When bear eat salmon in the summer they are not satisfied with just one fish. In fact, they continue to eat and eat, getting larger and larger, but not becoming satiated. The President’s education policy has created a bureaucracy that is hungrier and growing fatter than the biggest of Alaska’s bears.
Nothing is more important to securing America’s future than ensuring a high-quality education for our nation’s children. Day in and day out, public school teachers dedicate themselves to preparing our children for the future. Make no mistake about it, the quality of these teachers is a critical factor in the educational success of students across Alaska and the United States.
At this very moment, Congress is working hard to fund the teacher quality provisions in the next year’s budget. We want to send the states $1.2 billion to hire new teachers but allow them to spend the money on improving teacher quality.
Unfortunately, President Clinton has been fighting us, and would prefer to mandate that school districts hire new teachers regardless of their quality or ability to teach. The President said the first year of funding was a down payment for his 100,000 teachers and would result in 30,800 newly hired teachers and smaller classes. However, in 40 of the nation’s largest school districts, a mere 3,500 teachers have been hired. In fact, schools have spent only $67 million of the $1.2 billion appropriated for this program. In Alaska only 80 teachers have been hired. Unfortunately, the Department of Education (DOE) only allocated $5.6 million, vastly underestimating the costs of hiring teachers in Alaska.
I think it’s foolish for the Washington bureaucracy to tell every school district in America that Washington knows the best way to spend their money. Federal mandates of quantity at the expense of quality will do little to help our children learn. Having qualified teachers in the classroom is vital to giving our children the opportunity to reach their full academic potential.
Our reform emphasizes teacher quality over quantity, but does not federalize a teacher quality program, or put more power in Washington. Instead, it gives states and communities their own ability to improve teacher quality. These include improving teacher certification, improving teacher retention, and having incentives for high-quality teachers to stay in rural and urban classrooms.
By giving local communities the authority and ability to make the decisions about class size and teacher quality, we give parents and teachers control over the education of our future leaders. Reducing class size is a worthy goal, but not without making sure that teachers in the classroom are not just there because they are a warm body, but, because they are highly qualified to teach our children. We need to give America’s children the education they deserve in securing our children’s future.
100,000 teachers: The President’s Washington Education Bureaucracy
an Editorial Opinion