Will states, school districts, and unions also agree to revise, in the long term, the ways teachers are hired, compensated, and fired, hopefully precluding the need for mass layoffs in the future?Even if there weren't serious problems with the proposed metrics for compensating and firing teachers, even if the changes were to do everything the advocates have claimed, how would these changes have any effect on the pro-cyclic economic policies of states? Has anyone even suggested a relationship here?
And if we're not limited to cases where there is some sort of likely causal relationship, why limit ourselves to lay-offs? Why not have something like this: "Will states, school districts, and unions also agree to revise, in the long term, the ways teachers are hired, compensated, and fired, hopefully ending future violence in the Middle East, curing cancer and preventing future movie version of SNL sketches?"?
What the hell, dream big.
"Will teachers’ unions agree to institute freezes or cuts to salaries and benefits in order to prevent layoffs—something many have resisted this year?"
ReplyDeleteThis is, I think, the more key sentence. In some sort of odd way, the reformers seem to think that they can make teachers sufficiently more productive by decreasing compensation that education quality does not suffer. The agenda seems to be something like:
We overpay teachers. Paying teachers too much money makes them less competent. If we could just remove job security, wage stability (i.e. allowing drastic pay cuts) and institute standardized tests then we'd be able to get more product for less cost.
It isn't like this outcome is impossible but one might remember the fate of other systems that tried to reduce compensation while keeping production high by careful central planning. Was Soviet Russia really such an amazing success?