Union label

THE LITTLE ROCK teachers’ union has a good proposal with which we agree: If a school’s letter grade (in this case, a D or an F) has not improved over three consecutive years, the principal should be removed and not allowed to be a principal or an administrator at any other Little Rock school. This is what is called accountability.

Accountability is different from responsibility, since people are only responsible for things they can control. But people are accountable for results, including things they can control and things they can’t.

Clearly there are a lot of things that a principal can’t control in teaching students in the Little Rock School District. But that doesn’t matter to the students who need a good education. They need someone who is accountable for the results, no matter how difficult the job.

But if people are to be held accountable, they must be given the authority for their responsibility. So for a principal to be held accountable, he or she has to be given the authority to hire and fire the people that work in the school,

including teachers. For example, if a teacher is chronically absent, a principal needs to be able to terminate that teacher after appropriate warnings and probation. If you don’t give them that authority, how can you hold them accountable?

So local control would be a great idea, but the ultimate local control needs to be with the principals at each school. If local control means the state’s rules and regulations, the school superintendent, or the teachers’ union contract can restrict the principal’s flexibility so that he cannot make the decisions necessary to succeed, then local control will fail again, as it has in the past in Little Rock.

At some point, some principal will make a bad decision or act in an arbitrary way. That is simply human nature. But if we make sure that never happens, and do it by taking most of the authority away from the principals, we would restrict all principals, including the good ones.

Those types of restrictions will doom the Little Rock School District, under either state or local control, to continued failure.