Randi Weingarten, M.D.

Randi Weingarten certainly set tongues wagging around the education department when she fell into a discussion with Jay DeDapper on News Forum, a Sunday morning talk show, and compared the membership of the teachers union to medical doctors. "A lot of people don't know about schools but a lot of people do know about doctors and disease," she said. Mr. DeDapper had asked Ms. Weingarten where teachers fit into Mayor Bloomberg's new school accountability model. Ms. Weingarten was explaining why teachers find shouldering accountability for their students' academic performance unfair. "When people say to me, you know, well, why shouldn't teachers be, you know, judged on the test scores of their kids? I say to them…would you want your oncologist, or your mom or dad's oncologist to be graded on the survival rates of his or her patients?"

A typically shrewd question from Ms. Weingarten, but we're not entirely sure the analogy is going to come out where she wants. Can anyone who has seen a loved one touched by cancer really wish their oncologist not be graded on the survival rates of his or her patients? No one would suggest the doctors be fired for each death, but certainly they should be, and are, held accountable for performance. This is the role of hospital internships, strict board examinations, and discriminating patients. Would that teachers were held to such standards as exist in the oncology ward.

If doctors whose patients don't survive are threatened with consequences, Ms. Weingarten suggested, "then what oncologist is going to work with a stage-four cancer patient?" Not a bad question, though under Mayor Bloomberg's leadership the New York City schools have adopted some answers. Teachers and principals can receive flat bonuses for taking jobs in high-needs schools. The grading system for schools is based not on flat test scores but on growth from one year to the next. A school full of smart children who do not improve will face similar consequences as a school full of low performers who show no growth.

"What teachers do is they basically bring their own moxie into their classrooms," Ms. Weingarten told Mr. DeDapper yesterday. "It's what they know in their head content-wise, how much they care about kids, and how they can transmit information. And so what happens is that they don't control a bunch of other factors but that." In other words, the poor performance of some children is like an inoperable tumor. To which we can only say the best way to deal with this is give the family seeking education for its children the same ability to manage its own choices as the cancer patient has and given them a system of vouchers so they don't have to go to the same government run institutions that have been failing for a generation.