In his Town Hall column today, Mike Adams takes Governor Easley to task for his veto of the legislature’s bill to ease teacher licensing in the state. You can (and should!) read it here. And yes, shucks, he does quote me.
The fact of the matter is that paper standards and credentials don’t make for good teachers. If the state wanted a full complement of good teachers, it would give school principals a free hand to hire those who seemed likely to be capable (either immediately or after some training) and to fire those who didn’t perform well. It would also reward principals whose schools improved, to give them a strong incentive to find good teachers and get rid of bad ones. All we need, in short, are market incentives so that personnel decisions are made the same way they are in private schools, where principals don’t much care about paper credentials, but concern themselves with classroom performance. That’s why private schools in cities like New York run academic circles around the government schools. They have the freedom to make hiring and firing decisions based on rational grounds.
