"Just what are the real priorities of the educational establishment, the National Education Association, the administrators, the teachers' unions? Are these groups really interested in getting the best teachers into the classroom and the incompetents out? Will throwing more money at the public schools ensure better education? Teachers' unions are very vocal about higher salaries and job security, and they are right. But when you ask them how they propose to go about rewarding merit and throwing out the dumbbells, the silence is deafening."
Walker Percy said that in a book published in 1991. Yes, the debate about how to reward schools and teachers, and how much to reward the best, has been going on since memory runneth not to the contrary. Maybe even back when the debate was being held outside the one-room schoolhouse.
Too often when it comes to education in this state, folks have had to rely on that old "thank God for" some other state, usually Mississippi. When has Arkansas ever led on an education matter?
Glad you asked. If you read the paper close enough just this past Thursday, you might have noted that that outfit of careful examination, that outfit of deep analysis, that outfit of surveys that must be some tough reading--the Thomas B. Fordham Institute--tagged Arkansas as one of the country's best when it comes to rewarding schools.
The Thomas Fordham folks apparently gathered up paperwork from 50 states and studied accountability systems. (Tough reading.) It appears as though Arkansas deserves a lot of praise for the way it rewards schools, when punishment is most often the preferred M.O.
The institute said that only a handful of states had regs that rewarded schools for students who moved from lower levels of testing to the Advanced levels.
"Our analysis indicates that just four states--Arkansas, Ohio, Oregon and South Carolina--have truly praiseworthy systems when it comes to focusing attention on these students," the institute's report says.
Arkansas and South Carolina lumped in with Ohio and Oregon when it comes to education practices? We'll take it. And we imagine so would the folks in South Carolina.
We imagine that the folks at the Thomas Fordham Institute have heard about the $100 per student that Arkansas gives as a reward to the best schools, and the $50 per student that the state gives to the next-best. Imagine that: Teachers and principals and administrators and others in the business of education like to be recognized, rewarded, and given extra money to improve classrooms, buy new equipment or just to get raises. Or whatever the schools can get the state to approve. Which is how this program works in Arkansas.
As if teachers were people, too, and have an incentive to make more money. We've never understood the opposition to merit pay in the ranks of the teachers' unions. Sure, undeserving teachers pay union dues, too. But teachers know who's doing a good job and who's sleepwalking to retirement. And across-the-board raises do little to encourage classroom excellence.
The whole country could benefit from what Arkansas is doing.
Hey, Mississippi: Tell the others to catch up.
Editorial on 09/08/2016