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Bad Schools + Shackled Principals = Outsourcing
Amid a furor of election-year debate over the outsourcing of American jobs, a new Wall Street Journal op-ed by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., former chairman of IBM and now chair of the bi-partisan Teaching Commission, reminds us that our public schools--and especially teachers--are the foundation of our economy. "The only way to ensure we remain a world economic power," he argues, is to increase teachers' pay in proportion to their economic value and, just as importantly, to demand accountability. We need to break down barriers to both hiring and firing, Gerstner says.
Gerstner's op-ed summarizes the findings of the Teaching Commission, a blue-ribbon panel of leaders in government, business and education working to transform "the way in which America's public school teachers are prepared, recruited, retained, and rewarded." Gerstner writes:
The teaching profession is undervalued, figuratively and literally. So we believe it's finally time to pay teachers much more. But at the very same time, we have to pay them more intelligently -- once and for all breaking the inane, outdated salary schedules that fail to offer more money to teachers with math and science skills, and fail to recognize and reward excellence.
We believe it's time to make teaching an attractive, accessible profession for the most talented and motivated Americans, no matter what their formal training, by breaking down the bureaucratic barriers to entry that can keep Ph.D.s, even Nobel Prize winners, out of public school classrooms. And we believe it's time to give principals, who are charged with leading schools to excellence, the authority they need to hire and fire their staff. Without that power, accountability is a cruel joke.
Gerstner connects the loss of American jobs to the failures of many of our public schools:
American companies don't simply go offshore for inexpensive labor. They are increasingly going abroad to find skills that aren't available, or plentiful, in their own back yard. And at the very same time, foreign companies are not taking market share from U.S. companies simply because they have less expensive workers. Those workers increasingly have equal or better skills. ...
We are fooling ourselves if we believe that tweaking tax rates, training, or trade agreements will turn this tide. ... The only way to ensure we remain a world economic power is by elevating our public schools--particularly the teachers who lead them--to the top tier of American society. We have treated teaching as a second-rate profession for decades--with sub-par compensation, antiquated training, and arcane systems of accountability. It's designed for the industrial age, not the age of information and innovation.
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