So, what’s the story, godogsgo13? You prefer that only people with lots of money push other people around? If anyone who doesn’t live in a $3 million apartment tries it (through sheer weight of numbers, mind you), then they’re an evil unionist?
dogs: when we say “unsupported” here, we mean you haven’t linked to, or otherwise cited, evidence supporting your claims. Just because support for your claims exists somewhere, doesn’t count here. You’ve got to link to a reputable source of information, or quote and cite a book, or otherwise document what you say. These are the informal (but well-established) rules of the Great Debates forum on this message board.
(Even in the Pit, posters will be hassled if they launch into a political rant without providing evidence that the problems they’re ranting about actually exist.)
Not all teachers are paid horribly, though some are. But nobody gets rich from teaching.
Still, why should some “helping professions” (e.g. doctors) be paid quite well, while others (e.g. social workers) are paid barely enough to scrape by? And while I agree that there’s no reason to go into a helping profession to get rich, by what principle should it amount to a vow of poverty?
I mentioned by stance on this in a number of other threads. Vouchers do no improve education for poor children. Most proposed voucher programs, including the recently defeated ones in Calfornia and Michigan, offer in the range of $2000 - $3000, which isn’t enough for a poor family to send their kids to private school. I’ve never encountered a private California school that costs less than $4000 year, and most cost a great deal more than that. Vouchers are just a subsidy for rich and middle class people who are already sending their kids to private school.
As ofr *godogsgo13, your accusation that teacher’s unions are trying to attract a broader range of people to the profession is an excellent argument for why they’re good.
In regards to teachers’ compensation (pay, benefits, number of hours, etc.), I think you are considering the decision-making process of the individual only, while ignoring the decision-making process of the corresponding society.
It is certainly true that an individual considering a career as a teacher must make his decision based on the present state of compensation.
However, society must consider that teachers’ compensation directly affects both the number and quality of applicants[sup]1[/sup]. In this debate, it is conceded that teachers’ compensation is poor. Therefore, society has consistently failed to prioritize this consideration highly enough. As a result, another party, the teachers’ union, participates in an attempt to right this misprioritization. One might attempt an argument that the teacher’s union fails to meet this goal, but to state that the union is unnecessary because the goal is unnecessary - that teachers should be poorly compensated - is ridiculous.
[sub]1 Teaching is one of the few professions that attracts quality applicants despite the poor compensation.[/sub]
Drive by argumentation. The not a response response.
Teacher’s unions: oppose merit pay and most testing, oppose firing teachers with poor performance records, oppose vouchers, and take many controversial political positions in lieu of focusing on education. Even when I agree with the position I cannot help but wonder, what the hell are they doing talking about homosexuality when the kids can’t read well enough to understand a newspaper or find Europe on a map?
Not all teacher’s unions are the same. So I would have to say only most of the unions are obstacles to any improvements in education.
If it were up to me teachers would make twice as much. On the other hand, the “academic” discipline of education is little more than a union closed shop - preventing people with specialized knowledge from becoming teachers. What highly educated person really wants to go back to school to be indoctrinated into education? Seems oxymoronic. This is simply turf protection by union teachers.
Thank God someone sees the burden that unions put on productivity, competitiveness and profits in this country. Before unions, employees would cheerfully work 16 hour days 6 days a week and half a day on Sunday, for less than a dollar a day, and without whining a lot about non-existent HMOs. People who own their own businesses in this country should be allowed to hire who they want, on the terms they want and fire them when someone who will do the same for less comes along. If we don’t roll back all the laws unions forced us to pass by getting their members to vote for liberals, this country will lose out to economic opportunities to countries like Indonesia and Viet Nam. Now those people work hard!
(Teachers’) - just to indicate that mine were not as bad as it may have seemed. Punctuation suffers as the vampire hours drag on.
Actually, you have not provided evidence of Mr. Wrong’s claim, either. Noting that teachers’ unions oppose merit pay and testing does not indicate that they
It does indicate that they oppose “testing” that has little to do with actual performance and that they (as most unions) oppose giving tools to administrators to break up unions (which is how they perceive merit pay). Where is the evidence that they “oppose firing teachers with poor performance records”? And opposition to vouchers is simply opposition to more union breaking.
One can differ with the unions regarding the value of merit pay or vouchers. However, there has still been no evidence provided that the unions support keeping “lousy” teachers employed.
