For quite a few years, I’ve joked that with all the recent rules changes, the NFL is fast becoming the “National Flagfootball League.” Then along comes former NFL Great QB Fran Tarkenton, who postulates the following:
Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.
Sadly, this alternate setting isn’t alternate at all. It exists right here in our own universe…in the form of America’s broken education system, where the Public-Sector Unions protect teachers who underperform, or in some cases, a whole lot worse. They indoctrinate the hearts and minds of our children with the mantras of wealth redistribution, global warming,and moral relativism.
And I haven’t even reached the Public Universities. Tarkenton continues:
Over the past 20 years, we’ve been told that a big part of the problem is crumbling schools—that with new buildings and computers in every classroom, everything would improve. But even though spending on facilities and equipment has more than doubled since 1989 (again adjusted for inflation), we’re still not seeing results, and officials assume the answer is that we haven’t spent enough.
These same misguided beliefs are front and center in Президент Обама’s jobs plan, which includes billions for “public school modernization.” The popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. We’ve been spending billions of dollars on school modernization for decades, and I suspect we could keep on doing it until the end of the world, without much in the way of academic results. The only beneficiaries are the teachers unions.
Some reformers, including Bill Gates, are finally catching on that our federally centralized, union-created system provides no incentive for better performance. If anything, it penalizes those who work hard because they spend time, energy and their own money to help students, only to get the same check each month as the worst teacher in the district (or an even smaller one, if that teacher has been there longer). Is it any surprise, then, that so many good teachers burn out or become disenchanted?
Indeed. There have been times over the last few years where I have actually thought about going into teaching as a profession, thanks to kudos from some friends, but what snaps me back to Reality are the mandates from the Department of Education Indoctrination and the Teachers Unions. I would surely rub them the wrong way at every opportunity.
The best way to improve the education of our students is to return control of the school systems back to the Local and State authorities, and in so doing, abolish the Department of Education Indoctrination.
Tags: Fran Tarkenton, NEA
