P UBLIC school teachers should be the highest paid employees in government. And I mean they should get as much as the governor, lieutenant governor and all the little colonel, captain and corporal governors. Public school system
flunks quality testBut that isn't going to happen and part of the fault lies with the union.
The teachers' union really is in the protection business, not the education business. If it was in the education business, it would be willing to do what it takes to get the highest paid, most qualified teachers in the country right here in little old Hawaii.
What would that take? It would take stepping aside and allowing a certain amount of dead wood to be chucked over the side of the SS Educational Bureaucracy. It would take the realization that the current public school system is an overloaded tramp steamer when what our kids need is a sleek, fast battleship.
In other words, the public school system needs more than an overhaul, it needs to be completely rebuilt. And the reconstruction needs to be based on principles that recognize the fact that if government is going to be involved in education, then education should be the most important function of government.
From education, or lack thereof, springs all of society's ailments or successes. While the cost of floating a top-flight kick-butt first-class school system would at first seem to be prohibitive, the payoff would come later. Crime, crowded prisons, traffic, the environment, jobs ... you name it. All roads lead back to education.
SO how do you get there? How can you build that educational juggernaut? You can't. At least you can't while a school board - with more members than the cast of Spartacus - sits on top of a bloated bureaucracy that encourages getting along instead of getting going. You can't, as long as the aim of the union is to protect every single breathing and barely breathing member and attempts to squeeze the bare minimum in wage increases from an administration that sees education as just another government department, along with highways, sidewalks and large grassy areas.
I'm not putting the blame on any of these folks. They are all doing what we want them to do. When taxpayers are ready to make education at least as important an issue as same-sex marriage and smoking in restaurants, the system will change.
This may seem harsh. But the way to solve the problem isn't simply to double every teacher's salary. Motivation is not the problem. Quality is.
Teachers should be the highest paid of all government employees. But they should also be the best teachers our money can buy. As employers, we should be able to dump the ones who don't measure up and retrain the ones who have a chance to make it. We should make wanting to become a teacher one of the highest callings in Hawaii. We should make it so that parents insist that their kids get the best education of anywhere in the country. We should make it so that the students realize they have the honor and privilege of attending the best schools in the country. We should make it so that politicians and high level government officials stop sending their kids to private schools.
What are the odds of this happening? Right now, it's off the board. Vegas wouldn't touch it with a metric yardstick. The union's intransigent. Election for school board is a combination beauty pageant and name-recognition extravaganza. The governor is busy counting pennies. Even suggesting such changes would be political suicide for anyone involved in the local power game. And we taxpayers and voters - the ultimate employers of all teachers - just haven't shown the guts to do it.
