Lock me in a closet and don’t let me out until after the November elections. Lock me in the back room of a financial services outfit and make me do logarithms with paper and pencil.

I’m an important public opinion manipulator, always on the side of God and capitalism and other good stuff, but…but…something awful just happened and I need to be stopped.

It’s too late. I’m sorry.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association is correct about something important. There. I said it. Can you ever forgive me?

This is the Massachusetts Teachers Association, enemy of all that is good, convinced that teaching “professionals” should be compensated and promoted in a fashion most akin to coal miners and truck drivers.

This is the MTA, which promotes the notion that students and their parents are the enemy – obstacles to the care and feeding of the teachers.

And yet, there it is, an issue on which the union (albeit, for all the wrong reasons) is correct – and those on the side of the angels are wrong.

It has to do with the ballot initiative set for November that asks voters to weaken the current tenure system that virtually guarantees a teacher a job for life, once he or she has staggered through the first few years of pretending to conquer ignorance.

“Performance” evaluation is all the rage these days, as various jurisdictions across the country stare at test scores and sneak assistant principals into the classrooms, to make sure that teachers aren’t wearing backwards baseball caps and committing other sins against educational competence.

Tenure? Number of years served? It will never go away, as long as a union leader is still breathing somewhere in the land. But the idea is to make it less of a factor than whether the teachers can actually teach; whether the little munchkins thrive under every instructor that stands before them.

No To ‘Yes-No’

The problem in Massachusetts, as articulated in various frantic forms by the MTA, is that the issue of evaluating teachers doesn’t belong on a referendum ballot. How, why and whether teachers should be evaluated, based on performance, is too mysterious and complex, and, of course, subject to union negotiation, for it to appear as a kind of yes-no question for voters to decide.

The broadest complaint against the referendum question is just that: It is too broad. Judges prefer (and, often, voters do as well) precision in referendum questions – and the issues lurking in the matter of teacher evaluation don’t necessarily merit a yes-no, decision-making process

The more comical complaint (not to say it isn’t valid) is that the make-believe “independence” of local school boards would be threatened if the voting public forced an evaluation tool upon them. As a practical matter, of course, the MTA owns the legislature and the local school districts are helpless in the face of the juggernaut.

All of this is not to say that the current, comfy process by which teachers are virtually guaranteed a job for life isn’t defective, but this is a political, nibble-at-the-margins problem to be solved by means other than a referendum vote.

Even those good folks who favor the question sound odd at times. As “Stand for Children” Executive Director Jason Williams put it, the proposal would “ensure that every child in every classroom across the commonwealth is being led by an excellent teacher.” Calm down there, cowboy.

To be sure, Massachusetts enjoys the recreational value of a rambunctious referendum or two. The kill-the-income-tax efforts, and the slash-the-sales-tax offering, gave the voters an opportunity to vent, and to scare the tax-and-spenders half to death, without much concern that the stuff would actually pass.

A few years ago, a Texas referendum endorsed the notion that Texas would never, ever be like Massachusetts: Voter approval would be required before the implementation of a personal income tax (as if that would ever happen in Texas).

The basic premise of the “tenure” referendum in Massachusetts is correct: The legislature is unlikely to ever buck the teachers’ unions in any significant way. But, unfortunately, the process and procedure of teacher evaluation isn’t appropriate for the blunt instrument that is a yes-no ballot question.