Can Madigan deliver?

As we note in the editorial above, House Speaker Michael Madigan recently created a special bipartisan Illinois House committee to push education reform.

Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia, D-Aurora, who co-chairs the new committee, told us it will look to do "stuff we've never even touched on before, because we haven't had the political fortitude to tackle these things."

Well, well. Merging such ambition and such clout just might lead to great things.

Among the items on the committee's radar screen:

•Making sure that teacher performance — not seniority — is a "primary factor" in layoffs.

•Making it tougher to get tenure and easier to fire tenured teachers who aren't performing.

•Ending the "dance of the lemons," in which teachers fired from one school are able to bump better teachers with less seniority in other schools.

•Curbing teachers' right to strike.

That's an excellent agenda. Teachers should be paid very well for outstanding performance. No one should be guaranteed a job just for showing up. Tenure and tradition and milquetoast administrators make it almost impossible to fire bad teachers. And traditional pay scales provide no incentive to teach well.

Illinois should join the 37 states that ban teachers from striking. Kids suffer the most in a teachers strike. They're the collateral damage when schooling is disrupted.

The special committee will launch hearings this week. We'd like to suggest the committee's first reading assignment: A chapter in a 2009 Urban Institute book. Its conclusion: Firing the least effective 6 to 10 percent of teachers would catapult American kids from near the bottom of the international pack in academic achievement to the top ranks. That's an astonishing measure of how valuable a good teacher is and how harmful an ineffective one can be.

"It is unclear why we permit a small group of teachers to do such large damage," Stanford economist Eric Hanushek wrote in "Creating a New Teaching Profession."

"The majority of teachers are effective. They are able to compete with teachers virtually anywhere else in the world. Yet these effective teachers are lumped in with a small group of completely ineffective teachers, who are permitted to continue damaging students' educational experiences."

We often have grade school and high school students visit the editorial board. We usually ask them: Do you know who are the best and worst teachers in your school?

Of course they do. It's inspiring—and harrowing—to hear them tell the stories of the best and the worst.

Here's your chance, lawmakers. Focus on the kids … and deliver.

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