Damien Grant: Decades of bureaucratic hand-wringing has delivered a broken system
Saturday, 18 August 2018
OPINION: The teachers are on strike. Well, some teachers. Those willing servants of the state are up in their collective arms at the low wages they are forced to endure.
There is a delightful irony in this.
The teachers' unions have, in recent years, championed opposition to charter schools and a refusal to countenance paying teachers on performance. The inevitable result of these strategies is the enduring low salary for teachers that they are so valiantly marching against.
In economics, the term monopsony refers to a market with one buyer and many sellers. Often described as a small town with one employer who has the ability to pay much lower wages than would be achieved if there was competition. If you want to work as a teacher, you soon confront the harsh fact that 95% of students attend state schools. There is only one employer, and they set the wages.
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* Teachers' strike means bring-your-child-to-work day for many**
Good teachers gravitate to the higher salaries paid by private schools, leaving the state sector with a mix of excellent, average and hopeless educators who must all be paid the same. It's a crushingly idiotic system that forces school boards to act as a sheltered workshop for inadequate teachers and an inability to reward great ones.
If you want to pay the effective teachers more, and we should, you also need to pay those who should be sweeping the classrooms rather than teaching in them.
Private and charter schools at least would afford teachers more career options, but the unions, who seem determined to cater to the lowest common denominator of their membership, resolutely oppose them.
Compounding this is zoning, a particularly evil institution was abolished in the early 1990s but gradually re-introduced as parents were taking the opportunity to abandon poor-performing schools. The gradual reintroduction of this archaic institution removes one of the few competitive pressures that remained in the sector.
We have an education system that does not reward excellence and does not punish failure. Decades of bureaucratic hand-wringing has delivered a broken system that relies on the personal integrity and good intentions of those who choose teaching as a profession.
In New Zealand, we are incredibly fortunate that so many teachers remain dedicated and committed to their profession, but they are working under a regime that does not foster excellence in teachers, in schools, or students.
Perhaps it is time for the teacher unions to consider, out of self-interest if nothing else, their resolute embrace of a monolithic state-system that consistently fails to properly recognise or reward them.