This opinion piece in the Washington Post lays out two ideas which I endorse as accurate.
The first:
This should be no surprise to anyone-- it’s a well-known conservative critique of public-sector unions.
The second:
The article goes on to list various initiatives from smaller unions that relate to measuring and advancing teacher skills – an outstanding focus for a union and one I wholeheartedly support.
That depends. Do you count “keeping their teachers from getting blown up” as “meeting a student need”? Because a lot of the big teachers’ unions have to spend all their time dealing with garbage like that, which doesn’t leave much left over for anything else.
There’s always time to strike for wages and benefits, though. Which brings us back around to the OP.
Incidentally, what precisely does “keeping their teachers from getting blown up” mean? Is there an epidemic of student bombings that I don’t know about or were you being rhetorical and I just missed your meaning?
Of course, when you are progressive and take up extra curricular activities, then you are faced with parents moaning because they think that ‘every child deserves equal opportunity’ is Communist.
Teachers being assaulted in school and not supported by parents is a serious union issue.
Tenure is obviously a matter for organised labour and has been for generations, so I think that positing the idea that workers should not bother protecting their terms and conditions a bit stupid, which is something I would expect any reasonably person would understand - you really would have to be rather numb in the head area if you think that unions or just individual workers will allow these to go past them on the off chance their employer will treat them decently - seems a bit of a dumb comment to make
You will note that the CEO of just about every publicly listed company does not promote their organisation by attacking their own workforce, and yet somehow public workers are fair game - why is that? I wonder if denigrating your own workforce is the way to get the best out of them - could you tell me how that works ** Bricker**?
In the private sector there is opportunity for advancement based on performance, but in the Public Sector it is often extremely difficult to measure outcomes in a timely and relevant manner - no wonder that innovation is not incentivised - how do you measure the performance of a teacher in terms of the well-being and well balanced person that attended ten or fifteen years ago, I am sure the OP can find a way of measuring this as he seems to have an authority of what is wrong with education.
We get school boards and regional governors telling us that we must put religious theory and utter tripe on an equal footing with reasonably secure scientific account of evolution - why would any sane person want to get into that environment, any intelligent person goes off to the private sector to earn more money and not be politically accountable.
The glorious idiots who are our elected leaders seem to find that any change within schools must be viewed with suspicion, and then we get the glorious idiots who elect them to office, the blind leading the blind.
Bottom line is this, unions naturally want to increase the personal and professional standing of their membership, they are quite keen to have minimum education standards for teachers, along with CPD and even a full licencing system so that teachers attain an agreed standard, but to do this there needs to be recognition and status.
Teachers, just like everyone else, wish to be valued and for the most part would be keen to take up investment in their self development - when you are ready to adopt such a strategy, and invest money into it, reward the good and excellent and provide levels to which the rest of the profession can aspire, then perhaps you will get what you dream of. Note that the issue here is that doing such things will actually mean pushing up the price of the better teachers - how many of the public are prepared to accept that?
In the meantime we get city halls denigrating their workers, financial cutbacks and ever increasing demands for more and more with fewer resources, and in this atmosphere you will not attract the best and the brightest, they can earn more money ad more respect elsewhere
I think too many people spend too much time arguing (and portraying their opposition as being) extremists on the other side that it is somehow eye opening and worthy of comment that there may exist a middle ground of agreement.
Public workers are “fair game” in the same way that private workers are fair game: striking unions seldom garner public approbation from CEOs.
It may not be possible to accurately measure the well-balanced, well-being person as a result of an individual teacher. In fact, I would argue that a teacher’s job is to impart knowledge, and not supervise the life of his students such that an individual teacher is even responsible for creating well-balanced individuals. I suppose a malicious or abusive teacher could frustrate that goal, but no teacher is responsible for creating that goal.
Bullshit. We get every dirty job parents and the legislature want done and don’t want to do themselves dumped on us. We likely see the kid more hours in a day that their parents do, and so we are the ones who have to feed him, educate him, enculturate him, counsel him, discipline him, and teach him. Along with 35 of his peers at the same time, with increasingly limited resources, zero parent support and a school board that is afraid of its own shadow.
If we aren’t the ones being held responsible, who is?
