Jerry Jesness is a special education teacher in a south Texas elementary school. His email address is: jjesness@hiline.net.

Difficult times always bring calls for strong leaders. The new call is to empower school administrators to be like business managers.

The idea is that we should eliminate tenure and weaken the sway of teachers' unions, and thus give principals and superintendents the same power to freely hire and fire as managers in the private sector. Georgia is leading the way, having just passed legislation ending teacher tenure there.

It is true that some systems offer too much protection to incompetent teachers, and such protections need to be weakened. To put absolute power in the hands of a few educational bureaucrats, however, would be folly.

No entrepreneurs allowed

We must consider two factors that make public schools unlike private-sector businesses. First, public schools are monopolies, not competitive businesses. Second, we presently have in place a credentialing system for administrators that actually locks some of the most competent educators out of leadership positions.

Market forces do not check public schools. Fired private-sector employees have the right to move to a competing company or start their own businesses and compete in the same market with their former employers. Many a firm has lost market share or has even been put out of business by competition from former employees. When Henry Ford II fired Lee Iacocca, Iacocca then transformed the faltering Chrysler Corp., much to the detriment of Ford Motor Company.

An entrepreneur who discharges competent employees in order to surround himself with sycophants likely will find his business on shaky ground or perhaps even in bankruptcy. There is no such consequence for a school administrator who does the same.

Some of us teachers would be willing to give up both contractual and union protection in exchange for full entrepreneurial rights. But at present, only a few states have voucher or charter laws that allow freelancers to compete for public education dollars, and even in those states, such opportunities are still quite limited.

When any teacher can create a mom-and-pop school and compete with the local public school for public school dollars as easily as a caterer can establish a hamburger stand and compete with McDonald's for the public's lunch money, education will be ready for the business model. But unless schools become truly part of the free-market system, principals with absolute power to hire and fire will more closely resemble the factory managers of the former Soviet Union than executives of American corporations.

The failure of education schools

It is hardly an inside secret that schools of education, the training grounds for most public school teachers and virtually all administrators, are held in generally low esteem. Some states have taken steps to weaken their influence.

Some states have reduced the number of education courses that prospective teachers are required to take, and others offer alternative certification programs that allow new teachers to begin working in the classroom before they have taken any education courses at all. A few districts are even considering hiring superintendents who have never set foot in a school of education.

Public school principals, however, are invariably education school products. They are taught the "child-centered education" mantra of the education faculties. "We do not teach reading and math," these professors say, "but rather we teach children."

Of course this is a play on words. We really teach reading and math to children. Even if we truncate the sentence, the meaning should be clear. Because education professors teach methods, leaving content to other departments, methodology seems to them to be what matters most.

Public school principals, the instructional leaders that our reformers would grant the powers of a CEO, are often the education colleges' star pupils. Most teacher candidates trudge through their education courses. But a few students find the classes interesting or even challenging. They acquire graduate degrees in education and then go on to run schools.

Only occasionally does one encounter an education-school graduate with a genuinely well-rounded education. It is frightening that teachers of academic subjects could be at the mercy of superiors who have had done little serious academic study themselves.

The danger of too-powerful bureaucrats

Even an intellectually and academically mediocre leader can improve a truly dismal school simply by keeping the grass mowed, the walls painted and teachers in their classrooms, and occasionally a truly competent and principled administrator can lead a school to greatness. An ignorant and egotistical leader with too much power, however, can sabotage good teaching.

I have known very competent teachers, especially in math and the sciences, who were at constant odds with their principals, not because they taught badly but because their principals did not understand what they were teaching.

If the market determines that a strongman's school merits customers, that is great. But we should not simply put a chainsaw in the hands of our educational bureaucrats and let them run roughshod over captive staffs. We must have competent teachers in order to have good schools, and a system that leaves the fate of teachers in the hands of one or two individuals will not attract our best and brightest into the classroom.

This is especially significant in these times of teacher shortages. Until we have a school system that is genuinely guided by Adam Smith's invisible hand, we are better served when public school teachers have certain protections.