Public school teachers in a sick system
Bookworm on Mar 03 2011 at 12:15 pm | Filed under: Education
Mr. Bookworm loves Jon Stewart. Most of his political views are shaped by Jon Stewart, except for those that get a helping hand from the New York Times. I therefore ending up watching more Jon Stewart than I like. What I’ve noticed about Stewart’s coverage on Wisconsin is that it’s very narrow in focus. It asks just one question: How dare conservatives beat up on teachers, who are nice people who care for our children?
You know what? I agree that most (although not all) teachers are nice people who care about our children. Many of these nice people are also dedicated, high quality educators. Nevertheless, conservatives are doing the right thing.
Our public education system is sick, and we, the taxpayers, are funding that sick system. How is it sick? We pay public teachers more and more and more, both compared to salaries in the past and compared to similarly situated private school teachers, but we get less and less and less for that money. Not only has public school education remained precisely the same in terms of outcome for decades now (long before the salary, pension and tenure boom), but those less well-paid private school teachers are doing a much better job. Reason gives the details:
When you perform necessary surgery, you invariably injury healthy tissue even as you cut out or sew up the life-draining problem. Right, the good teachers (as opposed to the screaming union goons) are feeling the heat. Still, they are, sadly, the necessary fallout for fixing a terminally sick situation.
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11 Responses to “Public school teachers in a sick system”
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I love misdirection, which the left is particularly good at.
Conservatives are not “beating up on teachers,” they’re beating up on unions, which have turned into corrupt, parasitical, direct assaults on democracy.
Yes, I understand when you have been shanghaied or dragooned into an army or political movement against your will, and forgive you for it. But please don’t whine and groan when my bombs hit you while they are aimed at your masters. As one of the left’s most beloved mass murderers once said, “A revolution is not a dinner party.”
Teachers don’t get a damn say in unions. So we don’t care about their decisions. For they don’t get to make any important ones, the unions make it for them.
Greetings:
One of the early lessons I received in my business career that stayed with me through thick and thin was what I call “The Parable of the Leg of Lamb.
A mother is over at her daughter’s house for dinner. The daughter is preparing a leg of lamb. She saws partially through the leg bone, bends it back and puts the lamb in the roasting pan. The mother asks why she did that. The daughter says, “Mommmm, that’s the way you always prepared a leg of lamb!” “Yes,” replied the mother, “but we only had a very small roasting pan.”
Processes and procedures often have a way of continuing long after the reasons for them have gone away. I used to try to coach my employees that it was important to remember both aspects, the procedure and why we do it.
It seems to me, and I am the son of a New York City Teamster Union Local 282 father, that many of the reasons for unionization have “done come and gone”. There are many government regulatory programs which restrict the activities of employers, EEO, EPA, OSHA for example, and that indirectly benefit employees by curtailing negative activities by employers, thus, in my opinion, diminishing the need for unions. If one also considers the changes in the workplace as manufacturing jobs were exported, there is again an approaching point of diminishing returns.
Back in my Public Administration studying days, there was an emphasized concept referred to as “fundamentalism versus incrementalism”. The former referred to situations like when FDR de novo established the Social Security System during the Depression. The latter would describe the various adjustment that have been made to that system since; beneficiaries, tax rates, and monthly payment rates. I think what we have with the current union situation is something that requires a look at the fundamental aspect of the problem while the unionistas want to restrict any analysis to the incremental.
The overwhelming majority of American workers seem to be getting by without union representation. They may be voting with their heads or with their feet, but they seem to be muddling through. The unions, as I believe Eric Hoffer said, started off as a cause, turned into a business and are now evolving into a racket.
It’s time to take a good look at the size of our roasting pan.
“The unions, as I believe Eric Hoffer said, started off as a cause, turned into a business and are now evolving into a racket.”
Good call, 11B40.
Honestly, my patience w/ teachers is growing very thin. But as someone else said already, the dems & Stewart are misdirecting. It really isn’t about hurting them…it’s about ending the racket. Why I’m done feeling sorry for them though is due to the fact that these supposed good teachers and even conservative teachers that we always hear about could end this union business faster than any of us ever could if they really wanted to. If there was enough passion & will among teachers to do something about it, they could organize against their own unions and win handily. I’m tired of of everyone having to preempt every criticism of the school systems, teachers unions or quality of education in general with a profession of honor and respect to the teachers. Until I see some kind of effort on the part of these teachers to help eliminate the cancer of unions in the schools system, I’m going to assume they are willing participants. How else can they be viewed when they fund nearly the entire cancerous operation?
How else can they be viewed when they fund nearly the entire cancerous operation?
One, they don’t have a choice as to funding. Their salaries are automatically deducted by the government and the money transfered to unions.
Secondly, no grassroots teacher’s organization can beat the public sector unions when it comes to intimidation, violence, manpower, organization, or funding. The odds are too extremely in favor of the unions themselves.
The Republican party, with national funding, haven’t even made a dent in the union’s power yet.
The power of funding and organization is greater than people can imagine, until it’s used against them.
“I’m tired of of everyone having to preempt every criticism of the school systems, teachers unions or quality of education in general with a profession of honor and respect to the teachers.”
Amen.
As the spouse of a (conservative libertarian and anti-union) teacher, I am conflicted. I agree that the situation has spun out of control. However, there is another factor at play here that has not been entered into the conversation: the parent(s).
