tennessean earlier this month, though it still misses the mark on at least two counts. I'll begin my response by addressing the Tennessee Center for Policy Research which is a self-described "...nonpartisan research organization committed to achieving a freer, more prosperous Tennessee through the ideas of liberty." I say self-described because I believe that their mass-produced opinion pieces are often layered with code words that are meant to trigger a knee-jerk response driven by emotion instead of logic.
While taking on the noble task of calling for better methods in which we educate our children, Mr. Johnson sees fit to imply some kind of Red Scare in the Volunteer State-"the state's current Communist-flavored system of teacher pay is based on longevity rather than ability." The problem here is that Mr. Johnson doesn't just describe a real (or imagined) flaw in the current system. No, he carelessly throws around the word "Communist" to get the blood boiling. This may very well be a deliberate tactic, but it is hardly one appropriate for a nonpartisan organization.
I agree that there is no room for ineffective teachers in the classroom any more than there is room for ineffective pilots in airliner cockpits. Under the guise of common sense, Mr. Johnson offers a problematic solution to a very complex problem. I've heard this in analogy form before: a factory manager who consistently ships defective products should be replaced. So far so good, but let's extend this analogy a little. Where does the problem actually lie? Is the manager truly ineffective? If he/she is, then they obviously need to find another vocation. Consider this: what if the manager consistently receives raw materials that have quality-control problems?
In a factory, the manager is in a position to find a new supplier; in the schools, teachers can hardly remedy a difficult home environment, emotional disturbances, physical abuse and the like. You see, children are not factory-made widgets where quality control is something that is easy to measure. Despite the best intentions of statistical studies using a variety of methodologies, the fact remains that human behavior and response is exceedingly difficult to quantify or predict. This is not an engineering problem with a clear solution. As a professional in another field, I can certainly tell you I don't want my compensation based on factors I have no control over. Yes, teachers influence student performance, but my challenge to Mr. Johnson is to parse all of the parameters in play before making such a sweeping recommendation. By doing so, he will uncover a complex problem with more than a simple feel-good remedy. Let's get to work on this.
K.A. Martin
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