This op-ed reads to me as if you're viewing public school problems through a lens of ideology. I don't hear any facts to back up your assertions, just stories about "the teacher in the classroom next door marking time". Your whole argument seems rooted in philosophy, not facts: You've deduced that teachers unions are bad and tenure protects incompetents.

Personally I've got anecdotes all around (my sister's a teacher, originally in New York City, now in Virginia). I don't rely on them to make policy recommendations, though.

My wife and I got into a sofa argument the other night over teachers. Here in lovely New Jersey the reprehensible Governor Christie told the citizens of the state that we should vote down any school budget increases in any district where the teachers didn't agree to a pay freeze. My side of the argument is this: Teachers are the low men on the totem pole. They're already overworked and underpaid. Demanding more from them is simply ridiculous -- especially in a state where the governor has simply refused to continue the marginal tax increase on taxpayers claiming over $400,000 income a year. How can we expect to attract the best and brightest to any profession where they're treated this way? Christie is afraid of scaring off the wealthiest residents of the state, but any time there's a problem, we can cut school funding.

I happen to feel, strongly, that the public school problems we're having are not due to teachers or tenure. I think the whole concept of how we teach children is in need of an overhaul. Our system was fine when our society needed factory workers but it's badly out of date now. However, given that our society won't be tackling the problems at that scale any time soon, we have to think carefully about what's possible. Simply falling back to free market ideologies and shouting "Choice! Competition!" -- as if these can solve every problem -- and haven't we learned over the past forty years of deregulation that they often make things worse? -- isn't helpful.

It's not as if my anti-deregulation broadside is a major part of my thesis or anything. Although I'll just mention Pan Am and Enron. And, oh yeah, THE GREAT RECESSION.

But never mind that. As I said, it's not a major part of my thesis. More importantly I'd ask where your evidence is that choice! and competition! really help with education. Keep in mind, before you answer, that choice and competition figure strongly in college-level education, and my wife's a university professor. So I have plenty of ammunition from those trenches, too. When I say evidence I mean more than thought experiments, by the way. That's usually what I hear about education reform.

As far as three-year tenure goes, you see the bad points of it from one side. There's another side, which is not that teachers gain permanent job security, but that they suffer with permanent insecurity. Because teachers don't get tenure for three years, many teachers get tossed before their three years are up -- just to prevent their attaining tenure. In fact that tenure requirement is held over new teachers' heads. They have to meet or exceed expectations -- never mind that "satisfactory" rating -- in order to hang on that long. It's three years in the same job in the same school, remember. Just being a teacher somewhere or other for three years doesn't count.

The trouble isn't that teachers aren't, therefore, motivated to achieve. The trouble is they're being motivated in the wrong ways for the wrong things. I'm sure we could both come up with a laundry list of complaints, from standardized testing to lack of afterschool programs, music and art classes. (In fact several high schools around here had their students stage a walk out in protest -- arranged on Facebook -- for the way their schools are being treated. A few students were even arrested! It's like the 1960s all over again! I'm proud of them simply because they give a crap. My class would never have given half that much a crap about anything. I'm not sure it's helpful in any way, but, hey, everyone needs to get demoralized somehow.)

I guess the question is not, what's wrong? We can all come up with things that are wrong. The question is, how would deregulation solve these problems?

I have my daughter in a charter school. Charter schools are choice and competition. But, in all honesty, I'm not sure the charter school is significantly different from the local public school. The main positive thing about it is, it draws from a larger and more varied population than our town, so my daughter is interacting with a lot of different kids. If she stayed here she'd mostly know middle class white kids, children of cops and firemen and car salesmen. Now she knows kids from Turkey, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Singapore, poor kids, middle class kids, the works. It's more fun.

Is the education any better? I'm not so sure. Insofar as the parents are more involved -- since parents have to be involved even to get their kids into the school -- it seems better. But overall I'm not that impressed.

And have we forgotten that tenure was invented for a reason? Do we want our teachers constantly beholden to the political winds? The idea was that, given job security, they could freely teach what was right, not what was popular or expedient. Is this something worth throwing away?