The education system in the United States is broken. Despite spending more money than any other country in the world on education, with the exception of Switzerland, the U.S. is consistently outperformed by its international competitors.
The latest test results from the Program for International Student Assessment show that the U.S. ranks 26th in math, 17th in reading and 21st in science. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Slovak Republic spends about $53,000 USD per student each year, whereas the U.S. spends $115,000 per student.
Despite this spending disparity, the OECD has shown that students from each country “perform at the same level.”
What’s worse about the U.S.’s failure in the education system is the confounding ramifications of this failure. According to the documentary film, Waiting for Superman, a student drops out of high school in the U.S. every 26 seconds.
Students who drop out are eight times more likely to go to jail, are not eligible for 90 percent of jobs, get paid 40 cents on the dollar compared to college graduates and are more likely to need public assistance.
Given that the future of our country lies in the hands of children, and that a good education is quickly becoming a necessity, one must wonder what it is that the education system is doing so ineffectively. It seems that it would be difficult to spend our dollars efficiently.
Although public education is multifaceted and cannot possibly be solved by any singular provision, one of the main criticisms politicians and students alike have concerning public education is the tenure system. Under the tenure system, a teacher who has been working for a school for a specified amount of time is effectively impossible to fire.
The policy of tenure was popularized by unions, such as the National Educator’s Association, throughout the U.S. in the late
1890s and early 1900s, when teachers were frequently subjected to flippant job termination from administrators and unreasonable demands from parents. Unions argued that teachers, just like all other industries, required some sort of protection.
Today, about 2.3 million public school teachers in the U.S. have tenure. Many argue that schools would do better without some of them. Time magazine reported instances including a Florida teacher who remained in classrooms for a year despite the fact that she threw books at students and forced them to refer to her as “Ms. God.”
It has been argued on numerous occasions in the political sphere that the inability of administrators to fire bad teachers and replace them with new, better teachers inevitably leads to a subpar education for students. Now a similar argument is being made in the courtroom.
The case Vergara v. California was filed last Monday by the nonprofit advocacy group, Students Matter, on behalf of nine students and their families in Los Angeles Superior Court, according to the L.A. Times.
Students Matter is reportedly arguing in court that the tenure laws in California are innately in violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, because they do not ensure that students have access to satisfactory education.
According to The New York Times, the first witness and former superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District, John Deasy, said, “attempts to dismiss ineffective teachers can cost $250,000 to $450,000 and include years of appeals and legal proceedings.” This, Deasy said, “make[s] it impossible not to place ineffective teachers at schools with high poverty rates.”
Only time will tell if the court rules that tenure is fundamentally irreconcilable with equal access to education, but nearly anyone can tell that a teacher who will only answer to “Ms. God” in the classroom should not be hard to fire.
Send Tim your thoughts to technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.
