This Bill Won’t Help Coal Communities, but Rolling Back Regulations Will

If you see thousands of children in West Virginia out of school this week, rest assured they are not playing hooky. In fact, it’s their teachers who are.

Last week, a massive strike of almost 20,000 teachers occurred in the state, leading to widespread school closures. On Tuesday, every single public school in West Virginia was closed.

Despite several failed negotiation attempts, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice finally struck a deal with the teachers and their union representation. As a result, children in West Virginia will be able to return to school on Thursday.

West Virginia public schools are certainly in trouble. Only 33 percent of fourth-graders are proficient in math, while only 27 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in reading, according to the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Additionally, West Virginia ranks 48th in the United States for teacher pay.

But a massive teacher walkout leaving nearly 300,000 children without an education and working parents in a childcare pinch is not the solution to the troubles facing West Virginia public schools.

One reason teacher pay for many might be lower than they deserve? Unions. Unions, which hold significant political power, such as the American Federation of Teachers and the West Virginia Education Association, claim to represent the needs of teachers. But in fact, such unions may serve as a significant barrier to reforming teacher compensation.

For instance, paying teachers based on performance would enable effective teachers to be recognized and financially rewarded for good work. Unfortunately, union-backed policies such as compensation based on years in the school as opposed to impact on students’ achievement fail to adequately recognize good teachers, and remove strong incentives for poor teachers to raise the bar.

Instead of walking out of their classrooms, an action that hurts children, teachers should be turning their attention to how the policies pushed by unions run counter to their interests as professionals.

Matthew Ladner and co-authors Mark Francis and Greg Stone explain in a paper for the Goldwater Institute how a combination of performance pay, improved teacher evaluation, and an option of modestly larger classes could easily enable schools to pay their “rock star teachers” more than $100,000.

As they note, “the United States has made a tragic error in emphasizing teacher quantity (through efforts to limit average class size) rather than teacher quality. The growing literature on student learning gains clearly demonstrate that teacher quality trumps the impact of class size variation by a wide margin.” Moreover, school choice programs could alleviate many of these issues.

As I have previously argued, there is no limit to what a teacher can earn under an education savings account model. Why not reward good teachers by allowing parents to pay a teacher directly, using state funds, for giving their child a customized math curriculum? A system that breaks apart the education bureaucracy and truly allows teachers to thrive and earn as much as they deserve is vastly superior to the union-dominated near-monopoly that exists in traditional districts.

And of course, it’s worth noting that while teachers may be making less than they deserve in the current system, union officials aren’t being hurt: union employees at the West Virginia Education Association average almost six figures, far exceeding the average teacher in the state making $45,622.

As teachers and students return to school on Thursday, parents should encourage policymakers to pursue policies, such as merit pay and school choice, that would break the public education monopoly status quo. More bureaucracy and union policies have not worked out well for students in West Virginia—or their teachers.

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The School-To-Mass-Murder Pipeline

Ann Coulter

Nikolas Cruz’s psychosis ended in a bloody massacre not only because of the stunning incompetence of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department. It was also the result of liberal insanity working exactly as it was intended to.

School and law enforcement officials knew Cruz was a ticking time bomb. They did nothing because of a deliberate, willful, bragged-about policy to end the “school-to-prison pipeline.” This is the feature part of the story, not the bug part.

If Cruz had taken out full-page ads in the local newspapers, he could not have demonstrated more clearly that he was a dangerous psychotic. He assaulted students, cursed out teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fist fights, threw chairs, threatened to kill other students, mutilated small animals, pulled a rifle on his mother, drank gasoline and cut himself, among other “red flags.”

Over and over again, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reported Cruz’s terrifying behavior to school administrators, including Kelvin Greenleaf, “security specialist,” and Peter Mahmood, head of JROTC.

At least three students showed school administrators Cruz’s near-constant messages threatening to kill them — e.g., “I am going to enjoy seeing you down on the grass,” “Im going to watch ypu bleed,” “iam going to shoot you dead” — including one that came with a photo of Cruz’s guns. They warned school authorities that he was bringing weapons to school. They filed written reports.

Threatening to kill someone is a felony. In addition to locking Cruz away for a while, having a felony record would have prevented him from purchasing a gun.

All the school had to do was risk Cruz not going to college, and depriving Yale University of a Latino class member, by reporting a few of his felonies — and there would have been no mass shooting.

But Cruz was never arrested. He wasn’t referred to law enforcement. He wasn’t even expelled.

Instead, Cruz was just moved around from school to school — six transfers in three years. But he was always sent back to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in order to mainstream him, so that he could get a good job someday!

The moronic idea behind the “school-to-prison pipeline” is that the only reason so many “black and brown bodies” are in prison is because they were disciplined in high school, diminishing their opportunities. End the discipline and … problem solved!

It’s like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse. The Wizard told the Scarecrow: You don’t need an education, you just need a diploma! The school-to-prison pipeline idiocy tells students: You don’t need to behave in high school, you just need to leave with no criminal record!