As to teaching issues regarding homosexuality: you are aware that that sort of subject matter is set by the adminstrations and school boards and are, indeed, the sort of things imposed on teachers which unions generally oppose? It seems from that argument that you should be supporting stronger unions so as to reduce non-core material in the classroom.
I’m going to weigh in on tom’s side here. Teachers’ unions are not, for the most part, the reason why schools are performing poorly (which I’m not sure is the case anyway). The unions generally oppose testing because because what tends to happen is teachers begin to teach to the test instead of actually making sure the kids are learning the curriculum. It makes for poor education. In addition, testing would get complicated because of the different types of classes teachers teach. Would honors and AP classes get a different test from normal classes and special ed or ESL classes? Or would special ed teachers be docked because of the nature of the students they teach? Or would it account for underfunded, inner-city schools as opposed to wealthier schools that can afford more materials, more teaching assistants, and more private tutors and after-school educational activities? Testing is a ridiculous idea.
The real problem with schools, IMHO, is people with no educational background and a political axe to grind deciding school policy and setting curriculums. That and a public that says it values education, but then fails to approve bonds or vote in a tax increase for more funding, or doesn’t care whether their child is doing their homework or even showing up for school. No, the teachers are most certainly not the problem, neither are the unions.
I’ll get off my soapbox now and humbly slink away into the crowd.
Oppose firings, pretty much all of them. Let’s put the shoe on the other foot shall we? Why doesn’t someone provide one example of a union suggesting a bad teacher (something less than a convicted felon) be fired. I do not think obvious things require a cite.
Everything is “union breaking,” it seems. Nobody but the teachers’ unions have clean hands?
As for the unions opposing the addition of non-core curriculum. I refer you to the NEA. It has a long history of proposing extraneous material for school children. I will never forget their
“What if Reagan blows up the world?”* modules from back in the day. The NEA is a political organization first and an educational organization a distant last.
I would still double teachers’ salaries. I would even vote for higher taxes if the money did not all go to bureaucrats and office temples for the bureaucrats. This is a local and state thing - your experience may vary.
*It was almost that bad. You had to select who lived or died, and it was quite clear who was supposedly at fault. Hint: not the USSR.
Do any of you anti-union people actually know any public school teachers? Between family and good friends, I personally know about ten, at various stages in their careers. While teachers unions may not be perfect, I can’t even imagine how bad public education would be without them. The real problem with teaching in public schools is, even when you get past the difficulty of the job and the low pay, having to deal with administrators and superintendents who have their own political agendas, completely unrelated to actual education quality. Without unions, these people (who may be short-term appointees with political aspirations elsewhere) would have license to fire at will any teacher who didn’t teach education the way they wanted. Dealing with these people is a shitty job already – if it was any worse, no one with a brain would do it.
So, if you’re anti-union, please explain how you expect things to be better without them.
I’m sorry, Beagle, but I’ve missed the cite you gave where all teacher’s unions oppose firings of “bad” (what does that mean, anyway?) teachers. Could you re-post it?
If it happened in Lake County, Florida, then our union representatives will be hearing from me!
Thanks.
?
My husband was a trucker with a non-union company for one year. During that year, I took a second job as a gas station clerk just to make ends meet. I worked 36 hours a week & made more than my husband. We also had no health insurance. We almost lost our house. Then my husband got hired by Consolidated Freightways, a union company. We have excellent health insurance, he gets paid a decent wage, & has a pension to look forward to when he retires. I’m not saying the Teamsters are perfect–Hoffa Jr. is a pocket-lining lying asshole who has raised the practice of nepotism to a fine art–but trying to make a decent living as a truck driver without them is next to impossible.
So far, we have cites that teachers’ unions oppose merit pay, vouchers, and most testing. None of which has been coupled with arguments that use these facts to demonstrate anything bad about teachers’ unions.
Since those arguing the side of the OP have yet to put forth a case of any sort, those arguing the other side would have had the better of the debate so far even if they had not posted a single word.
Sheesh.
All I asked for was ONE example of a teachers’ union supporting the firing of a teacher for less than a felony conviction. I thought that was a pretty low standard for a “bad” teacher. Apparently it was not low enough.
Is teaching the only profession where everyone is good at their job?
