Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it
is a lost tradition.
~Jacques Barzun
Teachers must take back our
schools from partisan pontificators and political hacks.
Clarence Darrow:
"With all their faults, trade unions have
done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever
existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for
education, for the betterment of the race, for
the developing of character in men, than
any other association of men.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
Only a fool would try to deprive working
men and working women of their right to join the union of their
choice.
Jimmy Carter: Every advance in this
half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to
education, one after
another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
Abraham Lincoln: "All that serves labor
serves the nation. All that harms is treason. If a man tells you he
trusts America,
yet fears labor, he is a fool. There is no America
without labor, and to fleece the one is to rob the other."
http://www.angelfire.com/blues/writing/Quotations.html
"The current trend in dishonest scape-goating and
misrepresentation of teachers as uncaring is beyond
contempt.
And laying the blame for administrative and
institutional problems at the foot of unions is nonsense. These are
management problems."
Most teachers do a great job, while some few are unprepared.
As many as 25% of our teachers enter the
profession without having fully met a multiplicity of contradictory
state licensing standards, so it should come as no surprise that
over 50% of the nation's middle school students and 25% of its high
school students are learning core academic subjects from teachers
who lack certification in those subjects and didn't major in them in
college. This is a management problem.
Instead of dumbing-down the curriculum, passing kids through, and
hiring inappropriately-trained teachers, we need for administrators
to do their jobs. If teachers do not meet state standards, don't
hire them. If state law may insulate them from being persuaded to
upgrade their skills, it is bad management to hire them. Blaming
unions for bad law is like blaming the victim. Sullying the
reputations of excellent teachers by misrepresenting these problems
is not helpful.
Teachers who have preyed on
students are fired when a school has competent administrators. It is
a myth that firing teachers is impossible. Sometimes it is
difficult, but this has nothing to do with unions . It is poor
administration and inattentive legislators.
"It is
easy to blame the unions for a process that seems weighted toward
keeping bad teachers on the job. But the real problem here isn’t
lawyers, it’s the legislation currently in place. “There was a
perception at one time that district actions were clogging the court
systems,” Halpenny said. “Subsequently, legislation was designed to
reduce those actions and to take politics out of the decisions.” But
does perception always equal reality? Halpenny says there is an old
legal phrase that applies here. “Bad facts,” she said, “make bad
laws.” Sacramento
News and Review
The problems we have in our schools are multiple, but the causes are
mostly administrative and institutional. Scape-goating teachers and
unions is unfair and counterproductive...."
The much criticized tenure system has nothing to do with teachers
or unions. It is law established by each state. The crux of the
problem is a corrupt legal system, incompetent administrators, and
bad management. If teachers ran the schools, instead of being run
by them, we might make more progress.
I think good teachers should be paid well and bad teachers fired or
retrained. Good administrators get the job done. Overpaid and under
qualified administrators sit on their haunches and collect inflated
salaries. "Meritocracy" is too often a code word for teaching to
arbitrary and culturally-biased tests. I support good teachers and
good teaching. Jargon and talking points don't get the job done. I
would prefer that we pay good teachers well, retrain poor teachers,
and fire bad teachers. Badmouthing teachers and unions does not
help get this done. It just makes our jobs that much more
difficult.
Schoolteachers are paid based upon their education, how well they
teach, and how much experience they have at successful and
productive teaching. And paying people based upon their experience
is the standard for most jobs in America. Good management
hires good teachers.
Teachers with many years on the job may or may
not be good or bad teachers. Experience counts, and it should.
Effectiveness counts, and it should. The issues are simpler
than linguistic acrobatics, rhetorical devices, and talking points.
Here are some excellent,
nonpartisan resources: a distillation of the problems and solutions
at hand.
Tenure has nothing to do with unions,
Tenure originated around the turn of the century to protect teachers
from arbitrary dismissals by school boards. However, tenure is not a
lifetime contract that guarantees teachers permanent employment.
Tenure laws were intended to regulate, rather than prevent, the
dismissal of incompetent teachers.
...Dismissing incompetent
tenured teachers is difficult and time-consuming. Contrary to
popular opinion, however, it is not impossible.
Dismissing Incompetent Teachers
Redundant and culturally biased testing is
counterproductive: Whether
you're a parent, teacher, or policymaker, it's impossible to ignore
how the long arm of standardized testing is reaching into every nook
and cranny of education. U.S. students are already tested more than
any other children in the industrialized world. And it's getting
worse.
Why the Testing Craze Won't Fix Our Schools
And there is more at work in the Bush
Administrations' encouragement of this scapegoating of teachers and
unions... They have an agenda.
