In his state of the Commonwealth speech last night, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine made the case for two education initiatives: Giving teachers an extra three percent pay raise, and funding pilot programs to expand the Virginia Preschool Initiative.
I’ve got nothing against paying teachers well. What I object to is rewarding all teachers, the good and the bad, equally. The Governor didn’t say how many millions of dollars it would take to increase teacher salaries by three percent, but it’s a significant amount of money. Why not use that money to reward the really good teachers, the ones we want to keep in the system, instead of rewarding the deadwood?
As for the preschool pilot programs, I would say that testing new ideas is good, experimentation is good. Let’s see if the preschool programs accomplish what they’re touted to accomplish. But if the pilots are to be genuine demonstrations of feasibility, not simply a way to get the camel’s nose under the tent, then I would suggest following the advice of Bacon’s Rebellion columnist Chris Braunlich:
The General Assembly has been asked to fund both the pilot program and creation of a quality ratings system. Legislators would be wrong to reject it out of hand. But they would be more wrong to approve it without insisting on a pilot that will actually study the effectiveness of universal preschool or a rating system that will give some sense of what this will all cost somewhere down the road.
