Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [27]
Yet in the past decade, educators have begun to make progress. (The vaccine.) In very different educational contexts, a set of reforms has demonstrated that we can educate our children, including the poorest among us, to achieve college-bound competency. Indeed, in one long-term experiment in Harlem—in the worst district in Harlem—test results show students closing the race gap in performance.3
The key variable in these experiments is not who owns the school (whether public or private, whether a charter or not), or how big the classrooms are, or how many computers there are per student. It is instead a much more pedestrian, indeed, obvious, difference: teachers. For these reformers, the single most important component to successful education today is great teachers. Within the same school, and the same population, the difference between good and bad teachers can be a 300 percent difference in learning in a single year. According to Professor Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, if we could eliminate just the bottom 6 to 8 percent of bad teachers, we could bring our results up to the standards of Finland, perhaps the best in the world.4
If you were convinced about the importance of teachers, you might wonder what stops school districts from getting better teachers. What stands in the way?
Many things, of course. We pay teachers a ridiculously small amount. In poor districts, we provide them with a ridiculously unequal range of resources. And as we’ll see later on, whenever we try to get government service on the cheap, cheap is precisely what we get. Without doubt, if we’re going to fix education, we’re going to have to be willing to pay good teachers more of what good teachers are worth.
At least some reformers believe, however, that low pay alone does not explain poor teacher performance. Some believe that there’s another feature of our public education system that needs to be questioned: teacher tenure, which protects the worst (and the best) of public school teachers.
I mean that term, teacher tenure, precisely, so let’s be clear about what it means. Everyone’s heard about tenure. Tenure means a set of workplace protections that makes it extremely difficult to remove the tenured employee. Judges have tenure. Academics have tenure. And K–12 teachers in public schools have tenure.
As with any workplace employment innovation, however, tenure has its benefits and its costs. The benefits are independence. We give judges tenure so they can do their job without fearing punishment by the government. We give academics tenure so they can do their job (primarily research) without fearing punishment by the government or the university for pursuing politically unpopular research. And we give teachers tenure to protect them from the arbitrary and powerful control of school administrators. The thought in all these cases was that security would improve performance, by protecting the employee against arbitrary action by the employer.
That protection has costs. A bad judge can do really bad things—though, of course, except for the Supreme Court, bad decisions get reviewed by higher courts. A terrible academic can waste valuable resources—but at least college and graduate students select which teachers they’ll have, and they can easily select away from the teachers ranked poorly. And a bad teacher can adversely affect the primary education of his kids.
These costs must be compared to the benefits that tenure provides. And where the costs outweigh the benefits, we shouldn’t have tenure.
Now, obviously, I’ve got a personal conflict here. I am a professor. I have tenure. I believe tenure has been important to my ability to do my work. But I am completely open to being convinced that we don’t need tenure in universities anymore. I’m less open to that argument with judges: the independence of the judiciary