Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.”

Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted Kolderie, says that one of our biggest problems is that we don’t give teachers any motivation to excel: no money and no appreciable amount of autonomy. In old-fashioned free-enterprise terms (and the brevity necessary here doesn’t do justice to the ideas), he suggests that we allow teachers to operate as the professionals we expect them to be, as free agents in what he calls “private practice,” who contract with various schools (rather than working for one school) and have control over curriculum, methods, and aids, colleagues and compensation.

He’d also like to see students and their parents have the chance to choose among public schools and school districts, a luxury now available only to people with money. Under such a system, “Every school will become a school of choice,” Kolderie writes in a public memo. “With choice among schools there can be more coherence within schools. Schools will be more responsive. And parents and students will begin to share with the schools the responsibility for performance.”

Under his proposed system, a school—and the teachers in it, individually—will be “at risk as to performance.” If the school is bad, parents can easily move their kids to a different one. And if enough dissatisfied parents take their kids out of Mr. Jones’s French class, Jones-the-free-agent’s salary will decrease proportionately, and he’ll either improve or quit teaching. Teachers’ salaries, under PSI’s plan, would be determined by class size (reflecting the quality of their teaching) and by their use of time and materials budgets.

Ruth Anne Olson, a self-employed educational evaluator and program designer who had been working with PSI, started her own business last year. Private Practice Advisors has, for example, helped interested teachers develop a contract with the Shrine Hospital in Minneapolis, teaching kids in grades K-12 who are long-term patients there and whom the local school system could not or would not take on. Other private-practice programs are being designed or are already in operation in Minnesota and Wisconsin classrooms.

But the most daring program Olson is working with may be the one in North Branch, Minnesota, where superintendent of schools Jim Walker proposed in the summer of 1985 that two fourth-grade teachers be responsible for teaching 90 children. They would receive the same budget as usual, would have to comply with all the district’s curricular and instructional policies, and would be evaluated like all the other teachers in the district. Parents, however, could choose to enroll their children in, or withdraw them from, the teachers’ class, and the teachers’ compensation would reflect those changes. Walker left all other options open. The teachers could, if they wanted, use part of their budget to pay aides or specialists in music, art, and phys. ed. They could buy materials from the district or elsewhere. They could, in short, spend their budget as they thought appropriate.

It would be logical for the teachers’ unions to turn handsprings over such a proposal, which removes any arbitrary ceiling in teachers’ pay, increases teachers’ professional prestige, and generally advances the concept of giving teachers the freedom to do what they’re supposed to do best. But because the teachers’ unions objected to it, the brave experiment in North Branch never took place during the 1985-86 school year. Eventually the school board (which had liked Walker’s plan) and the union compromised on a more traditional two-year version during 1986-87 and 1987-88. One major change, an important deviation from the original private-practice concept, was that the teachers were not allowed to profit monetarily by increased class size and smart budget decisions; they simply receive the district’s usual salary for their level, and their budget is decreased by a like amount. According to Ruth Anne Olson, the unions’ objection to Superintendent Walker’s proposal was not that the three teachers might make less than other teachers at their level but that they might make more.

The National Education Association (NEA), whose 8,000 members make it the nation’s largest teachers’ union, meets every year, and they met this July. Unworldly parents might expect that they spent their four days in Los Angeles discussing how to increase teacher responsibility, pensions, and classroom success, since NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell has sworn to use the NEA to help elect a Democratic “pro-education” president after she boots Reagan the antiabortion child-hater out of office. But no. Concerned above all with children, the group voted to endorse distribution of contraceptives at school health clinics after a Raleigh, North Carolina, elementary teacher declared, “Information does not cause pregnancy. Lack of information causes pregnancy.” (These people know a revolutionary scientific breakthrough when they hear one.) A social studies and Spanish teacher from Lehi, Utah, reminded them that as educators they were “trained to dispense knowledge, not contraceptives” and added that “teen pregnancy goes up where clinics exist”; he was booed.

His testimony, however, did serve to remind the group that they were there to talk about education, for Heaven’s sake, so the logical next step was to vote for AIDS education courses; specifically, the material should include information about “abstinence and medically accepted protective devices.” The 8,000 teachers then voted to fight the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork; “He’s a compulsory pregnancy man . . . too conservative on race, women’s rights, and reproductive freedom,” one teacher told the remaining 7,999, and apparently they believed her. Another vote fought the move to make English the official language of the United States. Then these elementary and high school teachers wrapped up their 125th annual convention by rejecting a wacko resolution to support U.S. economic reconstruction aid to the Communist government in Nicaragua (it was near the end and they were weary; the vote was obviously a mistake) and voting to oppose laws requiring school buses to have seat belts. Exhausted, the group left it to the nine-member Executive Committee to decide whether to endorse a gay rights march in Washington.