A modest proposal: Why don’t we make all the college educated bureaucrats in the departments of education actually teach a class every quarter or semester, whatever. This would help alleviate the overcrowding problem and possibly educate the education bureaucrats on a reality.
Second modest proposal: Reduce bureaucratic pay significantly and give it to the actual educators.
Bureaucrats, of course, are represented by the union also. Around here the education bureaucracy seems to grow exponentially. They bought primo office space in the most expensive part of downtown. Now, due to the public outcry, they want to sell it at a huge loss. Inmates running asylum. If anyone sees any way out of this, I’m all ears.
How about hearing from another corner: a teachers’ union movement beyond K-12?
I’m talkin’ adjunct faculty here. You know, the part-timers at community colleges who teach the majority of the core courses and sometimes other courses too. And they’re not all CTA-NEA or AFT; some are Independent and some are CWA. *
Now, some of these instructors are retired and want to continue serving the community, or have a full time job elsewhere, or their spouses have good jobs and they’re just supplementing things.
But a great many others are freeway flyers, cobbling together a living by teaching as many as 10 classes a semester on multiple campuses. (How can they do their work properly when stretched so thin? I don’t know.) They collect unemployment during the summer and winter intersessions because there is no reasonable assurance of work for the next semester; hence, one becomes a “new employee” each term. Full time positions are far fewer than the number of people who want them; and the districts would rather have part timers because they are so cheap. There are 30,000 adjuncts just in California. Multiply that by how many there must be in all the other states, and you’ll get an idea of what’s going on here.
Those with good union contracts can at least get some of the following:
–equal pay for equal work (instead of making a third of what a full timer gets for the same class)
–a medical benefits program or a stipend (because you can’t choose to get sick part-time)
–offices and office hour pay (because you need to see students too)
–assignment and scheduling preference (if you’ve taught there a number of years, you get first dibs on courses, though a full timer can always yank 'em away to make their load)
–a grievance procedure (so you can’t be totally at the mercy of the administration)
–etc.
Now, then…I am working on the first contract for one college in CA that is one of the few which doesn’t have one yet for part timers. Negotiations have slowed to a crawl, but I intend to see this through to its conclusion. Currently, with no contract, we have:
–none of the above in my list;
–an administration that doesn’t believe in seniority or in giving people 2 or 3 classes if they want to teach that many
–none of the state parity money which is supposed to go to adjuncts
–a lot of disgruntled and frustrated unit members
(At the other college where I work, we do have a number of the benefits listed earlier, thank goodness.)
Is this fun for me? Certainly not. I’m not even getting paid for all the union work or the negotiations, not that I ever expect to be.
I have learned a lot about the innards of the colleges, and it ain’t pretty. I’ve carded, mailed, phoned, emailed, tabled, and researched like crazy, because the only way to make this situation somewhat more bearable and equitable is for us to have a contract, and it can only be done through collective bargaining, for which we need…a union.
If there were another solution, I would have taken advantage of it by now. If I wanted to make a six-figure salary, I’d have become an adminstrator by now.
And if anybody out there has an idea of how to fix this mess without a union, I would love to hear it.
*Sorry for the plethora of acronyms, but they are unavoidable.
No, that’s not how it works.
WRONG:
“I contend X is true. Let’s see you provide one counterexample.”
RIGHT:
“I say X is true. Here’s a cite prividing at least partial support for the truth of X.”
All straight now? 
vivalostwages - there was a story about DC-area adjuncts in that situation in the Washington Post Magazine a couple weeks back - ah, here it is.
Should those folks have a union? Damned straight, IMHO. And they should join together with grad students in creating that union, since grad students serve the same role, from the admin’s POV. And as the article and your experience both make clear, most grad students won’t have a comfortable academic job waiting for them when they finish their doctorate, so they too deserve proper compensation now for the classes they teach.
RTFirefly : I’m glad to know that people have seen that article. It was forwarded to me by three different professors from three different campuses right after it came out. I can only hope that people will actually click on the link and see what’s going on. Thank you for weighing in.
This is a supreme example of the badness of unions. The guy is doing the same work, less, and receiving a whole lot more, plus his wife is not required to work anymore. The only people unions help are the members of the unions, and not society at large. Productivity takes a big downturn. Unions do nothing for people who aren’t their members, and that includes most of us.