The jobs bill in congress includes a $23 billion dollar provision that’s being called “the teacher bailout”, to prevent school districts from laying off 100,000 to 300,000 teachers. There’s certainly something to be said for trimming the fat, and I’m sure every school district in the country spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on stuff that could, and should be cut from the budget. Nevertheless, Derek Thompson at the Atlantic Business points out that the good kinds of cuts are not necessarily the kinds of cuts we would get:

Smart education reform includes clear incentives for administrators to control costs and teachers to demonstrate achievement against a reasonable baseline. But we don’t want schools firing teachers willy nilly in the fog of deep budget cuts that could wipe out programs based on their cost rather than their effectiveness.

This certainly seems to be what you see with school districts cutting budgets during this recession. You don’t hear about school districts whose budget cuts involve finally firing some of the old, ineffective, teachers who everyone knows shouldn’t be teaching, or taking back some of the overly generous salaries commanded by 8th grade history teachers because they have PhDs they don’t need. No, what you see is the most recently hired teachers being fired, and whole departments like music and art being cut. And many State laws ensure that future cuts are not going to get any better:

Fifteen states, including New York and California, now operate under union-backed state laws mandating that seniority, or “last in/first out,” determines layoffs. These quality-blind layoffs could force a new generation of teachers, like those recruited by Teach for America, out of classrooms in the coming months

I understand the desire to force school district towards efficiency, but it does not seem like the most inefficient costs are being cut as a result of budget shortfalls. However, that doesn’t mean that this is not an opportunity for reform. One way to get more reform and efficiency out of this is to go ahead with a teacher bailout, but model it after Obama’s successful Race to the Top program. States could compete for a piece of the bailout by getting rid of the first come/first fire laws, making it easier to get rid of bad teachers, and implementing other reforms. Given what RTT was able to achieve with $4.3 billion, $23 billion would likely buy some pretty significant reforms.

Legislators would be wise to consider what Obama said in his State of the Union: “Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform”.