Fire doctors to cure obesity? Absurd!

     By now you’ve read part one about America’s obesity epidemic, and how blame falls squarely on the shoulders of our nation’s incompetent, lazy doctors. If we fire them and start over, the health and vigor of our citizens will rise to Olympic proportions. (If you haven’t read that yet, do so first and then come back here).

     By now, you’ve also noted how absurd the assertion, and how sophomoric the solution. Perhaps you can even smell the sarcasm emanating from your computer monitor. It’s utter nonsense – all of it. Yet this is exactly the kind of witch hunt targeting public school teachers throughout America.

     “We must fire bad teachers” – these words blazed across the cover of the March 15, 2010 Newsweek Magazine. Not once, not twice, but eleven times; chalk-written, line after line, as if a disobedient child were fulfilling his detention-time penance.

     “We must fire bad teachers”. Not a bad idea. Education is vitally important so it follows that teacher quality is vitally important as well. But the entire premise of the cover, and of Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert’s article within, is that the alleged decline of public education in America is the result of our teachers being too incompetent and lazy to provide effective instruction.

     Thomas and Wingert point to the persistent achievement gap between white students compared to poor and minority students; and they blame teachers. They note that as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores drop; and they blame teachers.

     News flash: as the number of obese Americans increases; so does the number of obesity-related heart attacks. Let’s blame the doctors.

     Thomas and Wingert go on to say that “Nothing is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones”. True enough. They also note the difficulty of attracting talent to the profession. “Most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound students”, they say; adding that many talented candidates “chose other, more highly compensated fields.”

     News flash: you get what you pay for.

     But do Thomas and Wingert call for higher teacher salaries? No. They nod apologetically to the nation’s “caring and selfless” teachers, perhaps not wanting to insult everyone with their bottom-of-the-barrel description of teacher quality. But it’s a backhanded compliment. They’re saying you can’t be a good teacher AND expect professional pay – as though the two are fundamentally incompatible.

     Would Americans be healthier if the starting M.D. salary was $30,000? Regardless, Thomas and Wingert leave us only the second option: fire the bad teachers.

     Yet they claim we can’t fire bad teachers because the “powerful” teacher’s unions protect them. They also claim teachers are given “lifetime tenure”. Two lies. As evidence, they say less than 1% of teachers are fired (interestingly, about the same percentage we see in doctors). They say “year after year, about 99 percent of all teachers are rated satisfactory by their school systems”.

     Perhaps those numbers exists because 99% of teachers ARE doing a good job. Perhaps the bad teachers – that whopping 1% of the total - ARE being fired. By Newsweek logic that can’t be right. If teachers were competent there would be no racial and socioeconomic achievement gap, right? Just like there’s no racial or socioeconomic factor in the prevalence of obesity. And if there were, we would blame the doctors and call for mass firings, right?

     What about “lifetime tenure”? Tenure, as the term is commonly used, isn’t granted in public school systems. Most states, including Kansas, have a probationary period in which new teachers can be terminated at the end of the year for no specific reason.  Non-probationary teachers have a "continuing contract", meaning they will continue to have a job year to year unless there is just cause for firing them.  Teachers can be and are fired for any number of legitimate reasons such as incompetence, unprofessional conduct, insubordination, and so forth.

     Unions don’t protect bad teachers. Unions protect good contracts. Unions make sure that firing is not arbitrary or capricious, but rather is only used for just cause. As such, unions help keep good teachers on the job.

     If a bad teacher is retained on the job, you’ll surely find a pusillanimous principal right above them. Or maybe there are no “highly qualified” candidates available to replace those teachers; and the school risks nasty labels and sanctions under No Child Left Behind if they dare fill a position with anything less.

     If unions protected bad teachers, non-union states should be firing scores of bad teachers. In “The Myth of the Powerful Teacher’s Union”, Los Angeles playwright David Macaray explains that South Carolina, where 100% of teachers are non-union, fires only 0.32% of teachers. North Carolina, where 97% of teachers are non-union, fires a miniscule 0.03% of teachers. Statistics not only don’t support Newsweek’s assertion, but actually contradict it.

     So where do Thomas and Wingert go next in their war on teachers? Check back soon for part three, but rest assured they won’t allow facts to interfere with their crusade.