. . . . Seniority trumps everything and is treated as a proxy for excellence. Under current rules, a school that has an enrollment shortfall or budget problem and has to cut one of its five math teachers cuts the least senior teacher, period. In progressive systems like the one in Washington, D.C., which has made big gains on federal assessment tests, decisions about which teachers to cut are based on a combination of factors, including how they stack up on evaluations and whether they possess special skills. The goal is to keep the most talented teachers. 

Similarly, the salary schedule in New York is calculated to reward longevity, requiring 22 years to get to the top level. Teachers are also rewarded for work toward advanced degrees, but this coursework does not necessarily have any bearing on how poorly or well they teach. . . .

If seniority doesn't matter, and youthful energy and smarts are everything, why stop with the teaching profession? Every business, including the journalism industry (are you listening, NYT?) should adopt a performance-based compensation system. For journalism, it shouldn't matter how long you've been reporting news. If a new graduate from an elite journalism school can write a better editorial at the New York Times, why not replace the old guard? Similarly, our military should forego seniority in its promotions. Newer, younger, and high performing soldiers should replace high ranking, experienced officers. The same with the airline industry. Let inexperienced but bright and high performing pilots replace those old, lazy captains who are protected by the unions. Hospitals should rid themselves of experienced doctors and replace them with new ones with Harvard smarts and youthful energy. Older corporate CEO's should make room for the new kid from Yale; maybe we can avoid more Wall Street crashes, mine disasters, and Deep Water Horizon-type catastrophes. 

 Anyway, this editorial is distinguished by an obsessive focus on teachers, which has prevented overdue acknowledgement of negative social conditions in many urban neighborhoods. That is very revealing.

With the reckless urgency that marks a desperate cynical scrambling to sustain a corporate welfare education scheme that is doomed by its own greedy overreaching and fraudulent machinations , the Koch Industry governors have gone All In to dismantle public schools and to crush teachers and staff.  From Nick Anderson at WaPo:

INDIANAPOLIS - The Republican faceoff with labor unions in the Midwest and elsewhere marks not just a fight over money and collective bargaining, but also a test of wills over how to improve the nation's schools.


GOP governors are pushing to limit teacher bargaining rights, dismantle teacher tenure and channel public money toward private schools. All are direct challenges to the teachers unions and their mostly Democratic political allies in Congress and in statehouses across the nation.

This approach to school reform is far more confrontational than President Obama's and threatens to polarize what has been a largely bipartisan movement to overhaul education. Analysts say teachers might grow leery of signing onto a school improvement agenda if they believe it will trample their rights.

"This is big," Rick Muir, president of the Indiana Federation of Teachers, said of the Republican agenda. "It's not one item. It's not two. They've seized the opportunity to go on the attack. They're going for the jugular."

Here in Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), a possible 2012 presidential contender, and several of his Republican peers are pushing a bill to connect teacher evaluations with test scores, launch a system of performance-based pay and make it easier to dismiss teachers repeatedly rated ineffective or in need of improvement. Other Daniels-backed bills would offer publicly funded vouchers to help children of low to moderate means attend private school and narrow the scope of collective bargaining to wages and benefits.. . .

Here is the conclusion of George Will's most recent tribute to Arne Duncan for moving forward on Obama's plan to re-focus the war against teachers and public schools down to the state level, whereby Obama can then be shielded from blame for the anti-union, anti-democratic, and anti-civil rights actions that his own federal policies encourage:

Regarding grades K through 12, federal education policy — if such there must be — should permit, indeed encourage, 50 laboratories of educational experimentation. Federal policy should be confined to providing financial rewards contingent on improvements confirmed by national metrics — Duncan’s single goal post.


The Education Department sits at the foot of Capitol Hill, where many new legislators consider “federal education policy” a constitutional oxymoron. They have a point. They might, however, decide that the changes Duncan proposes — on balance, greater state flexibility in meeting national goals — make him the Obama administration’s redeeming feature. 

