Obama Insists On Performance Standards For Teachers

From The Atlantic:

Today, President Obama wades in to a controversy that threatens to split one of the Democratic Party's most generous source of donations and activists, the teacher unions, from the whole. [...] Obama wants more accountability for teachers.

This is good stuff. As it is, it's almost impossible to fire teachers no matter what they do. It's one of the reasons American education is failing. Predictably, unions beg to differ.

The teachers unions contend that there is no universal metric that can reliably assess teacher performance, particularly in poor neighborhoods where students experience intense social dislocation. Part of the problem is that nothing seems to work: not charter schools, not tying teachers to student performance, not throwing money at schools, not even curricula reform.

It's unlikely that the president will push for any major, significant reform which would entail the complete privatization of education. That would solve its problems entirely.

Allow fair and full competition between schools and that test scores will go up. Parents, after all, will send their children to the best school available to them. But without choice, anything goes, and those trapped in the public system will never have the same chances in life as those who enjoyed the good fortunate of being educated in a private school.

Accountability is a good and necessary step toward improving education but it won't do as long as the system remains unchanged and the premise that every child has a "right" to schooling remains unchallenged.

How Dreams of Equality Are Destroying American Schools

The New York Times reported last month that increasingly, "educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents." They are wondering whether it's healthy for children to have just one best friend.

"I think it is kids' preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults---teachers and counselors---we try to encourage them not to do that," said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. "We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends."

At a time when public schooling in the United States is in an absolutely dire state, education professionals are evidently pushing for even greater egalitarianism among kids. Rather than act on their natural inclination to select merely a single or a handful of friends, they ought to socialize more, these do-gooder profess, to understand that they're part of "society", not individuals. Some of them have now come to oppose standardized testing because poor results might hurt the feelings of underperforming students while others are fighting against vouchers and charter schools, alleging that they privilege some children at the cost of an even greater divide in American society.

Meanwhile, private schools are showing that students can do better, and they do it at a lower price tag. But the conservative elements preventing the American education system from moving forward---particularly the teachers' unions and their representatives in Washington---still insist that it is their job to foster equality, whatever the costs.

The solution? Free children from government schools and allow competition to improve education throughout the country.