A Stitch in Haste

Have you heard of the College Board's Center for Innovative Thought?

Have you heard of their recent report, "Teachers and the Uncertain American Future"?

You know, the one that wants to make education even more subject to federal command-and-control, more socialist, and more expensive, than it already is:

We recommend a national fund, a Teachers’ Trust, devoted to supporting these reforms and financed by a federal appropriation, matched by state and local revenues and a special assessment on corporate windfall profits.

The total recommendation is for an extra $64.5 billion dollars per year, every year, just for teacher salaries.

The very next sentence after the numbers are broken down:

The increases described in this document are modest.
I'd hate to see their idea of a "bold" increase.

A guest blogger at Joanne Jacobs sums it all up nicely:

[I]f we're going to have the political capital for a Teacher's Trust (complete with big signs and official letterhead and all that jazz), why not just legislate a minimum wage for high school teachers at $70,000 entry, and automatic $7,500/year raises for the first ten years? Because that's how much money you're going to have to pay to attract the sort of teachers I know you want — people like my friends from law school who are brilliant, enthusiastic, personable, creative, knowledgeable, and making a quarter of a million dollars a year at age 30.

Indeed — a minimum wage for ultra-unskilled workers is a "human right," but a minimum wage for ultra-skilled teachers that obviates the need for a massive new federal educational bureaucracy is apparently too simple a solution for this task force. Go figure.

By the way: what if there are no "corporate windfall profits" to tax? Then what?

Meanwhile, here's my version of "why not just" — Why not just give parents vouchers? Why not give the power of the educational purse to parents rather than some new and ominous federal bureaucracy? The financing details would be ancillary; the fundamental outcome would be that if parents could choose their kids' schools without the disruption of relocation to another school district, then I suspect the "teacher salary crisis" would promptly take care of itself.

How is "more money" the answer to education reform? How does "more money" smash the teachers unions? How does "more money" abolish the long-obsolete agrarian school calendar? How does "more money" end the counterproductive mainstreaming of special-needs students? How does "more money" stop ineffective bilingual education programs from being substituted for rigorous English as a Second Language instruction?

"More money" is not the answer, and certainly not in the guise of more tax-and-spend masquerading as a faux "Teachers' Trust."

There can be no "reform" without, um, reform.

Call it my "minority report."