Take Tennessee as a prime example.  As one of the first two states to land big money ($500 million) from Race to the Trough Top,  the State set out immediately to remove the cap on charter schools and to promote them as the prime school turnaround option, to undergird its test-score analysis and archival systems, and to begin to hurriedly design a teacher evaluation system based on test scores. 

Bill Sanders, testing guru and former adjunct professor at UT, has moved back to Nashville from the SAS campus in North Carolina to be close to the action.  So far Sanders has remained mum on the fact that the National Academy of Sciences has nothing good to say about using value-added modeling for assessment of anything or anyone involving high stakes.  But, then, for some teachers don't matter--it is only the students' test scores that matter.

Now combine these developments with the corporate-funded election success by Tennessee Tea Party Republicans who now suddenly control both State Houses and the Governor's Chair, and you have a perfect storm aimed squarely at sweeping away the teaching profession, teacher preparation, collective bargaining, due process, retirement, school governance and oversight. 

In short, public education as we know it will cease to exist if these guys prevail, with the federal government doing nothing except to help the process along with huge infusions of cash.  Here is a list of pending legislation now zooming through the legislative chambers in Nashville:

HB130, abolishes teacher unions’ ability to negotiate conditions of employment with school districts.

SB102, eliminates Tennessee Education Association-selected positions on Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System board of directors.

HB159, prohibits public employees having dues deductions for either political action committees or dues, if the organization engages in political activity “in any way.”

HB145, blocks Tennessee Education Association from recommending appointees to the Tennessee Financial Literacy Commission board of directors.

These guys make Fathead Christie in New Jersey look a Deweyean progressive. 

And don't expect the new governor, Bill Haslam, to veto any of these draconian measures if they are voted through.  As CEO and majority owner of Pilot Oil (yes, the ones you see on every interstate), Haslam is the corporationist's poster boy.  Here are few of his holdings that he dumped prior to his election in order to avoid ethics questions:

The multimillionaire Knoxville mayor sold stocks of U.S. tobacco giants Lorillard Inc. and Philip Morris International, several oil companies, Canadian payday loan company Cash Store Finance Services Inc. and Amazon, the Internet retailer that refuses to collect sales taxes from customers on behalf of states such as Tennessee.

He also got rid of investments in two major state contractors, CVS Caremark, which manages state pharmacy benefits, and United Health Group, which owns TennCare contractor AmeriChoice.

Good folks.

So, yes, there is a new new federalism, or is that feudalism?  Unless people organize in every state, a piece of the national juggernaut will be show up in every state. 

Today there are signs that teachers are hitting back, suing a local school board that could not wait for the new laws crushing collective bargaining to go into effect.  That's a start.  Now if the prostisuits who run the AFT and NEA would come out their spider holes and say something, that might help.  Oh, I forgot--they're listening to Arne and Bill Gates.

While Joel Klein was Chancellor of NYC Schools, there was no one besides Bloomberg that teachers hated more within the five boroughs.  With his saccharine smirk that elevates an arrogance born of ignorance and an utter disdain for educators, Klein played McChoakumchild to Bloomberg's Gradgrind with true Dickensian authenticity. 

Now that Klein is spending more time with his family in the wake of the great New York test score fraud, he has yet ascended to the boardroom of News Corp, where he gets his marching orders from Murdoch's top propaganda artists, who live by the dictum that the masses fall more readily for the big lie than the small one.

And so it is that Klein has been set upon any unsuspecting and gullible public, here and abroad, to spew the Oligarchs' big lies to anyone willing to listen:

Clearly both the Mayor and the former schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have a different idea of what makes a good teacher. Over the weekend, Klein deplored that fact that it was easier to execute a killer than fire an incompetent teacher. “Five to 10 percent are not remotely capable,” Klein told the London Sunday Times. “It’s easier to prosecute a capital-punishment case in the U.S. than terminate an incompetent teacher.”

Nice metaphor. . . .