Rod Paige
could hardly wait to get to the meeting at the White House, where
all the best lies are told. The nation’s largest teachers union is a
“terrorist
organization,”
exclaimed
the Education Secretary to an audience of state governors. The place
got quiet all of a sudden, and Paige had to regroup. It was “a bad
joke; it was an inappropriate choice of words," he back-peddled to
reporters. If only George Bush had been in the room – someone to
share Paige’s wild-and-crazy-guy sense of humor.
It is no wonder that Paige has lost his mental balance, and imagines
that the National Education Association’s 2.7 million members are
under the sway of (Al-Gebra) terrorists. Paige’s Department of
Education has become an Alice In Wonderland lie-ocracy where not a
word of truth is spoken; where arch racists claim to be civil rights
activists, government divests itself of public schools to improve
them, and higher standards of teaching require the abolition of
teacher standards. Paige’s brain has been left behind in the rush to
privatize the nation’s schools.
Click to view entire image
The
entire edifice of Bush education policy – every printed page and
verbal utterance – is double-speak propaganda designed to mangle the
public perception and actual workings of public education. It was
inevitable that Paige, the dim bulb at the top of the bureaucratic
stairs, would one day tumble from the hyperbolic (vouchers equal
“reform”) to the ridiculous (vouchers equal “emancipation”)
to the maniacal (the NEA is “terrorist”).
People get disoriented when they spend every waking hour turning
truth on its head.
Indulgence in fantasies
promulgated by
www.reallyunclearpoliticalrhetoric.com and their ilk,
is unfortunate. They are not real or clear, and their mean-spirited
and wrong-headed diatribes only muddy the waters.
best regards, Tim Flanagan
The problems we have in our schools are
multiple, but the causes are mostly administrative and
institutional. Scapegoating teachers and unions is unfair and
counterproductive.
There are problems with disproportionate pay and low
expectations for
clueless administrators. Also paternalistic, unfunded
federal programs
shoved down the throats of teachers and state governments.
Another
proper target might be parents and administrators who
encourage
"passing children through." Or school administrators,
boards, trustees,
and local officials who juggle the books, invent statistics,
inflate their
own salaries, and then blame the victims.
Public schools are monopolies and cash cows for their
administrators,
but blaming their mistakes on the employees they choose to abuse
is
ignoble and pointless. Contrary to popular pontification, a
lazy
teacher gets fired... unless they kiss some administrator's
butt, and
too many good teachers remain unheard, underpaid, and
unappreciated.
The disgusting & dishonest and misrepresentation of teachers as
drunks is
beyond contempt. Pretending that any but a few bad apples might
be incompetent,
racist, or dangerous is a blatant lie. And laying the blame for
these administrative
and institutional problems at the foot of our unions is
nonsense. These
are management problems.
Administrators, school boards, principals, and trustees are
primarily
non-union. At least the bottom-feeder who wrote this tripe
could get
his facts straight... If we had competent people running the
show
instead of overpaid stooges, we might do a better job educating
our
youth and reforming our schools. And we would be doing
our students
a favor if we gave teachers more voice in curriculum and
methods.
Today, teachers are told what to teach, how to teach it, and
lately are
instructed to bypass critical instruction in order to teach
students how
to perform well on arbitrary and culturally-biased tests of
dubious value.
That a teacher has the chutzpah to print this union-bashing
drivel is
beyond the pale! If not for the union, we would be in real
trouble. If
people blindly accept partisan nonsense, stereotyping, and
misrepresentation in outrageous articles... they are more
seriously
deluded we had reason to imagine.
Why not simply face facts? Admit that many otherwise
well-meaning
voters made a mistake, and join us to help save our schools,
institutions, communities, and our nation from abject
corruption,
general incompetence, and amoral thuggery. This
is a failed administration. Our failing schools, disintegrating
infrastructure, weak economy, job decline, wage regression,
benefits
reduction, pension misplacement, and institutional breakdowns
are
symptoms of a problem at the seat of government. We know who
they are.
The buck stops with the current administation. On their
watch...our
high schools have declined, community college funding has
plummeted,
and student performance is not improving. Our standards have
been
lowered and our president seems about as concerned as he is
about
finding Osama. One of his several appointee's had the
audacity to
suggest we eliminate the Department of Education. This
"suggestion"
comes at a critical juncture when we approach a complex,
globally-interconnected,
economic boondoggle with broken schools, unfunded mandates, and
a crippled economy.
best regards, Tim Flanagan
www.WritingResource.org
www.UnionResource.org
tflanaga@pcc.edu
tim@writingresource.org
union@peaceresource.com
>http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-2_15_06_JS.html
>Teacher Unions Are Killing the Public Schools
>By John Stossel
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