NFL Quarterback Great Fran Tarkenton Knows Nothing About Education; Has No Solutions

 These are Great Qualifications for an Opinion Piece in the Wall Street Journal

Fran Tarkenton has written on the status of American Education in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.  Who is Fran Tarkenton?

Mr. Tarkenton, an NFL Hall of Fame quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants from 1961 to 1978, is an entrepreneur who runs two websites devoted to small business education.

Now if no one sees any expertise in public education in that description of Mr. Tarkenton’s credentials, the likely explanation is that there isn’t any.  So how is Mr. Tarkenton qualified to write on the subject in a prestigious newspaper like the Wall Street Journal?  Easy answer, he isn’t.  But since he is willing to rail against teachers, teacher compensation and teacher unions that makes him qualified for Conservatives.



How Much Did This Contribute
to Better Education?


 

Here is what passes as wisdom from Mr. Tarkenton.

The popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. We've been spending billions of dollars on school modernization for decades, and I suspect we could keep on doing it until the end of the world, without much in the way of academic results. The only beneficiaries are the teachers unions.

So one could conclude from Mr. Tarkenton’s comments that not having modern schools would not harm education.  And exactly how teacher’s unions benefit are the only thing that comes from modern schools, well let’s just leave that to the imagination since Mr. Tarkenton does not have an answer.

And then there is this,

We've destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out. As one of my coaches used to say, "You don't get vast results with half-vast efforts!"

which defies comment because the sentiments are so incoherent that a coherent comment is not possible.  And is a football coach really the person one wants to turn to for insight on education?

Mr. Tarkenton also says this

Our rigid, top-down, union-dictated system isn't working. If results are the objective, then we need to loosen the reins, giving teachers the ability to fulfill their responsibilities to students to the best of their abilities, not to the letter of the union contract and federal standards.

cleverly ignoring the fact that Mr. Obama just made major moves to return greater control of education to the states after his predecessor, a strong conservative took power away from the states and gave it to the Federal government.  But pointing that out would have meant approving of something the President did, and that’s no way to get published in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Tarkenton made million in his career as a professional football player.  The NFL is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the country.  Taxpayers in every city that has an NFL franchise has contributed millions, sometimes hundreds of millions to build facilities for their teams.  The owners of those teams are very wealthy, fully capable of supporting their team without taxpayer money, but that kind of thinking is not what got them to be rich in the first place. 

So Mr. Tarkenton, before you criticize public education and its support, take a look at your own situation and think about how much your success has come from taxpayer funded activities.  And maybe if some of that taxpayer money that went to build a football stadium that is used less than 20 days a year were used on education reform there might well be a better educational system.  And we could still have football, just in the older stadium.  Would that be okay?