Kevin O'Leary Gets an F in Education

There are some bad ideas that just won't die, and all it takes is some over-inflated rich guys with a platform to keep them alive.

Enter Kevin O'Leary, a Canadian successful businessman, middling TV personality, and failed politician. He made his big pile in software (SoftKey), tried running for office, did some television reality show stints, and is currently a crypto guy and turns up on Shark Tank. All of that, of course, qualifies him to opine about education over the airwaves. 

He did so on CNN's NewsNight on Tuesday, where he offered his theory about US student test scores.

Why? Unions. Unions that keep mediocre teachers in place in every high school in America when we should be firing them.

Yes, it's the old Fire Our Way To Excellence idea again.  

I would like to fire teachers... and I'd like to pay a lot more to the teachers that advance Math and Reading scores that push our system forward... We have broken the system long ago through unions.

And also

The lowest paid person in America that deserves a lot more money is a great teacher... and we can't in the system of unions in America, we keep mediocrity festering. We're destroying the education system.

Well, this should be easy to test. The states that have the weakest teacher unions should have the best paid and the highest scores. States like Oklahoma and Texas and the Carolinas and Mississippi and Arkansas and Louisiana and Florida and Georgia-- oh, I see a pattern here. Low pay, low test results. Apparently when you stomp on unions, you don't get instant school awesomeness. 

How do we find these mediocre teachers to fire them? We've been over this before-- using tests as a measure creates all sorts of problems, from trying to measure student growth on through using math and reading scores to judge teachers who don't teach math and reading. 

And if we do fire teachers, how easy is it to just go pick some new ones off the Excellent Teacher Tree? 

O'Leary also reinforces the odious notion that the whole purpose of schools is to crank out math and reading scores, which is a giant honking to show that he understands neither assessment nor the whole purpose of education. 

I graduated from teacher school in 1979. and one thing has never, ever changed-- the level of confident assumed expertise of some folks because they went to school. What has changed is the degree to which media outlets aggressively feed them baloney, confirming their worst guesses. But our problem in education is now the country's-- how to make progress with people who don't know what they don't know, and who know with utter certainty some things that just aren't so.