Dancing with the lemons

Last week in my column I suggested that Governor Martinez give consideration to grabbing the third rail of political issues, such as cuts in Medicaid, to help balance the FY2012 state budget.

Well, here’s another third rail issue for her to grab on to: cuts in education. First off, I’d like to holler a hello to our newly nominated public education secretary, Hanna Skandera. It appears she’s got a lot of reform experience and we could surely use reform here in the land of disappointing educational rankings.

Naturally, she is going to run smack into many a rancorous debate with our teachers unions over reform and new ideas to improve student performance.

Unions make it almost impossible to sack incompetent teachers. A lawyer friend of mine out in California says that “getting rid of a problem teacher can make the O.J. Simpson trial look like a cakewalk.”

Teacher incompetence is so endemic that a phrase has emerged in academic circles applied to the practice of reassigning bad teachers to new schools rather than getting rid of them: “Dancing with the lemons.”

In a column I wrote last September, “Why not a Sunshine Portal for teachers,” I addressed the value-added analysis to measure teacher effectiveness now being use in the Los Angeles school district.

The Praetorian Guard

Teachers’ unions have often acted as the Praetorian Guard when it comes to educational innovation.

Here in New Mexico we have the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) New Mexico standing sentry against reform. It has fought relentlessly against charter schools (which escape union rules about pay and promotion) and scholarship schemes (which give choice to parents).

The following announcement comes copied directly from its website:

“Join Us January 17th! Rallly to Raise Revenues Instead of Cutting Education.

“Join the American Federation of Teachers New Mexico and the Albuquerque Teachers Federation on January 17th in Santa Fe to send a clear message to our lawmakers: Education is a civil right. We must raise revenues instead of education!”

This is from the No. 1 teachers’ union in New Mexico, and its own website announcement misspells “rally” in the headline and concludes its call to arms to its members with the screwy entreaty: “We must raise revenues instead of education!”

Huh?

Michelle Rhee is coming to town

I was glad to hear that Governor Martinez plans to consult with Michelle Rhee and her newly formed foundation StudentsFirst.org to generate new education reform ideas.

For those unfamiliar with Ms. Rhee, she was the chancellor of the awful school system in Washington, D.C., where she didn’t hesitate to close failing schools, fire ineffective teachers and principals, and advocate merit pay. But the unions fought her every step of the way, using their muscle first to get rid of her patron, the city’s mayor, and then to bring about her own resignation.

Eric Hanushek, an education economist at Stanford University, argues that replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of American teachers with merely average performers could move the United States from near the bottom to near the top of the international math and science rankings.

Many consider Dr. Hanushek the foremost authority on the analysis of the determinants of student achievement.

It’s my opinion that the rigidity of the public sector does not merely reduce the quality of services. It also discourages innovation. In the private sector innovative firms routinely experiment with new business models, measure the success of those models and then expand successful ones. But whenever public-sector managers have tried to do the same – by establishing magnet schools that focus on certain subjects, or charter schools with longer teaching days, for example – the unions have opposed them.

Waiting for Superman

Davis Guggenheim, an impeccably liberal film director whose credits include Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” (I’ll forgive him for that movie, but that’s a different argument and column), subjected the teachers’ unions to a merciless critique in his latest documentary “Waiting for Superman,” flagellating them for perpetuating a broken system and presenting Randi Weingarden, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, as “something of a foaming satanic beast.”

This, from a liberal?

When Martinez was running her gubernatorial campaign she promised if elected she would not make cuts in Medicaid or education. But she was working off of a deficit number of $260 million given to her by the Legislative Finance Committee. Closer to election night, the number doubled to between $400 million and $500 million.

I think this gives our governor the policy flexibility to put Medicaid and education back on the chopping block. I think it would be unfair to accuse her of “breaking her campaign promises” when she was given false financial information by the previous administration.

Molitor is a regular columnist for this site. You can reach him at tgmolitor@comcast.net.

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