Public workers do not need to go on strike to be attacked by the public and the city hall officials, public worker bashing is simply a sport that the ill informed and ignorant take part in.
Your view that a teacher is there merely to impart knowledge betrays just how little you actually know of teaching itself, and relegates you to an an ill informed and opinionated person - which puts you on the same level as all the other reactionary attention grabbing self servers around.
The only thing I agree with, is your implied point of just how important teaching actually is, and where we diverge is that you do not understand how it is to be done or even what is the role of teaching itself.
You need to understand this, a significant part of yourself has been due to teachers - your success or failure partly depends upon that profession. Look around you, everyone you ever knew, and it is the same story for them, forget shares, forget the markets, the things that matter are health and education.
Would you tell your doctor they are doing a bad job by going into the specifics of their role when you know just about jack in terms of medicine - I think you would soon be revealed for your lack of insight - you can comment on service but not on content. This is exactly what you are doing with teaching, you complain about the role of teaching, moan about innovation or lack of flexibility but it is frequently your own profession Bricker that stifles innovations by ensuring everyone plays it as safe as they can so as not to incur liability. Its ok to state that anyone can sue and lose, but being dragged through the legal system and coming out the winner does not inspire confidence in the teaching practitioner.
It is far safer not to do anything new or try anything out otherwise some self righteous dolt will try the legal challenge.
Bricker I there ever were a great blanket stifling creativity and innovation, the legal profession is surely the main problem.
Blame the teachers, I blame you.
So the “bad” unions are first and foremost concerned with the economic security and well-being of their members? What a profound critique!
The sarcasm aside, this is a serious issue. For one, bad teachers have an effect far beyond private agencies. They’re trusted to educate the young, and therefore have far-reaching influence in shaping society. And in many areas, education has become a mere side-item for schools. Maintaining the stauts quo has become an end in and of itself.
Teachers unions are public. They serve the local public. And the local public is always and everywhere morally entitled to maintain or destroy it if it no longer serves the public good. Like it or not, it’s our money getting spent on it, so if it doesn’t get the job done, then it’s for it to go. Teahcers have no moral right to have a union, nor to have a job at all. They are employed at the whim or need of the public, period.
Of course, teachers tend to vary considerably in their skills from place to place, and some communities have excellent teachers while the county (or school) next door completely fails. Nor do I deny the role that parents play in making schools a success. That does not change the fact that Teachers’ Unions tend to the obstructionist and self-serving, and that some are completely counterproductive. They fight any move towards obejctive accountability or testing, but use the same lack of obectivity as a shield against any interference. They demand more money for teachers (naturally), but block any move to require better outcomes for students.
*Adam Smith, for one, suggested that teacher should be paid only half from public funds and should have to get the other half from parents, on the grounds that ptherwise you’d tend to get a terrible teachers with little or no oversight. And he wasn’t wrong.
This doesn’t really apply to the criminal defense bar, does it?
Really? Because I just looked at my semi-annual property tax bill, and I didn’t see a line item for the local chapter of the AFT. I was under the impression that it’s funded by member contributions.
No, they serve their members. The elected officials who supervise those members - the school boards and state level politicians who determine education policy - serve the public. Those officials hire the teachers to do a job for the public, the same way that managers at a private enterprise hire workers to do a job for the shareholders.
Teachers have the same “moral” right to form a union as any other worker, including cops, firefighters, electricians, truck drivers, and actors. If you disagree with the entire principle of collective bargaining, then fine, state that as your premise. It’s a lousy one within the context of American capitalism, but at least its consistent.
Under the law, public employee unions exist under the aegis of the government. It’s not a private organization, for the basic and sane principle that we probably shouldn’t invite conspiracies of public employees. Public employee unions have more limited rights (although frequently they get away with flagrantly violating the law), partly because they have more protections under the law already.
You missed the law and the point. Public employee unions are not the same as private ones, precisely because they can directly or indirectly abuse public funds. Likewise, this has nothing to do with capitalism, which doesn’t exist, nor free markets, which don’t exist in public school system.
It’s a massive strawman to suggest that large teachers’ unions are focused only on pay and tenure.
A bit of checking shows that big unions like the AFT concern themselves with other issues like educational performance standards.
