| The News resorts to its oldest, most tested trick this morning ... scare tactics. If you vote for Proposal 2, you are voting to undo teacher "reforms" from the last two years. Many teachers do good work, and they ought to be commended. But recent education reforms sought to end longstanding protections for bad teachers — helping ensure the best and brightest teachers are leading classrooms across the state. It's hard to figure out why anyone would see that as a negative change. But it's a big reason why the powerful teachers unions in this state are fighting so hard to make permanent changes to the Constitution. That should make citizens wary.
The problem? Because there is no statistical evidence that teacher tenure ever affected educational outcomes. Teacher tenure "reform" was presented as a way to improve education because of the idea that bad teachers were holding back students, and then passed despite the fact that there exists no evidence that this is true. In fact, the best research says that the number of really awful teachers are fairly low, and that far from being impossible to fire them, it's pretty easy to build the case to remove that person from the classroom. Hell, if you want something anecdotal, you are free to examine the work record of the Republican running for Thad McCotter's seat. He was the picture of a terrible teacher who didn't care, and was eventually broomed out of the classroom. There wasn't any reason for this set of "reforms," except that the people who run the Legislature don't like teachers' unions. The News goes on to accuse teachers of supporting this so they can strike without fear of getting fired. I have an alternate explanation that's actually based in fact ... the state's teachers took a look at the stuff the Legislature was doing -- including talking about a Right-to-Work bill that affected only educators -- and decided that the only recourse they had to open to protect themselves was to get behind an omnibus-style constitutional amendment enshrining their rights in the constitution. That, unfortunately, comes with the downside that it suggests that the News, the Legislature, and business groups brought all this upon themselves by tormenting teachers at every turn. |
