In order to teach in most states, they must take courses at teacher colleges that are widely condemned as being useless or even counterproductive in the classroom. They must join teacher unions and have hefty dues withheld from their paychecks, money that is used in political campaigns without their consent. Merit pay to reward and retain outstanding teachers is off-limits in nearly all government school systems.

Public school teachers lost the rights that other professionals take for granted because the usual marketplace forces that protect and reward professionals do not operate inside the public school system.

Teachers, for example, are protected against competition and individual responsibility, and the absence of competition allows many superintendents and school boards to frequently change academic assessment methods and tests, making it difficult for critics to prove the absence of year-to-year progress.

The logic of bureaucracy also rewards centralization of authority, resulting in school districts and high schools that are much too large for a single curriculum to be best for many or even most students. With multiple and constantly changing curricula, however, there can be no certainty as to what students should have mastered in earlier grades, making it almost impossible for school boards, superintendents and principals to accurately assess the performance of individual teachers.

With objective measures of professional competence missing, teachers rightly fear favoritism and other kinds of managerial abuse.

The solution, offered by powerful teacher unions, is complex and detailed collective bargaining agreements which severely limit the principals’ managerial prerogatives. In some respects this strategy works: Teachers are almost never terminated for incompetency, and even the most troubled schools are nearly impossible to shut down. But this "solution" has badly damaged the teaching profession and the children in the schools.

Teaching has become a disrespected profession, with the overwhelming majority of teachers recruited from the bottom third of American college graduates. Real teacher pay has risen by 12 percent since 1982, but pay rose faster for college graduates as a group and in comparable professions. For example, pay for nursing rose by 17 percent over the same period.

Many public school principals have been forced to work around incompetent or otherwise dangerous staff members and teachers, rather than replacing them. This places greater demands on competent teachers and sometimes puts students at grave risk.

* Empower teachers

There is a better path for public school teachers to follow. Allowing parents to choose the schools their children go to would simultaneously allow the teachers to recover their lost freedoms, while also boosting the productivity of K-12 schools.

If parents were allowed to choose schools for their children and if public funds followed the child, the tactics used by superintendents and school boards to avoid accountability would no longer be necessary or possible. Superintendents would have no incentive to mislead parents or voters. Accurate information about student achievement and professional competence from third party rating systems would become widely available, as in the cases of consumer reports on automobiles, hospitals and other goods and services.

If school choice were allowed, school districts and individual schools would become smaller, allowing for a variety of curricula to be applied consistently based on the needs of students and preferences of their parents. This would make possible more accurate evaluation of each teacher’s contribution to a student’s learning. Schools that retain incompetent or dangerous employees would quickly lose students to those with merit-based employment policies.

Successful schools would pay more for teachers with proven ability because they would have greater resources -- from privately or publicly financed tuition -- with which they could pay teachers.

Excessive bureaucracy would not be tolerated, and more money would flow to teachers and classrooms. Principals would no longer be prevented from offering higher pay to exceptional teachers or to those teaching difficult-to-master topics.

Finally, under a system of school choice, teachers would be free to start their own schools and compete for students, free of the bureaucracy and regulations that presently handicap them.

A wide range of exciting opportunities would emerge as old assumptions and dogmas -- that have been kept alive for more than a century behind the walls of monopoly and bureaucracy -- are finally subjected to criticism, and as those walls fall before new and better ideas.