Making Fiscal Sense I

I believe the entire public sector/private sector discussion referred to (on the Norwich ListServ 10/28/10) arises from Stan Williams' "new superintendent qualifications input" post from earlier this week.

I'm afraid the public/private sector distinction is unnecessarily/unhelpfully obscuring Stan's "three major concerns about the state of the Hanover/Norwich school system."

To press the points home, I've repeated Stan's post below [sanitized of the public/private distinction within bold italicized brackets] as I think his points are well worth pondering and discussion:

I have three major concerns about the state of the Hanover/Norwich school system.

1. Unfunded pension and health liabilities will crush our ability to provide a quality education at a reasonable cost unless we continue to attack these costs - the new superintendent must be able and willing to tackle this issue in the next round of contract negotiations. At a minimum, new teachers should not expect to receive a defined benefits pension - this perk has [become a major and intractable fiscal millstone for many states and municipalities].

2) Teacher Evaluation - as a board member for two years, I was never able to receive ANY data on the number of teachers rated excellent, good, poor (use any rating system you like.) I find it hard to believe that it is possible to effectively run a service sector, labor intensive operation without good data on employee performance, and I believe the board and taxpayers need more information, in aggregate - not individually, about teacher performance.

I know the board has addressed merit pay in the past and defining excellent performance is not easy and can be subjective, but [as individuals, we tackle difficult, subjective decisions every day] and [where evaluating the quality of our childrens' education is in question] imperfection is better than not trying at all.

3) Tenure - originally intended to protect academic freedom, this is another perk that really [begs the question whether we are guaranteeing employment at the expense of evaluating quality of teaching]. The administration needs the ability to more easily terminate teachers that don't make the grade (see above.)

To teachers who may think this sounds a bit harsh, I can only say that I do appreciate the individual excellent efforts of the vast majority of the teachers who have taught my children very well over the years. But I honestly believe these are key issues on which we must focus as a school system as well as a society - we can no longer afford to have education costs rise greater than GDP growth in perpetuity. (This goes as well for universities, where the issues above are all in play, or will soon be.)

Thanks for your efforts on the board.

Stan Williams

[paraphrased/rephrased by Watt Alexander]