Now you can argue that at least in some instances, teacher unions take a protectionist stance in blocking changes that would benefit their students. But it is dishonest to suggest that they’re only money-grubbing - as dishonest as suggesting that right-wing attacks on teachers’ organizations are only motivated by the goal of weakening public education, to promote religion in the schools and other teachings that are more in accord with their views.
Good point. With the vast discretionary budget available to the average public school teacher, there are probably dozens of dollars per year that could be siphoned off.
The “only” part is obviously BS, but I just don’t see a problem with teacher’s unions doing what unions are supposed to do - maximizing the well being of their members. I don’t see conservative attacks on teacher’s unions as originating from actual concern about the well-being of the public. If that were the case, we’d hear the same bleating about performance standards for cops.
Since when does a public sector union use public money?? How then can they abuse it except at the will of their members, you know, there is something such as a vote, members decide to vote on issues that they believe affects their well being. Oddly enough other people also do this when it comes around every 4 years, its called democracy.
I expect that the only democracy that is acceptable to you is the one that does what you want without regard to the views of others.
Public sector unions are not appointed by the government, they are private organisations open to those within their remit.
I love the criticisms here of public sector unions blocking progress for their learners and the complete non-mention of the county and city hall chiefs that impose absolutely insane teaching material which is highly likely to impede the progress of those same learners.
I doubt you’ll find teachers unions advocating intelligent design, yet you will find ignorant and ill informed idiots in positions of power trying to impose their flawed beliefs on a whole sector of the population.
What we do find are individuals who club together for their own protection, from spurious allegations to profession wide attacks on their integrity. We get funding cuts and yet requirements to improve results- somehow the removal of personal initiative, the public attempts to degrade and humiliate teachers and attacks on them as individuals or as an institution are not going to improve their performance.
You will find teacher unions arguing that the latest set of demands will adversely affect the educational standards of their learners, in fact I would be surprised if it was ever any different. Seems to me that you do not actually know a great deal about public sector unions, or even unions at all. Each and every union understands that the interests of their members is best served by having an effective workforce, there is little point in having militancy if the result is poor performance and a general dragging down of professional standards.
Way I see it is this, if you attack and denigrate the people whose only role in life is to educate you, then you are simply blowing your own national brains out - it will not be too long before you are in thrall to other nations who value education and their teachers more highly - think about it before you dumb down education, stupid is easy to attain, see it all the time at sport events, smart is challenging but its the only future you have.Work with teachers or go straight down the toilet bowl
Well done ** Bricker** divert away from the point as ever and never address the meaning and intent of the message, its all I have come to expect.
I’m not just being rhetorical. In the district where my mother taught, it was district policy that, in the event of a bomb threat to the school, the teachers were to escort the students in their evacuation, and then the teachers were to go back into the building to look for the bomb. Now, granted, most bomb threats to schools are hoaxes, but I’d still say that that’s something that the union really ought to object to, don’t you?
The Founding Fathers probably should have thought of that before they explicitly did invite such conspiracies, then. Freedom of assembly doesn’t get played up much, but it’s right there in the First Amendment along with speech and religion.
I worked for a district without a union and any teacher caught mentioning forming a union was summarily dismissed. As a result …
Any teacher with a progressive pedagogy that didn’t meet the superintendent (a former army officer with no pedagogical experience) criterium of lecturing at the students for 50 minutes was fired immediately if the superintendent was in your classroom.
Two years ago, EVERY teacher with only one year with the district was fired no matter their years of teaching experience to make room for TFA teachers with no experience (read inexpensive and/or malleable to the superintendent preferred teaching style).
The salary schedule was based on teacher performance. The evaluations were repeatedly shown to grade teachers low and any the district would refuse to provide feedback to improve score (i.e. improve teaching). I got 3’s (on a 4 point scale) on one evaluation and when asked what I needed to get 4s I was told, “We’re just happy if a teacher gets a 3.” I was never told what the criteria was needed to get a 4 so I could move up in pay but theoretically the district felt there was room for improvement in my teaching.
