Mark Saiki, Improving Public Schools (Boulder, Colorado: Front Range Community Press, 2008)

Mark Saiki, Improving Public Schools (Boulder, Colorado: Front Range Community Press, 2008),

Time magazine's recent article got it half right. "Ineffective teaching" is the

"biggest problem with U.S. public schools.1 Not content with such mediocrity, our nation's capital has a plan. Washington D.C.'s education czar, Korean-American Michelle

Rhee, has fired 100 administrators, 270 teachers and 36 principals.2 The main problem, as

Rhee sees it, is that school administrators give bad teachers an automatic green card to avoid making waves. "What I'm finding is that our principals are ridiculously-like ridiculously conflict-averse," Rhee says. "They know someone is not so good, and they want to give him a `Meets expectations' anyway because they don't want to deal with the person coming into the office and yelling and getting the parents riled up."3 Rhee's diagnosis is accurate, however, her prescription overlooks a simpler and more practical solution.

Rhee's description of the problem is quite accurate. The landmark 1983 national study, A Nation at Risk, reports, "Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students."4 These incoming teachers are not the cream of the crop. Journalist Jonathan Kozol, noted that the best and brightest college students seldom choose teaching as a profession. "Those who go into teaching are less qualified than ever. SAT scores (1982) for students entering schools of education were 80 points below the national average. Of twenty-nine academic fields surveyed, future teachers came out twenty-sixth."5 US New and World Report concurs, "Education majors

1 Amanda Ripley, "Can She Save Our Schools?" Time Magazine, December 8, 2008, 36. 2 Ibid., 39. 3 Ibid., 42. 4 David Pierpont Gardner, Chairman, President of the University of Utah, The National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation At Risk, The Imperative for Education Reform (Washington DC: US Department of Education, 1983), 22. 5 Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985), 212.

1 scored an average of 391 on the verbal portion of the SAT-33 points below all others taking the test and among the lowest in any academic field."6 In effect, unmotivated college students choose education because the teaching profession has low expectations and even lower hiring standards.

These under achieving teachers are often less intelligent than their own students.

Twenty percent of California teachers (65,000) failed their own basic literacy tests in

1994-5.7 These problems are not limited to one coast. In 1998, 59 percent of

Massachusetts' 1,800 prospective teachers flunked the first Massachusetts Teacher

Certification test. These candidates "could not define a noun or a verb or what democracy means or the meaning of the word 'imminent.'" Other could not write an example of an

"interrogative sentence."8 These low achieving education majors perpetuate a culture of medocrity, which trickles down from there. These teachers "graduate from high school with academic skills no greater than a seventh- or eighth-grade level, attend a local college with low standards and graduate with skills no higher than a high school senior. 'Then they go back and teach,' said Kati Haycock of the Education Trust, which tracks urban schools. 'It's a cycle of low achievers teaching students to levels they reached at best.'"9

While firing incompetent teachers is wise policy, an ounce of prevention is worth one pound of cure.

Whereas there is considerable merit in Rhee's long-term policy of reforming school culture and making principals less adverse to confronting and firing incompetent

6 Stanley Wellborn, US News and World Report, May 17, 1982, 55. 7 Thomas Togh, Robin M. Bannefield, Dana Hawkins and Penny Loes, "Why Teach?" US News & World Report, February 26, 1996, 66. 8 Ken Hamblin, editorial, "Why Teachers Can't Learn," Denver Post, July 12, 1998, 3H. 9 Richard Whitmire, Gannett News Service, "A Tale Of Two Inner-City Elementaries: Adult Actions Make All The Difference," Denver Post, November 11, 1997, 20A.

2 teachers, there is a simpler and more practical short-term solution. All hiring personal should require teacher applicants to supply a resume complete with their grade point averages.10 Administrative salaries should be reduced back down to teacher salaries, and these bureaucrats would earn bonuses for hiring educators from the top half of their college classes and for retaining them thereafter.11 In this regards, most anecdotal evidence suggests that good teachers do not enter or leave the profession for monetary reasons. In fact, many of the brighter public school teachers take comparatively lower paying jobs at colleges, particularly community colleges, like myself. Thus, Rhee's plan to pay competent teachers more may be doomed to failure.

My solution begs the reflective question, why do virtually all administrators failed to ask for applicant GPAs? The answers are complex. First, most administrators and teachers are very insecure. Competence is a threatening concept for most of them.