Of course, killjoys will say that removing the consequences of bad behavior only encourages more bad behavior. But that’s not the view of Learned Professionals, who took summer courses at Michigan State Ed School.

In a stroke of genius, they realized that the only problem criminals have is that people keep lists of their criminal activities. It’s the list that prevents them from getting into M.I.T. and designing space stations on Mars. Where they will cure cancer.

This primitive, stone-age thinking was made official Broward County policy in a Nov. 5, 2013, agreement titled “Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline.”

The first “whereas” clause of the agreement states that “the use of arrests and referrals to the criminal justice system may decrease a student’s chance of graduation, entering higher education, joining the military and getting a job.”

Get it? It’s the arrest — not the behavior that led to the arrest — that reduces a student’s chance at a successful life. (For example, just look at how much the district’s refusal to arrest Nikolas Cruz helped him!

The agreement’s third “whereas” clause specifically cites “students of color” as victims of the old, racist policy of treating criminal behavior criminally.

Say, in the middle of a drive to cut back on the arrest or expulsion of “students of color,” how do you suppose the school dealt with a kid named “Nikolas Cruz”? Might there be some connection between his Hispanic last name and the school’s abject refusal to do anything about Cruz’s repeated criminal behavior?

Just a few months ago, the superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, Robert W. Runcie, was actually bragging about how student arrests had plummeted under his bold leadership.

When he took over in 2011, the district had “the highest number of school-related arrests in the state.” But today, he boasted, Broward has “one of the lowest rates of arrest in the state.” By the simple expedient of ignoring criminal behavior, student arrests had declined by a whopping 78 percent.

FOOTBALL COACH: “When I took over this team a year ago, we were last in the league in pass defense. Today, we no longer keep that statistic!”

When it comes to spectacular crimes, it’s usually hard to say how it could have been prevented. But in this case, we have a paper trail. In the pursuit of a demented ideology, specific people agreed not to report, arrest or prosecute dangerous students like Nikolas Cruz.

These were the parties to the Nov. 5, 2013, agreement that ensured Cruz would be out on the street with full access to firearms:

Robert W. Runcie, Superintendent of Schools

Peter M. Weinstein, Chief Judge of the 17th Judicial Circuit

Michael J. Satz, State Attorney

Howard Finkelstein, Public Defender

Scott Israel, Broward County Sheriff

Franklin Adderley, Chief of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department

Wansley Walters, Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice

Marsha Ellison, President of the Fort Lauderdale Branch of the NAACP and Chair of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board

Nikolas Cruz may be crazy, but the parties to that agreement are crazy, too. They decided to make high school students their guinea pigs for an experiment based on a noxious ideology. The blood of 17 people is on their hands

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Senate votes; West Virginia teachers say strike won't end

Unions representing West Virginia teachers and service personnel said Saturday that they will stay out on strike after the state Senate voted to cut the 5 percent pay raise they had negotiated with Gov. Jim Justice.

In a joint statement, the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia, West Virginia Education Association and the School Service Personnel Association said Senate President Mitch Carmichael and his leadership team had left them with no choice after they voted to reduce the raise to 4 percent.

The statement said all public schools in West Virginia would be closed again Monday "and remain closed until the Senate honors the agreement that was made."

The Republican-controlled Senate voted Saturday evening to approve the lower pay raise, bucking teachers, Republican Gov. Jim Justice and the Republican-controlled House, which approved the 5 percent raise on Wednesday. The two bills will now have to be reconciled. It was unclear how soon that process would begin.

The Senate's vote came as the teachers' strike rolled into its second weekend. Republican Sen. Greg Boso of Nicholas introduced the amendment to lower the raise, which the full Senate adopted by a vote of 19-15.

Senate Republicans have repeatedly emphasized exercising restraint with state spending, while agreeing that teachers and West Virginia's other public workers are all underpaid.

"That compensation increase is long overdue," said Sen. Charles Trump, a Berkeley Springs Republican. "We've been able to do this without tax increases."

Approving a 4 percent raise, instead of the 5 percent hike, will save the state $17 million, Boso said.

Democratic lawmakers said their Republican counterparts should approve the deal the governor negotiated with union leaders for a 5 percent raise.

"We're all caught up in our egos," said Democratic Sen. Douglas Facemire of Sutton. He noted the impact of the impasse on students, including those who depend on schools for their meals. "For 1 percent we're going to let kids go hungry," he said.

Hundreds of teachers and supporters, including students, rallied at the Capitol on Friday, the seventh day they've shuttered classrooms.

Teachers are protesting pay that's among the lowest in the nation, rising health care costs and a previously approved 2 percent raise for next year after four years without any increase.

Justice told school superintendents gathered at the Capitol on Friday that he believed the votes for the raise were there. One administrator noted the impasse is affecting 277,000 students and 35,000 employees.

Protesting teachers have argued that education in West Virginia — where more than 700 classrooms lack fully certified full-time teachers — needs to be a higher priority among politicians. Pay starts at about $33,000 a year, lower than in surrounding states.

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