Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

According to recent press reports and from personal sources, conservatives are very unhappy with President Bush's education proposals. I am not excited about them either, but question whether the criticism is appropriate.

First of all, as I have said repeatedly, K-12 education is not and should not be regarded as one of President Bush's highest priorities. It is unrealistic to think that a president, who is responsible for national security, foreign policy, and leadership on health care and social security should regard education, a service for which the federal government contributes only seven percent of the funding, as his highest priority. Despite all the media hype, I hope he devotes most of his energies to the activities that are the core of his presidential responsibilities.

This is not to say that President Bush cannot do very much to improve education. On the contrary, it would be possible for him to effectuate several important educational reforms that lie beneath the radar at this point, but they probably will not materialize for the same reason that they did not materialize in his father's tenure in office or President Reagan's.

A great deal of federal ineffectiveness in education is due to the fact that very few federal government officials know very much about the realities of collective bargaining in the bargaining law states. For instance, I have attended numerous meetings where federal bureaucrats advocated inclusion of merit pay in presidential education programs. These discussions went on in complete ignorance of the fact that seventy percent of the nation's teachers work pursuant to union contracts that preclude merit pay. In any given year, one-third or fewer of these contracts expire. To effectuate merit pay, it would be necessary to persuade school boards and school administrators to negotiate hard for it - an unlikely development for more reasons that I can explain in one column.

At any rate, the teacher unions can be expected to resist merit pay throughout negotiations, mediation, fact finding and even interest arbitration where this anti-democratic practice is allowed or mandated. The conservatives in the federal education bureaucracy have never experienced these developments, have never negotiated a teacher union contract or have even read one from beginning to end. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that we see so many futilitarian federal initiatives, nor should we be surprised if this situation continues into the Bush administration. Significantly, very few of the persons reputed to be under consideration for appointments to the Bush administration have had the kind of experience essential to make realistic assessments of what is feasible and what is not at the local level. I do not mean to suggest that the administration should regard NEA/AFT opposition as setting the limits on what is feasible; quite often, naivete about the teacher unions results in lost opportunities as well as foreseeable disasters.

Let me cite just one more example. Back before the Clinton administration, I went to a press conference cosponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation. The occasion was an NSF appropriation to provide a number (a very small one!) of teachers training in mathematics and science. During the press conference it became quite clear that the cosponsors appeared to lack any idea of how teachers are paid, and for what. The overwhelming majority are paid according to their years of teaching experience and academic credit; however, they cannot get salary credit for courses or advanced degrees unless the school boards agree to give it only for approved courses.

Consequently, if NSF and the Department of Education wanted teachers better trained in mathematics and science, the way to achieve this objective is to persuade school boards to insist upon mathematics and science courses where appropriate for salary credit. Sprinkling a few federal dollars on teachers for taking such courses simply reinforces school board tendencies to give salary credit for just about any course, but the point is for another column. For this one, I can only hope that the Bush administration includes a few staff members who know about the real world in real school districts.