This article in the Washington Post certainly seems like an example of banks wanting to have their cake and eat it too. Here’s the choice part:

Currently, they can choose between direct lending and a federal program that guarantees student loans made by private banks. The bill would not affect nonfederal loans.

By cutting banks out of the equation, the administration expects to reap $80 billion over the next decade for increased student aid, community colleges, early childhood education and other programs. Those funding estimates, however, are being questioned because they are several months old.

Prominent players in the lending industry, including Sallie Mae, oppose the legislation, saying that it will eliminate thousands of jobs and that there are ways to save the government money without shutting out private lenders. Republicans depict themselves as defenders of market competition.

Hmm…the banks don’t want the government to pull their guarantee of this debt, but just want to make all the profit. And, naturally, they’re worried about being cut out of the process entirely. Hmm…I’m not feeling too sympathetic. Try not to throw up as you read about Sallie Mae here.

America’s best investment is easy. Education.

This summer there was a disturbing article in The New Yorker highlighting how some of the worst teachers in the NYC school system, essentially, couldn’t be fired. Despite grotesquely negligent behavior their contract was protecting them and they were being paid to go sit in a room every day. A snippet:

It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.

These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.

The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

As distressing as that snapshot was, this latest news from the president of the American Federation of Teachers is every bit the inspiring.

The president of the American Federation of Teachers says she will urge her members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account and that the union has commissioned an independent effort to streamline disciplinary processes and make it easier to fire teachers who are guilty of misconduct.
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The point is not just to get rid of failing teachers, but to improve the skills and effectiveness of the millions of teachers who show up in the classrooms every day.

A number of studies have shown that excellent teachers make the greatest difference in student outcomes. I can certainly attest to this from my own personal experience. A clear embrace of greater accountability and improved training is a giant step forward to improving our school system.

In an increasingly tough global economic environment for America we must “stack the deck” in our favor every way that we can. Rebuilding an educational system that is the world’s envy is surely the foundation of any plan for our continued prosperity.