Why Our Children Fail

7. Inflexible tenure and compensation tracks
Education Minnesota generally supports sound educational policy. But on the topic of seniority, the union remains too rigid.

After a consecutive three-year on-the-job probationary period in the same school district, public school teachers in Minnesota become tenured in the district. They can still be fired, but the termination process remains unreasonably difficult. Tenure has its virtues, providing freedom from political harassment and arbitrary school district decisions. But it can cripple the ability of a school staff to remain together in times of rising or falling enrollment, when teachers with the greatest seniority take precedence.

Among teachers, age is not necessarily preferable to youth—or vice versa. But there is an educational advantage in staff stability. We agree with the recent findings of the New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit program designed to develop outstanding new public school teachers, that the teacher-termination process must be made easier so a principal can keep a school’s teaching team together.

As for compensation, Governor Pawlenty’s experimental Q Comp program will provide extra teacher pay for measurably improved classroom results—a useful step in directing incentives toward real student learning. Q Comp is voluntary, but already Minneapolis, Hopkins, St. Francis, Mounds View, Fridley, Alexandria, LaCrescent–Hokah, and St. Cloud have signed on. What are other districts waiting for?

8. Innovation for its own sake
Charter schools. Vouchers. Language immersion. Montessori . . . . Well-intentioned teachers, parents, politicians, and interest groups all have ideas about how schools should be run and what options should be offered. But not all of their “solutions” have proven effective—either for the children or the educational goals of the community. And offering too many choices can be costly, both financially and in terms of parental confusion.

We waste valuable time debating ideological initiatives such as school vouchers—a concept rooted in the belief that competition produces better and less costly results, which may be true for business and technology, but hasn’t been proven true for education. Even public school choice—created to address mandated desegregation and to help keep middle-class students in city schools—has run amok, creating confounding first, second, and third “choices” for city parents and students, often at schools across town and involving ever higher busing costs.

Charter schools were created in Minnesota in 1991. There are now more than 125 across the state—serving more than 26,000 students—and they too may need reining in. Questions abound about their successes and failures, their costs versus benefits. The Minneapolis School Board is right to seek answers to these questions before agreeing to more charter schools in the city. The objective must not be to stifle innovation, but to make sure the successful are replicated, the failures closed, and that new charters are granted only on proven prospects for success.

Reformers often get what they want when they clamor long and hard enough. For the majority of students and parents, however, the results often leave much to be desired.