Speaking of evaluations and low scores, I had a district coach come in and grade me with 1s and a couple 2s for a groupwork project I had going on. I was told that the way I was doing groupwork all wrong (she didn’t know groupwork/cooperative learning that was the main focus of my Ed.D. in math education before I transferred). Of course there were no suggestions on how to improve and I found out why. A month later that same coach ran a professional on best practices in groupwork and everything I was doing was considered exemplary teaching. I asked for a copy of my eval and hep presentation be placed in my personnel file to document the hypocracy in the evaluation.
Superintendent told the convocation of teachers that teachers get in the way of education.
All of the NBCTs were either fired or pressured to leave the district. NBCTs have the highest level of certification and have to demonstrate excellence in curriculum development, pedagogy, professional development that applies directly to improving student achievement and working with families to improve their student’s education.
So explain to me how lack of a union improves teaching?
What would improve teaching would be changing the rules, whether or not there is a union involved. End seniority, tie pay to teacher performance, put in an evaluation system that rewards the good teachers and gets rid of the bad.
The reason teachers have to defend their jobs and accept criticism from the public is simply because teachers are public employees, and therefore their jobs have been politicized. It works in both directions - the unions work to influence politicians and the public in order to increases wages, benefits, and working conditions for teachers. This means they’re constantly agitating to make it seem like teachers are over-worked and under-paid. And frankly, it’s just not true. Overall, teachers make as much or more money per hour than any other professionals with their level of experience. In addition, teachers have far better job security than private sector workers, they work fewer hours, and they generally have much greater than average levels of benefits and retirement plans. They should be making less than average salaries, because they have above-average benefits. But they don’t.
If they were in the private sector, I wouldn’t care. Charge what the market can bear. But when their unions are the largest contributors to political campaigns and they enjoy a near monopoly in the education market enforced by government, and their pay and benefits come out of the public purse, then those issues are everyone’s business.
The education system would be improved tomorrow and a ton of money would be saved if we simply fired the bottom 10% of teachers and let class sizes for the rest grow to accommodate their students. In fact, educational outcomes would increase quite dramatically. Any white-color employment system that can’t filter out the least productive and reward the most productive employees is going to drastically under-perform, because the difference in quality between the worst knowledge workers and the best is dramatic. Seniority-based employment works fine for assembly-line workers, but it’s disastrous to a white-collar workforce.
The school systems are full of minefields for kids in the form of those 10% of terrible teachers. Having to take a class from one of them can do real damage to a student’s academic career. My own kid is currently in a math class with one of them - an old teacher who demeans the kids when they ask questions, who doesn’t grade homework because it’s too much effort, and who refuses to allow parents to see their kid’s exams because she likes to re-use the same exams every year (saves a lot of work, don’t you know) and doesn’t want them copied. The result is that the kids have no idea what they’re doing wrong and their parents have a hard time helping.
My kid has never had less than an ‘A’ in math in 10 years of school, and all teacher reviews have said that he’s extremely talented in that area. Now he is tracking towards a ‘C’ in her class and doesn’t know why - and the teacher’s not telling. I’ve resorting to re-teaching the entire coursework at home to find where the gaps are. And by the way, this teacher has already suggested to my kid that he give up his dream of being an engineer and drop down to non-matriculation math - probably because she’s getting heat from us about her teaching methods and wants the kid out of her class. In just a few months, my kid has gone from someone who excels at math and loves doing it into being a kid who ‘hates math’ and has near panic attacks when having to go to her class.
When we’ve complained to the administration, as soon as we mention this teacher’s name you can see the administrators giving each other knowing looks. Then they apologetically say they’ll ‘look into the situation’. Rate My Teacher has numerous ratings for this teacher, none over 2 stars. The kids hate her, and the administration knows she’s a disaster. But nothing will be done, and she’ll be there until she chooses to retire - which she’ll get to do on a 70% salary with full benefits for life, five years sooner than the average worker if she wants.
In my province, the average salary for a teacher with 10 years of experience is $84,000. That’s way higher than the average for workers in other industries with the same level of experience and education, despite the fact that the teachers only work 1280 hours per year while other workers work around 2,000. It’s the best deal around, but that doesn’t stop our teachers here from constantly whining about pay and benefits. Because that’s what they’re encouraged to do by the public union, and it’s what they have to do in order to extract more money from the public teat - which everyone always wants to do.