Fran Tarkenton in the Wall Street Journal reposted by Mark Hinkle at LP.org blog:
Imagine a league where players who make it through three seasons could never be cut from the roster.
Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.
Let’s face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?
No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn’t get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.
Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn’t help.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers’ salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn’t rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they’ve been teaching. That’s it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you’re demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation’s children.
Read the rest of the article here.
The NFL is one great big socialist camp. If it wasn’t for the state colleges training the players and governments at the state and local level paying for the stadiums the NFL would be shell of itself.
sorry
THEIR reform has no demonstrable benefits
It’s a false dichotomy. If it was teachers coaches then I could understand it. I mean…
“Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent.”
What if your method of testing talent could be rigged? They actually did that to get Michelle Rhee’s scores where they wanted them.
“the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: “They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans.” ”
I’m a supporter of the “players union” and my criticism is not that they hate the game. It’s that there reform has no demonstrable benefits when the background of the subjects is factored in and that they’re trying to PROFIT from it, which is a recipe for poor overall quality and social stratification.
” Teachers’ salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn’t rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they’ve been teaching. ”
And no relation to the environment they’re in or whether or not the majority of their students actually CARE about doing well. Children from poorer households tend to do worse, and if a child just doesn’t give a crap, what is a teacher to do? What if you have parents who look down on ” secular” education or just learning in general?
I think this review says it best of all http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/11464/waiting-for-superman-the-worst-film-of-2010/