Second, most administrators believe that they are the answer to our nation's educational crisis, so they naturally hire teachers who are like themselves. Third, school administrators are not recruited or hired based on real-world management skills. I have often remarked that Rose at SOS Staffing would make a better principal than 99.9% of all school bureaucrats. Instead, they are churned out from the same bottom twenty percent of their college classes by teacher education programs. These experienced, savvy and highly paid administrators took six to nine hours of "School Administrator" classes.

My solution has elegant simplicity. Present school administrators troll the bottom fifth of their college classes hoping to find like-minded bottom feeders. Instead of over-

10 I worked as an Attorney for seventeen years and was in the top 10% of my college class and the top 35% of my law school and UNC's Masters of History degree at University of Northern Colorado. I spend fourteen fruitless years trying to get hired by public schools, while administrators continued to hire from the bottom quarter. 11 Calculating the top half of college classes is easy. Just average all the GPAs of your applicants and hired those in the top half.

3 paying these six-hour wonders for hiring insecure slugs, we should pay them less money and give them financial incentives to do what every real world manager does. Hire more competent teachers and work to keep them happy. My plan has the additional advantage of reducing the monetary incentive for competent teachers to leave their classrooms and become higher paid administrative snails. In the long term, my solution will help alter the teacher college culture of non-achievement. After teachers from the bottom half fail to get hired, perhaps those college students will party less and study harder, in order to get a job.

However, these bottom of the barrel test scores are not without their defenders.

The industry's chief lobbyist rushes to their defense. "SAT scores are extremely weak predictors for success in teaching. SAT scores actually predict job success poorly for most fields, but the problem is worse for teaching. In fact, neither test scores-such as those from the SAT, the ACT, or the National Teachers Exam-nor grade-point averages in college are useful for predicting on-the-job ratings of success as a teacher."12 According to David C. Berliner, the amount of work and learning that incoming teachers is important in determining "success." Berliner fails to draw the critical link between grade point average and work ethic. Dr. Diane M. Bonner, from Susquehanna University in

Pennsylvania, and James A. Herrick, professor of communications at Hope College in

Michigan report that the "best predictor" of grades is "personal motivation."13 Students earn good grades through diligent effort; likewise grades are best predictors of which

12 David C. Berliner, is the 1994 recipient of the NEA's highest honor, its Friends of Education Award. He is Professor of both Psychology and Education and Curriculum and Instruction at Arizona State University in Tempe, Bruce J. Biddle is Editor of the Journal Social Psychology of Education, and is Professor of both Psychology and Sociology and Director of the Center for Research in Social Behavior at the University of Missouri, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995), 106. 13 Associated Press, "Motivation Leads to Academic Success, Denver Post, August 18, 1996, 3K; Arthur Applebee, Judith Langer, James Marshall, Literature and Language (Evanston, Illinois: McDouglas Littell, 1992), i.

4 teachers are likely to commit their efforts toward becoming better teachers. Not only does this union-biased lobbyist miss the boat, he utterly fails to justify current hiring practices.

The companion problem, is once hired, better teachers are often flushed back out of the system. "Over 10 percent of those entering teacher-education programs come from the highest fifth of the SAT distribution."14 According to the Rand study, public schools are "losing the brightest new educators. Half of all novice teachers quit within their first five years; 70 percent of teachers drop out within ten years."15 This happened to award winning teacher Jaime Escalante, from the movie Stand and Deliver, who fled the Los

Angeles school system, after teacher union officials complained that he had "too many students in his calculus class."16 Likewise, in 1990 Minnesota's Teacher of the Year,

Cathy Nelson, was laid off under the "union bargained last hired, first fired policy."17

School principals should be paid bonuses for hiring teacher from the top half of their college classes and for keeping them on the job.

In summary, Michelle Rhee has it half right. We need to fire incompetent teachers. Rhee should then ask herself, why do school administrators hire so many unqualified teachers? The answer is that they utterly fail to use grade point average as the common sense, real world, and most accurate predictor of job performance. Instead they fish for bottom-feeders hoping to turn them into like minded superstars or "Yes" persons.

Requiring all school administrators to ask for resumes and grade point averages, and then rewarding them for hiring and retaining teachers from the top half of their class, is an idea whose time has come and hopefully we have the audacity to mandate.

14 Berliner, Manufactured Crisis: 105-6. 15 Richard Louv, Childhood’s Future (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), 340. 16 Togh and Bannefield, US News, 63. 17 Ibid., 64.