Stunning Failure

"Stunning" is the word, but this is not news to anyone, spin aside. Teacher quality has a huge impact on learning. Merit pay and school choice are a way to pull new, qualified teachers into the profession as well as attract current teachers to take up the challenge of failing kids. Will this happen anytime soon? Probably not. Teachers' unions, the great defenders of mediocrity, are opposed.

Tribune story here. Sun Times here. Author of study is the Illinois Education Research Council.

According to Reason, there is a pilot program of some of the measures outlined below going on in Chicago though, that should be adopted system-wide. It might help. San Francisco has introduced a decentralized approach to schools, which mimics school choice, including site-based budgeting, money following the kids, and a formula that weights funding for special needs and other kids who need more resources. Reason article by Lisa Snell here. And here's this from a UCLA professor:

In his 2003 book Making Schools Work, Ouchi found that the decentralized public school districts and private Catholic schools had significantly less fraud, less centralized bureaucracy and staff, more money at the classroom level, and higher student achievement.

He also found that most districts merely give lip service to local control. According to Ouchi, the money must follow the child. The only true local control occurs when the principal controls the school budget.

Can we try for stunning success here?