Policy Corner: Two Lousy Education Ideas
Gore's signing bonuses : Al Gore proposes to meet the rising demand
for new teachers by creating what he calls a "21st Century National Teachers Corps." Of the 75,000 talented
people he hopes to attract to teaching each year, he thinks 60,000 should be
new college graduates and 15,000 should be "mid-career professionals" who want
to change jobs. Gore wants to attract bright and talented people in both
categories by giving them hefty signing bonuses. In last Friday's
Nightline debate, he indicated that he would set the bounty at $10,000 a
head.
What a poor use of $750 million a year that would be. There are tens of
thousands of capable college graduates as well as mid-career professionals who
would love nothing more than to become public-school teachers either for a few
years or longer. But they can't become public-school teachers. What prevents
them isn't the insufficient pay, the low social status, or the emotionally
taxing work. It's the teachers' unions, which maintain powerful barriers to
entry in the form of certification requirements. This means that if you're a
smart young college graduate or a bored lawyer or a retired-at-42 Army colonel
who wants to teach in a public school, you can't do so without obtaining
credits in education. And because education courses are a colossal waste of
time, many people who would make wonderful teachers never get the
opportunity.
The idea of a Peace Corps-type program fueled by big signing bonuses seems
odd in any case. If Gore really wants to attract more talented people to
careers in teaching, he needs to do two things he's not doing. He needs to
appeal to the idealism of those he wants to recruit by telling them that they
can make more money elsewhere but that they can do more for society by becoming
teachers. And he needs to prevent his allies in the teachers' unions from
continuing to serve as gatekeepers to the profession.
McCain's tax breaks : McCain always gets a chuckle for his line that a
good teacher shouldn't be paid less than a bad senator. But his plan for
rewarding good teachers is wackier than Gore's and much more foolish. According
to an AP story, McCain plans to spend $1 billion on income-tax cuts for the
nation's best teachers. A teacher rated "excellent" might get a 25 percent
income tax credit. McCain apparently thinks this will produce a helpful kind of
competition in the public schools.
Merit pay, like alternate certification, is a sound idea that has been
blocked by the teachers' unions, which instead want more pay for everybody. But
McCain has come up with an ass-backward method of inflicting merit pay--an idea
that's awful for so many reasons one almost doesn't know where to begin
criticizing it. The biggest problem is that once you start trying to shape
people's career choices through the tax code--awarding tax-favored status to
some professions and not others--you're on an express train to hell. Why
teachers but not social workers? Why social workers but not nurses? Why nurses
and not police? And indeed, why teachers at public schools and not teachers at
private and parochial schools--where McCain wants students to be able to go
with the help of federally funded vouchers. With this idea, McCain, who casts
himself as the arch-foe of the special interests in Washington, has devised an
entirely new form of favoritism for special interests to pursue.
