Back in early January, when the full scope of the Great Recession was just starting to become clear, and the stimulus bill was but a glimmer in President Obama's eye, Checker Finn, Rick Hess, and I argued that bailing out local school districts would be a big mistake, because it would forestall opportunities for reform:
There's scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today's schools delivers an extra dollar in value - and ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective...Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions.
Kevin Carey, writing at Quick & the Ed, referred to that as the "school poverty gambit" and later the "Petrilli school bankruptcy theory of education reform." And he demurred:
Underlying the larger argument is the idea that the public schools will implement a whole suite of needed reforms if only we can put them under sufficiently terrible financial stress. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that this will work...Are there any examples-any?-of a state or school district that has ever responded to a fiscal crisis with reforms that actually benefited students in the long run?
That's a reasonable counter-argument. But I've suspected that, for example, if districts were forced to lay off teachers, and moved ahead with "last hired, first fired," parents and citizens somewhere would rise up in revolt, and push to change that and other onerous policies. And guess what? It's finally happening, in Seattle of all places. Columnist Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times describes the situation:
Maybe it was brought on by lean times. Or maybe long-simmering angst about the state of Seattle schools is finally boiling over on its own.But the decision this month to lay off 165 of Seattle schools' newest teachers in a "last hired, first fired" manner has got some of liberal Seattle suddenly sounding more like a conservative red state.
More than 600 school parents have signed an online petition, at supportgreatteachers.com, that calls out the teachers union for causing "great distress and upheaval" in the schools. At issue is the policy of choosing who gets laid off solely by seniority.
"Wake up and see how union refusal to consider merit is damaging the profession and our kids," wrote one parent.
"We want the best teachers, not the oldest, teaching our kids," wrote another.
"Teacher unions are an anachronism," said another.
The organizers of the petition are a group of parents called Community and Parents for Public Schools. They agree what they're doing is very un-Seattle.
Seattle! Now, this is hardly a national trend (yet!), and who knows if the parents will win this battle. (God bless ???em, though.) But this is the beginning of something important.
I met with former American Enterprise Institute president Chris DeMuth yesterday, to interview him for a book project I'm starting, and he said something very interesting. Reform doesn't happen because someone in a think tank somewhere writes a brilliant white paper, he argued. Reform almost always happens as a reaction to scandal. And oftentimes, the scandalous behavior has been going on for years, right out in the open, until suddenly it sparks a populist outrage.
Well, "last hired, first fired" is an outrage. It makes a mockery of meritocracy. It saps the energy from our youngest teachers, and rewards longevity over effectiveness. And it's been sitting there for a long, long time. Maybe now is the time that it comes to be seen as the scandal it is, and maybe now is the time that it will spark the populist outrage necessary for reform.
