What Will Improve Schools?

Column for week of September 15, 2014

     The Michigan legislature has attempted to improve
Michigan schools.  One of these attempts involved merit pay. 
Beyond poor teachers and teachers' unions, few will argue that
paying teachers based on the value of their work is a bad idea.  
The legislators at last are pursuing a good idea.  Will they catch
it?

     The legislators mandated that teachers' pay be based on
merit.   Next, the legislators took merit pay off the collective
bargaining table.  School boards were to have complete
discretion in establishing merit pay.  If school boards are truly
committed to improving the quality of education they would
jump at this opportunity to motivate teachers.

     Instead some school boards ran in the opposite direction. 
Faced with mandatory merit pay one school board established
merit pay as one dollar per year extra for the best teachers.   The
Ann Arbor school board negotiated merit pay with the teachers'
union and came up with $150 per year.

     How could the board negotiate something that the
legislators mandated was within the sole discretion of the board? 
The board claimed its discretion included deciding to let the
union decide merit pay.  Should the legislature amend the law to
make it even clearer that the union has no voice in deciding
merit pay?

     Why bother?  This is just one more example of top down
control not working.  You can't drive a horse that doesn't want
to be driven.  First you must provide the incentives to make the
horse willing to be driven.  Until school boards and
administrators are motivated to seek to provide quality education,
no mandate will help.  The mandate will be ignored, evaded or
poorly implemented.

     Kicking the problems to the national government will be
an even bigger failure.  No Child Left Behind and Common
Core, etc. were guaranteed failures even before they were
launched.  It wasn't  necessary to read them to know they would
fail to improve schools.

     It is pointless to try micro managing school
administrators or any other managers.  The only answer is to
create incentives so that the managers are rewarded for good
performance and punished for bad performance.  In other words,
we need merit pay for administrators.  This doesn't mean the
legislature should pass a law requiring merit pay for
administrators.  It would suffer the same fate as has merit pay
for teachers.  Who would judge the merit of
administrators?     

     Schools are supposed to serve students and their parents,
not serve unions, politicians and bureaucrats.  The parents and
students should evaluate the administrators and give them
thumbs up or thumbs down.

     This doesn't mean let the community vote on the
administrators' merit.  Such a vote would be an exercise in
futility.  No matter what a school does it won't please everyone. 
Not everyone wants the same things from a school.  One size
fits all ends up fitting no one.

     We should determine the merit of school administrators
the same way we determine the merit of managers of grocery
stores, clothing stores, restaurants, repair shops, and movie
makers.  Usually we don't even know who these managers are or
what they do.

     We judge their products.  Then we buy the products that
we believe serve us best.  When others prefer different products,
we don't interfere with their buying them.  This eliminates one
size fits all.

     The manager's survival as a manager depends on how
well his enterprise serves its customers.  The customers' choices
fire the failing managers and reward those who do good jobs. 
This is merit pay that really works to motivate good service.  It
doesn't force managers to do good jobs, or any kind of jobs.  It
makes them want to do a good job for their own benefit. 

     Competition and survival of the best providers is the only
road to quality for any product, including education.  Our current
government school system is pure socialism.  It can only fail
miserably as socialism always has and always will.

aldmccallum@gmail.com
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Copyright 2014
Albert D. McCallum