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Yet I’m skeptical about the argument for tenure for teachers. We know, based upon absolutely convincing evidence, that there are good teachers and bad teachers. We know, based on the same evidence, that bad teachers destroy educational opportunities for their kids. We know, based on common knowledge, that we’re not about to give third graders a choice about which teacher they have for home room. And we know, based upon evidence and experience, that a system that protects failure will only encourage more failure. So if we know all these things, then we also know that the elaborate system of protections that school boards have agreed to may actually be inhibiting student success.

That’s not to say that there should be no employment protection for teachers. There are lots of arbitrary and impermissible reasons for firing people that should be banned—race, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, etc. But if the reformers are right, then principals need more freedom to filter out educators who are failing to perform. Just as a bus driver who fails to drive a bus safely, or an airplane pilot who lands at the wrong airport, or a lawyer who can’t file his briefs on time, or an accountant who can’t add, a teacher who can’t demonstrate educational progress with his class should find a different job. Performance is at the core of efficient and effective business. It should be at the core of education as well.

If we could make performance the key to teacher retention and evaluation—if— then we would have a good chance to turn this failure of an education system around. Or, again, so these reformers insist. Not costlessly: we need to pay teachers more, or at least good teachers more. But with the kind of investment we already make in education, we could begin to close achievement gaps, and actually do what public education was meant to do: educate our kids and therefore our public.

Effective teacher performance is thus the vaccine at the start of this chapter. Poor teacher performance is the virus. We have the data to show that we now have a vaccine against this virus. We’ve had it for almost a decade.5 Yet we have not deployed that vaccine broadly or systematically. Instead, politicians have continued to defend a system of tenure that is weakening the effectiveness of public education. Generations of hopelessness are being produced by this recalcitrance. What might explain the resistance?

There are lots of possible theories. Funding may be inadequate. No doubt it is wildly inadequate in poor neighborhoods. Moreover, poverty generally diminishes the educational opportunities of kids, as parents cannot provide a constructive environment for education. Perhaps testing has skewed the way we teach. Perhaps parents don’t do enough to support young kids. And no doubt, better preschool interventions would radically improve performance overall.6

But there’s one fact we can’t ignore. The teachers’ unions are among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party—by far. And the amount they’ve spent on “reform” outpaces that of the next-largest reform groups by two orders of magnitude.7

FIGURE 5

So, again, I am asking:

Not: Did the teachers’ unions buy protection from more intensive performance evaluations?

Instead: Does the influence of the unions’ spending weaken your ability to believe that the current pro-tenure policy makes sense?

CHAPTER 7

Why Isn’t Our Financial System Safe?

America is still feeling the effects of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. That collapse was triggered in 2008 by a crisis on Wall Street. All of the major banks in America were drawn to the brink of bankruptcy. It took the largest intervention in the history of the nation to avoid a crisis likely to be worse than the Great Depression.

Tomes have been written about this crisis and its causes. Practically every single actor within our system of finance—from the borrowers to the lenders to the government overseeing it all—has been blamed by someone