http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/12/21/pinkerton_obama/

December 21, 2008

By James P. Pinkerton

Should drug-dealing public school employees be permitted? Should that even be a question?

It is if you live in Hawaii.

The headline in The Washington Post on Sunday morning sums it up: “Despite Agreement, Hawaii Teachers Resist Drug Testing.” Does it get much plainer than that? Not according to reporter Mark Niesse:

Hawaii public school teachers signed off on first-in-the-nation statewide random drug testing in exchange for pay raises, but now the state claims the educators are trying to take the money and run.

Since the teachers’ union approved the pact nearly two years ago, they have accepted the 11 percent boost in pay while fighting the random tests as an illegal violation of their privacy rights. No teacher has been tested.

The showdown over teacher drug testing arose from the highly publicized arrests of six state Education Department employees in unrelated drug cases over a six-month period. One, Leilehua High School special education teacher Lee Anzai, pleaded guilty to selling more than $40,000 worth of crystal methamphetamine to an undercover agent.

To sum up the situation, the public schools have a drug problem–but they don’t know how big a problem it is, because there’s no drug testing.

Most Americans have come to accept workplace drug-testing as a necessary part of any comprehensive anti-drug program, but not the Hawaii teachers union.

And as for public school employees, well, you might think they would want to do everything possible to root out druggies from their midst–but if you thought that, you thought wrong. Instead, the public employee unions seem determined to obstruct efforts to clean up the mess. Most Americans have come to accept workplace drug-testing as a necessary part of any comprehensive anti-drug program, but not the Hawaii teachers union.

To her credit, Hawaii’s Republican Governor, Linda Lingle, has been pushing for a tougher approach to testing. But she is just one voice; powerful as she might be, she can be overruled by the combined power of the bureaucracy and the judiciary, backed up by the overwhelming Democratic state legislature.

A thorough rethinking of America’s educational system has long been needed: Just how do we get good teachers into the schools, and bad teachers out of the schools? But if this drug-testing case is any sort of indicator, we aren’t likely to get such a rethink. And yet this is not just a state issue–it is a national issue.

By coincidence, President-elect Barack Obama is in Hawaii now, on vacation. He has nothing to do with this sort of local scandal–yet. But once he becomes President, he will have some indirect responsibility for these and many other thorny questions.

As President, his job duties will include improving education. Yes, education has traditionally been a local concern, but over the last 30 years, Presidents of both parties have embraced a substantial federal role in upgrading the schools, as a matter of social justice as well as international competitiveness. As President Ronald Reagan put it, back in 1983, we are “a nation at risk,” jeopardized by underperforming education.

And so while the recent “report cards” issued by the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests are ambiguous as to actual improvements in test scores, what’s decisively unambiguous is the degree to which America is falling behind the rest of the world. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. currently ranks 18th out of 36 industrialized countries. As one expert, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute, told United Press International: “The United States has rested on its laurels way too long, Other countries have increasingly caught up and surpassed the United States.”

Some experts say that we need to inject market forces–choice and competition–into education to make it better and more cost-effective. Others say that we mostly need more money. But it’s hard to imagine any legitimate expert saying that our national education strategy should include drugged-up teachers and other school employees remaining on the job.

And beginning next year, President Obama’s education secretary will be a longtime friend and colleague, Arne Duncan, the current Chicago schools chief. Which is to say, Secretary Duncan should be able to pick up the phone and say, “Mr. President, I think that we have a problem in Hawaii, where the teachers unions are resisting the most obvious and basic of reforms.” It will then be revealing how the 44th President responds.

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