One of the most educational activities is to watch what happens when a public official seeks to reform the Big Education system. The entrenched status quo — those who like things just the way they are — lash out with ridiculous claims about the motives of reformers. We’ve seen that dynamic on display in our state as reformers have successfully pushed for more options for parents. Thankfully, North Carolina reformers haven’t been deterred by the arrows.
In today’s Daily Journal, JLF’s John Hood delves into issues of teacher quality and the legislature’s decision to end the policy of paying teachers more when they secure a graduate degree.
What the political debate about North Carolina’s recent decision reveals is that the education establishment lives in a fantasy world, a world of wish-fulfillment rather than hard realities. Its denizens believe that raising taxes to spend more money on education is the state’s best strategy for economic development, despitecopious empirical evidence to the contrary. They attribute all gains in student achievement to their pet programs, while blaming the low performance of many states on factors entirely outside of their control — or on the fact that the students are not exposed to their pet programs long enough.
You’ll notice, by the way, that their deeply cherished beliefs happen to align with their personal interests. Who are the strongest lobbyists for giving teachers salary supplements to get master’s degrees? Schools of education at North Carolina’s public and private colleges, of course. The policy has generated a reliable stream of income for them for decades. Now that legislative engineers have diverted the stream to a more productive destination, they are panicked and angry.
