RALEIGH – In the General Assembly, angry Democrats are lashing out at what they see as Republican efforts to advance an education agenda based around choice and competition, rigorous standards and meaningful testing, and more efficient expenditure of tax dollars.
I can understand why they are upset. Bringing North Carolina’s education policies into the modern era – and closer to the policies that prevail in higher-achieving states and countries – does represent a major break with the recent past.
Under governors and legislators of both parties, the state’s public schools made measurable progress in the early to mid-1990s. But then, despite the implementation of several costly programs, the progress ground to a halt. Democratic reformers became enamored with ideas that sounded promising, such as large-scale preschool interventions and class-size reductions, but proved to have few if any measurable benefits over the past decade.
Another major element of that mid-1990s mix of Democratic education policies was a $1 billion increase in average teacher pay. While some of the money was earmarked for school-wide bonuses based on growth in standardized test scores, lawmakers attached most of it to the usual labor-union preferences such as seniority pay and bonuses for obtaining additional education.
When it comes to attracting, training, retaining, and rewarding excellent teachers, North Carolina is not a national leader. Don’t take my word for it. A new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality points to Massachusetts, Colorado, Florida, Delaware, Louisiana, and the District of Columbia as national leaders in teacher policy.
Other Southern states with higher rankings than North Carolina included Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas. They are more likely than North Carolina to apply sound principles and the latest educational research to the task of increasing the effectiveness of public-school teachers.
Some policies that the NCTQ report recommends North Carolina adopt, or adopt more fully, include:
• Connecting sound evaluation of classroom performance to tenure and retention decisions.
• Ensuring that teachers truly understand the academic content they are expected to teach.
• Reforming the pension system to provide portability, reduce cost, and avoid perverse incentives for teachers.
Over the years, governors and legislators have tended to celebrate national studies and comparisons that put our state in the best possible light and downplay or ignore studies and comparisons that reveal our state’s shortcomings. It’s not hard to understand why. Incumbent politicians prefer good news to bad news. They seek credit from voters for what goes right during their tenure, and try either to shift the blame for or deny the existence of countervailing negative trends.
The strategy may pay political dividends. But it has helped create and reinforce a debilitating insularity on the part of North Carolina’s political class. Like washed-up actors fondly remembering the good old days of intoxicating stardom and professional accomplishment, too many veteran politicians prefer live in a fantasy world of past glories rather than accept the reality of the present day – that our state’s schools, infrastructure, tax code, and governing structures are outmoded and uncompetitive in a world of quicksilver capital and international competition.
Instead of embracing change, these lawmakers have become obstructionists. They insist on protecting ineffective monopolies, and the jobs of their political supporters, instead of insisting on higher productivity and more consumer choice in education and other public services.
Their strident rhetoric may represent the last gasp of an old, outdated order. But does it retain enough force to delay education reform for another year?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.