Ms. Lemieux works in a high-end school district that far out-performs the inner city schools and, in fact, the vast majority of other schools in our state. However a big factor for this is the parents (most of them) and their support for strong education values. School districts that do badly usually do so because the parents don’t put value on education. There is not much that teachers can do to overcome bad parenting and bad educational and behavioral values, believe me. Even if teachers wanted to substitute for the role of the parent, they couldn’t because of all the limitations that have been put on them (when I was a kid, we were terrified of the “paddle”, not for the physical harm but for the humiliation that it rendered).
The second issue is the role of the union in protecting the teachers from the parents. Many parents will try to sue a teacher at the drop of a hat because their cherished child, who is of course brilliant beyond belief, got a bad grade in school or was otherwise dissed by a teacher or the system. This happens all the time and my wife has seen many very bright and promising teachers get let go before they could get tenure because the school administration was afraid to stand up against parent(s) with a gripe. You have to see how a minority of parents can hold a whole school hostage to their behavioral excesses to believe it.
Many of the parents in our district are lawyers. In a recent case, a kid who broke their leg was able to get a personal school bus assigned to them (one kid, one bus) because their lawyer parent threatened the school with lawsuits. So now, the district pays for bus + driver until the student is completely healed. This scenario happens over and over again, especially with parents demanding that their kids be classified as “special needs” so that they get extra support and services. Our district loses huge sums of money because of parents like these.
What I am describing happens at a very good school in a very high-end neighborhood with (generally) very high educational values. I leave it to your imaginations to try to conceive what the situation is like in less-endowed communities or in the inner-city.
So, whereas I believe that there are a lot of reasons to oppose the current state of affairs, it’s not all that simple as saying the teachers’ unions are greedy. A quality education system depends upon upon quality teachers, quality administration, and quality students (which includes quality educational values and quality parents).
Each one of these three legs is broken. Politically, it is very difficult to say to parents (i.e., taxpayers) that they have to fix themselves, too.
You’re absolutely right about the parent issue, Danny. I live in a community with maniacal, overachieving parents. One of the things that’s clear is that student performance has at least as much to do with parent commitment and involvement as it does with teacher quality. If the parents care, the students care (or, at least, they still try harder).
I have to say,though, maybe because we’re not living the Chicago-way out here, the parents aren’t very litigious. Indeed, most are quite cowed by the school, because they’re worried that the teachers, most of whom have been around long enough not to fear firing, will give their children bad grades. That fear, combined with tenure, means we have some truly awful teachers who live on here forever, making life miserable for generations of children and their families. Most of the teachers are good to average — but the bad ones! Oy, entrenched for life.
So you’re right about one more thing: all three legs are broken.
>>So now, the district pays for bus + driver until the student is completely healed.>>
I hope that at the very least, they assigned him a “short bus”…
I agree with Danny about the parent involvement. It can be a problem. Both the uninvolved and the over involved parents are problems. The other factor here is the willingness of parents to sue. Most school districts simply cannot afford the massive bills that legal actions of any type require, so really all a “force” has to do to effectively blackmail a district is to threaten legal action. It’s generally cheaper to give someone what they want than to have to hire a lawyer to defend a case. The cost of your school’s bus and driver is still significantly less than the cost of a lawyer to represent the school so that they _don’t_ have to send a private bus for the kid.
Bad teachers can be gotten rid of – but it takes 2-3 years and a very dedicated principal/superintendent. And a lot of the p/s person’s time. A parent can’t afford to let their child stay in a classroom if they have one of those rotten apples. A child only gets one shot (we hope) at any one year of school. Schools have to take too long to get rid of problem teachers and not enough time to evaluate them properly before they get tenure. In our state, for example, if you hire a new teacher in Sept of school year one, you can fire them anytime until March 1 of school year 1. By Mar. 1, you have to inform said teacher that they will not have their contract renewed for year 2. You do not need a reason(for the year 1 teacher), but you have to give notice by March 15 (which is why all those teachers in Rhode Island got notice). If you don’t give them notice by March 15, then you have basically renewed their contract for year 2. Now…bear in mind that most school boards meet only once a month. That means that in order to give notice to the teacher by March 1, the board has to vote on the action in February. To vote on the action in February, that means that the Supe has to decide to take the action in January. Said teacher has now had all of 4 months of work in which to evaluate him/her. Not very long.
Suppose Supe says “I’m not sure about this one”. Teacher is not given notice, and therefore now can consider his/her contract to be renewed for year 2. Year 2 teachers can still be “not renewed”, but the Supe has to have some cause. Maybe not as stringent a cause as a tenured teacher, but close. Once again, in year 2, the Supe has until January to make a decision to present to the board to vote on in Febuary, in order to give notice by March 1. So basically, at this point, a superintendent has 13 months to made a decision on whether that teacher will be with their district _forever_ or not. So the “3 year” tenure requirement is actually 13 months. Once the year 3 contract is in place – which it is after the first of March of year 2 if notice not to renew the contract is not given – the teacher effectively has tenure.
You can see the problem.
I thought I changed all those dates to March 1. I missed some of the March 15 dates – I don’t remember which one is correct. I think the slips have to go out by March 1, but there’s something about the March 15 date as well – I just don’t remember what it is.