Teachers and student performance

It would appear everyone agrees that teachers in the public schools should be paid based on their performance.

It only "appears" that way, however, because the teachers unions and their allies have adopted a double-talking definition of "performance" 180 degrees at variance from common sense.

Thanks in part to federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation, it's now possible to track each student's academic improvement from year to year, from classroom to classroom.

The old objection to holding a teacher responsible for student performance was that an uninspired teacher might luck out and get handed a classroom full of high-achieving geniuses. At the opposite extreme, a better and harder-working teacher might end up "looking bad" because he or she got saddled with a room full of knife-wielding delinquents from broken homes, many of whom didn't even make it through the year.

But modern computer tracking can overcome that objection. If individual kids did well the year before and the year after they were exposed to teacher X -- but their progress stalled in his classroom -- that could now be determined.

All this would now be possible -- except that the teachers union used its influence in Carson City to make sure that using the available achievement statistics in that way is banned.

While teachers in Houston, the nation's seventh-largest school district, can earn incentives of $3,000 up to $10,000 for student improvement on state and national tests, the Nevada State Education Association saw to it in 2003 that NRS 386.650, intended to "establish and maintain an automated system of accountability" for the public schools, includes a provision that, "The information maintained ... must not be used for the purpose of evaluating an individual teacher or paraprofessional" -- thus rendering the whole exercise pretty much pointless.

It would be nice to report the problem is unique to Nevada, but other states are now succumbing to the same lobbying pressure to guarantee permanent employment to classroom incompetents.

In an Opinion piece in the May 9 Wall Street Journal, John Merrow, a former high school and college teacher who now serves as education correspondent for the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," reports that the state of New York last month joined this "upside down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching." Today, Mr. Merrow reports, the law in Albany reads, "The teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data."

This makes about as much sense, Mr. Merrow asserts, as making it impossible to fire a swimming teacher whose 10-year-old students prove unable to swim the length of the pool during their final exam, instead having to be rescued from drowning.

This debate over teachers unions using their political muscle to protect the least competent of their members will become ever more relevant here in Nevada, as various initiative questions move forward, seeking to raise taxes and divert that added loot into teachers' bank accounts -- still without any demand that the raises flow only to those who are demonstrably succeeding with their young charges.

"Denying any connection between teaching and learning is a dangerous course for teacher unions to chart," warns Mr. Merrow in the Journal. Not only does it fly "in the face of common sense," but, "If unions are telling us there's no connection between teaching and learning, why should we then support teachers, or public education?"