Anyone who has succeeded in business has survived a lot of failure—but they were tough enough to get back up and try again and again. Kids need to learn that success requires persistence. Self-esteem should come from overcoming challenges and surviving the hard knocks of trying to be better.
Yet today, some teachers and school administrators are more concerned about hurting their students’ feelings or about hearing complaints from parents that they’re being too tough. Instead of becoming more competitive, we’re actually eliminating competition. That’s incredible—and wrong.
Competition makes you stronger, it forces you to work harder, to do more. Corporations that can’t compete with other companies go out of business, no matter how nice they are or how good they feel about themselves. Small businesses have the same challenge. The owners have to work hard and compete for their survival or they won’t make it.
Competition is why I’m very much in favor of school choice. Let schools compete for kids. I guarantee that if you forced schools to get better or close because parents didn’t want to enroll their kids there, they would get better. Those schools that weren’t good enough to attract students would close, and that’s a good thing.
For two decades I’ve been urging politicians to open the schoolhouse doors and let parents decide which schools are best for their children. Professional educators look to options such as school choice, charter schools, voucher programs, magnet schools, and opportunity scholarships.
Call them what you want—they all come down to the same thing: fostering competition.
Those people who are against offering parents choices claim that doing so would be the end of good public schools. Better charter or magnet schools would drain the top kids out of that system, or hurt the morale of those left behind.
Suddenly, the excellence that comes from competition is being criticized.
Let’s look at the facts. While the number of charter schools has grown substantially, they are still a small percentage of our public schools. But it looks like they are making a difference, especially in urban areas. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes looked at the impact charter schools have made in 41 urban areas. They report that charter school students, compared to students in public schools, learn 40 days more advanced in math, and 28 more days in reading. That is significant, no matter how you look at it.
Look, I know that people both for and against school choice can roll out endless arguments and statistics showing charter schools are either very successful or make no difference at all. This is a legitimate debate. But anyone except a politician running for office and looking for support from the teacher unions has to realize that smaller class sizes, more individualized instruction, and stricter discipline all make a huge positive difference. Making teachers accountable is important, but we should stop measuring their performance with mindless standardized tests. We should be embracing the success stories and using them as a model for improving the others.
I’m not as concerned about the kids growing up in wealthy communities, where high property taxes have allowed them to build great schools, hire the best teachers, and provide all the supplies they need. Those schools are doing fine.
In many urban areas, however, schools must fight for every tax dollar and are forced to have teachers and students bring in their own basic supplies such as pencils and paper. That’s a national tragedy.
The problem with public schools is that in many places there is no way to take an honest measurement of how they’re doing. If a charter school isn’t doing the job, it closes. That’s the type of accountability we need throughout our educational system.
One huge obstacle is the strength of the teacher unions. Teacher unions don’t want school choice because it means a potential reduction in union-protected jobs. In New York, for example, the unions have been so powerful for so long that, more than four decades ago, Woody Allen had a scene in his movie Sleeper in which a man wakes up in the future and is told that the world he’d known had been destroyed when the president of the powerful teachers union “got hold of a nuclear warhead.” Thanks to strong contracts negotiated by the New York City teacher union, it’s become almost impossible to discipline a teacher, much less actually fire one.
When there is a legitimate complaint against a teacher in the New York system, rather than having a quick hearing to determine the validity of the complaint, teachers are assigned to an area known as “the rubber room” while they wait for their hearing.
And they wait. They sit in empty classrooms or converted closets and do nothing—but they still get paid their whole salary. Some teachers spend several years waiting. No wonder they call it the rubber room—the whole concept is insane. But it’s the result of the contracts that strong unions have forced on New York and other cities. When teacher unions fight against school choice the unions are saying that their product isn’t good enough to compete in a free marketplace. Maybe they are right. And what about the good teachers? They can get stuck too and are at the mercy of the union.
These unions have a nice monopoly going, so why wouldn’t they want to protect their turf? By the way, the teachers are not the only ones with troublesome unions. In New York City, the janitors don’t arrive in the morning until exactly the same time as the students. That means the boiler might not be fired up yet, or doors might not be unlocked, so students have to wait outside.
To be upfront, I’m not a fan of the teacher unions, but I have great admiration and respect for teachers. Most of us can name a teacher or two who had a profound influence on our lives. But we’ve made teaching a tough profession. Good teachers love to teach. They respect and honor their profession. In too many classrooms, though, we’ve taken away their right to discipline disruptive kids, turning the teachers into babysitters as much as educators.
And a lot of good teachers aren’t paid enough. It’s an interesting choice we’ve made as a society. We entrust our kids to teachers for most of the daytime, where they’ll have a really big impact on how their students will grow up. But we don’t pay enough to attract the best people to the profession.
Unfortunately, teachers are not paid on merit. The standard for advancement is mostly the number of years of service—seniority. The really good and inspirational teachers burn out under the painful conditions found in too many schools. The bad teachers tend to hang around since they have nowhere else to go. Thus, the paychecks tend to be bigger for the less capable.
That’s exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.
One way of making the profession more attractive is to put some discipline back in the school. A lot of our schools aren’t safe. Putting metal detectors at the door may prevent kids from bringing in weapons, but it still doesn’t prevent them from causing problems. We need to get a lot tougher on troublemakers. We need to stop feeling sorry for them. They are robbing other kids of time to learn.
I’m not saying we should go back to the days when teachers would get physical with students, but we need to restore rules about behavior in the classroom and hire trained security officers who can help enforce those rules. The parents or guardians must be brought into the process as well.
Most disciplinary problems among students begin in the home. All parents should ask themselves: What kind of example am I setting?
At the same time, there is nothing more important to the future of this country than our colleges and universities. We have the best higher-education system in the world. There is a reason that young people from all over the world come here to study at our schools.