JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

We just had an uncommonly spirited local school election where I live. One candidate spent more than $30,000 in a district encompassing a couple of neighborhoods. On election day, opposing forces manned busy intersections waving signs. Folks shouted through bullhorns, producing utterances wholly indecipherable.

Here's what's happening, and it's hardly unique, but nationally typical:

The local business community, championed by the right-wing newspaper publisher, has decided that the problem with public schools is that they are not subjected to corporate-style competition and accountability. It believes the teachers' union needs to be broken down or at least weakened because it's an agent of self-preservation instead of progress and reform. It says one solution is to introduce merit pay for teachers. So, it's begun running a slate of well-financed candidates to advance this agenda.

The local education establishment, led by the teachers' union, has become galvanized in opposition to what it sees as an attack on dedicated education professionals by people who advance destructive notions they don't practice themselves. For example, the newspaper publisher doesn't pay his reporters on merit, he pays by position grade and experience. Merit pay, the educational establishment says, is judgmental, ripe for favoritism, punitive, divisive, demoralizing and counterproductive to the very concept of faculty, meaning teamwork. The education establishment puts up its own candidates.

After the election that produced mixed results last week, I talked about all this with the weekly retirees' class. The assembly included several retired educators, but, honestly, I was not meaning to pander.

I told of my mentoring a youth in a public middle school in the inner city and how the school counselor collects emails from his teachers about his performance so that I can unnerve him, as I did last week, by asking, "What happened on that social studies project that was due Monday?"

I asserted that those who declare the public schools failed and infested with people motivated only by self-preservation do not go where I go and see what I see. We don't need the English teacher whose email expressed concern about my young friend's motivation to be competing with the social studies teacher who reported the missed project deadline. We need what we're getting, shared concern for the boy's best educational interest.

Sometimes the more conservative members of the class don't speak up until afterward, regrettably. One woman, a well-known conservative, came up to say she'd agreed with everything except this: How do you break through the teachers' union stranglehold and onerous fair dismissal laws to get rid of truly bad teachers?

Then a retired businessman came up to say that he'd agreed with everything except my likening a teaching job without merit pay to a reporting job without merit pay. There's a big difference, he said. A reporter could get fired.

There's an irony. The business-oriented reformers lamenting the education establishment tend to dislike Bill Clinton and his education policies. Yet Clinton, as an ambitious young Arkansas governor fancying himself as a "New Democrat," engendered teacher wrath in 1982 when he passed a basic skills test by which failing teachers would be weeded out.

I'm wondering if we haven't managed to sift through to the central point. Merit pay may not even be the issue. Some objective assessment of teachers with a mechanism not for special raises, but for getting the incompetent ones out of the classroom -- that may not be merely the common ground, but the best answer.

If we truly don't want any child left behind, perhaps we ought to make sure his teachers aren't benefiting from each other's failings. And perhaps we ought to make sure none is incompetent.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.