Tom Zawistowski,
I think that eliminating tenure instead of reforming it, requiring teacher compensation to be tied to standardized test scores and eliminating binding arbitration without replacing it with some type of third-party mediation are not better for the taxpayer than what we have now. I am being truthful. I agree that tenure should be reformed but I don’t think it should be eliminated. We need to protect teachers from having curriculum dictated to them for political reasons by school boards. Teachers should be evaluated every year for diagnostic purposes, but the results should not be made public and the rankings should not be tied to compensation. (See the behavioral economics work of Dan Ariely and Daniel Pink.) There should be some mechanism for third-party mediation of labor disputes—otherwise collective bargaining is a farce and a waste of time and money.
