No Teacher Left Behind

This Op-Ed piece from Terry Moe (Mr. Moe, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, and a professor of political science at Stanford, is the winner of this year's Thomas B. Fordham prize for distinguished scholarship in education) in the WSJ, illustrates the largest known problem in education, yet the one that will be most difficult to overcome:

"The problem is not that the unions are somehow bad or ill-intentioned. They aren't. The problem is that when they simply do what all organizations do -- pursue their own interests -- they are inevitably led to do things that are not in the best interests of children.

To appreciate why this is so, consider the parallel to business firms. No one claims that these organizations are in business to promote the public interest. They are in business to make money, and this is the fundamental interest that drives their behavior. Thus, economists and policy makers fully expect firms to pollute the water and air when polluting is less costly (and more profitable) than not polluting -- and that is why we have laws against pollution. The problem is not that firms are out to destroy the environment. The problem is simply that their interests are not identical to the public interest, and the two inevitably come into conflict."

Here are some examples of what their interests impact:

"The unions are opposed to No Child Left Behind, for example, and indeed to all serious forms of school accountability, because they do not want teachers' jobs or pay to depend on their performance. They are opposed to school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- because they don't want students or money to leave any of the schools where their members work. They are opposed to the systematic testing of veteran teachers for competence in their subjects, because they know that some portion would fail and lose their jobs. And so it goes. If the unions can't kill these threatening reforms outright, they work behind the scenes to make them as ineffective as possible -- resulting in accountability systems with no teeth, choice systems with little choice, and tests that anyone can pass."

Finally, Mr. Moe ends with this:

"Only when the public speaks out will politicians have the courage -- and the electoral incentive -- to do the right thing. And only then will the interests of children be given true priority."