From the Examiner.com
by David Reber
All the talk lately about health care warrants stepping out of topic briefly to discuss a national public health epidemic: obesity.
According to the Center for Disease Control, one third of American’s are obese. Furthermore, obesity is not an equal-opportunity affliction. Obesity is 21% more prevalent among Hispanics, and 51% more prevalent among Blacks. The surgeon general’s office indicates that people living in poverty are 50% more likely to be obese.
Obesity is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancers, and type 2 diabetes. Obesity is unquestionably a life-threatening condition.
And obesity is expensive. Obesity-related medical expenses in the United States total nearly $100 billion annually, including about $50 billion in Medicare/Medicaid spending. In Kansas, we spend about $200 million each year on obesity-related medical costs.
How do we accept that one out of every three Americans suffers a life-threatening condition, and that minorities and economically-disadvantaged people are disproportionately afflicted? Why must society spend nearly $100 billion annually on what should be a preventable problem? Who is at fault?
Obesity is a medical problem, and medical professionals are supposed to prevent, treat, and cure medical problems. We spend $100 billion every year, but clearly we aren’t getting our money’s worth. It must be that our doctors are too incompetent and lazy to provide adequate medical care. The solution is simple:
We must fire bad doctors.
But we don’t. National medical malpractice statistics show that less than one-half of 1% of the nation’s doctors faces any serious state sanctions each year. This has to change. For the future health and prosperity of our nation, we must act now. We must fire bad doctors.
Certainly the doctors won’t like this. They will toss out all manner of excuses. They will claim lifestyle choices influence people’s health. They will claim genetic pre-dispositions influence people’s health. They will claim that living in poverty limits people’s access to healthy foods and healthy lifestyle options – all beyond the doctor’s control. Lame excuses.
The really bad doctors will point out that many people don’t follow doctor’s orders. Doctors tell their patients to eat right and exercise, but the patient’s just won’t “do their homework” so to speak. The worst doctors will have the audacity to claim that not everyone bothers to visit a doctor, and that doctors can’t treat – or be held accountable for - patients who don’t show up. More lame excuses.
We cannot accept lame excuses when the health and economic prosperity of our nation is at stake. We must “bust the doctor’s union”, so to speak; and rid the country of lazy, incompetent doctors who refuse to cure our nation’s ills.
But this isn’t a medical column; it’s a public education column. So where is this digression going? Read part 2; and learn how this relates to public education.
Part II
By now you’ve read part one about America’s obesity epidemic, and how blame falls squarely on the shoulders of our nation’s incompetent, lazy doctors. If we fire them and start over, the health and vigor of our citizens will rise to Olympic proportions. (If you haven’t read that yet, do so first and then come back here).
By now, you’ve also noted how absurd the assertion, and how sophomoric the solution. Perhaps you can even smell the sarcasm emanating from your computer monitor. It’s utter nonsense – all of it. Yet this is exactly the kind of witch hunt targeting public school teachers throughout America.
“We must fire bad teachers” – these words blazed across the cover of the March 15, 2010 Newsweek Magazine. Not once, not twice, but eleven times; chalk-written, line after line, as if a disobedient child were fulfilling his detention-time penance.
“We must fire bad teachers”. Not a bad idea. Education is vitally important so it follows that teacher quality is vitally important as well. But the entire premise of the cover, and of Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert’s article within, is that the alleged decline of public education in America is the result of our teachers being too incompetent and lazy to provide effective instruction.
Thomas and Wingert point to the persistent achievement gap between white students compared to poor and minority students; and they blame teachers. They note that as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores drop; and they blame teachers.
News flash: as the number of obese Americans increases; so does the number of obesity-related heart attacks. Let’s blame the doctors.
Thomas and Wingert go on to say that “Nothing is more important than hiring good teachers and firing bad ones”. True enough. They also note the difficulty of attracting talent to the profession. “Most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound students”, they say; adding that many talented candidates “chose other, more highly compensated fields.”
News flash: you get what you pay for.
But do Thomas and Wingert call for higher teacher salaries? No. They nod apologetically to the nation’s “caring and selfless” teachers, perhaps not wanting to insult everyone with their bottom-of-the-barrel description of teacher quality. But it’s a backhanded compliment. They’re saying you can’t be a good teacher AND expect professional pay – as though the two are fundamentally incompatible.
Would Americans be healthier if the starting M.D. salary was $30,000? Regardless, Thomas and Wingert leave us only the second option: fire the bad teachers.
Yet they claim we can’t fire bad teachers because the “powerful” teacher’s unions protect them. They also claim teachers are given “lifetime tenure”. Two lies. As evidence, they say less than 1% of teachers are fired (interestingly, about the same percentage we see in doctors). They say “year after year, about 99 percent of all teachers are rated satisfactory by their school systems”.
Perhaps those numbers exists because 99% of teachers ARE doing a good job. Perhaps the bad teachers – that whopping 1% of the total - ARE being fired. By Newsweek logic that can’t be right. If teachers were competent there would be no racial and socioeconomic achievement gap, right? Just like there’s no racial or socioeconomic factor in the prevalence of obesity. And if there were, we would blame the doctors and call for mass firings, right?
What about “lifetime tenure”? Tenure, as the term is commonly used, isn’t granted in public school systems. Most states, including Kansas, have a probationary period in which new teachers can be terminated at the end of the year for no specific reason. Non-probationary teachers have a "continuing contract", meaning they will continue to have a job year to year unless there is just cause for firing them. Teachers can be and are fired for any number of legitimate reasons such as incompetence, unprofessional conduct, insubordination, and so forth.
Unions don’t protect bad teachers. Unions protect good contracts. Unions make sure that firing is not arbitrary or capricious, but rather is only used for just cause. As such, unions help keep good teachers on the job.
If a bad teacher is retained on the job, you’ll surely find a pusillanimous principal right above them. Or maybe there are no “highly qualified” candidates available to replace those teachers; and the school risks nasty labels and sanctions under No Child Left Behind if they dare fill a position with anything less.
If unions protected bad teachers, non-union states should be firing scores of bad teachers. In “The Myth of the Powerful Teacher’s Union”, Los Angeles playwright David Macaray explains that South Carolina, where 100% of teachers are non-union, fires only 0.32% of teachers. North Carolina, where 97% of teachers are non-union, fires a miniscule 0.03% of teachers. Statistics not only don’t support Newsweek’s assertion, but actually contradict it.
So where do Thomas and Wingert go next in their war on teachers? Check back soon for part three, but rest assured they won’t allow facts to interfere with their crusade.
Continue reading on Examiner.com Fire doctors to cure obesity? Absurd! - Topeka K-12 | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/k-12-in-topeka/fire-doctors-to-cure-obesity-absurd#ixzz1WzIDLg2B
http://www.examiner.com/k-12-in-topeka/we-must-fire-bad-doctors
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