Skeptics who rightly scoff at the latest brainstorm from the public schools, giving grades to parents, ask a logical question: Why not grade the teachers?
It's a good question, but only a rhetorical one for two reasons. Teachers and school bureaucrats will never submit to impartial evaluation of their performance, and if they did, the evaluations would be a waste of time.
Government schools operate beyond the control of parents and taxpayers and no matter how many bad "grades" teachers might get in whatever form, nothing will improve them.
The Idea
Correspondents writing about my last column suggested grading teachers after reading that Philadelphia and other cities are adding grades for parents to students' report cards.
Reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the idea is to rate the "home support" from parents. So "teachers will assess several areas: Does the child appear rested? Is he or she getting proper attention for vision and hearing problems? Do parents respond to notes and phone calls? Does the child have the necessary supplies, including pencils and notebooks? Does the child complete homework assignments?"
Parents will receive one of two grades: "satisfactory" or "needs attention."
Thus did a few readers offer a suggestion such as this one: "More valuable than a parent report card, would be a TEACHER report card. The children know who teaches and who doesn't!!"
Wrote another: "We need to be provided with printouts showing the reading and math scores for kids in the class of the teacher we're grading, as well as those for his/her peers, for comparison. Then we can give grades like: u2018Teaches reading competently: above average; average; below average; downright awful.'"
Why No Grades For Teachers
School bureaucrats and teachers would never submit to this, an obvious truth we learn from the violent reaction when anyone suggests "merit pay."
Merit pay, you see, would "grade" teachers by giving strong teachers bigger raises than weaker teachers. Some teachers wouldn't get raises. Such a scheme is anathema to the totalitarian government school collective, which is managed by socialist unions that are anti-Christian and pro-government.
Another reason parents would never have the chance to "grade" teachers lies in the assumptive rationale for compulsory government schools: Parents are too stupid to educate their children. Education requires "experts," meaning professional pedagogues with degrees in "education" and "school administration."
Well, if parents do not have the intellectual or academic aptitude to educate their children, surely they are not possessed of the cerebral tools to assess a teacher's performance. Only the "experts" can do that, the same experts who graduate thousands of illiterates from high schools and think "values clarification" and distributing birth control pills are legitimate educational endeavors.
A Real Grade
Sad thing is, once the government schools have had a kid for eight or 10 years, it's too late to do any "grading." The damage is done, either to the child's intellectual complement, academic and employment future, or spiritual and emotional well-being. Or perhaps all of them.
So the government-school racket will never accept serious outside evaluation. Some parents might believe they are "grading" teachers when they write nasty letters to the school superintendent, or trundle down to the school board meeting on a chilly evening in November. If such were true, schools would improve. But they don't.
The only meaningful way to grade teachers is yanking kids out of public school.
October 4, 2003
Syndicated columnist R. Cort Kirkwood [send him mail] is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va.
