Congressman David Obey is trying to save the jobs of tens of thousands of public school teachers who have received pink slips. As chair of the House Appropriations Committee, he proposes to shift money from President Obama's "Race to the Top" program to keep teachers employed.
Specifically, the Obey plan would keep teachers working by diverting money that is now going to be spent on charter schools and merit pay.
The Obama plan is called "reform," but it really represents the wish list of the Republican Party, which has long supported charters, vouchers, and merit pay.
The Republicans and some of their allies in the Democratic party have raised an outcry against the Obey plan, claiming that it will "gut" what they call "reform" if money is taken away from privatization and merit pay.
But there can be no school reform of any meaning if tens of thousands of teachers lose their jobs. Class sizes will soar, especially in hard-pressed urban districts, and education will suffer a serious setback for our nation's most vulnerable children.
Research and national scores have repeatedly demonstrated that charter schools in aggregate do not perform better than regular public schools. Merit pay has been tried and has failed repeatedly since the 1920s. Why should these dubious ideas, with little or no evidence to support them, take precedence over the continued employment of teachers?
The pro-privatization crowd should put their agenda on hold for a bit and support Congressman Obey's sensible plan to use every possible discretionary dollar to keep our schools fully staffed. This is the first obligation of our federal government. Thank you, Congressman David Obey for supporting the nation's hard-pressed educators!
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Seniority based retention HAS TO GO. If you can't figure out a better way to determine which teachers keep their jobs then you have no business speaking on behalf of students in this country. I have personally witnessed too many young, energetic, great teachers fight the union and the fat, fall asleep in class, just plain horrible, tenured teachers so that they can even have a chance to change the way things are done in the public schools.
Every great young teacher I've seen quit or get laid off here in Chicago has not done so as a result of the students, but of the terrible, dog eat dog, BS political minded behavior of the administration and the union.
Why shouldn't I support charter schools? I've seen the dirty underbelly of the teachers' Union. It's a world where most teachers are frightened to even give a much deserved detention lest their coworkers give them a hard time for violating the strict, union enforced, clock out right at 3pm, work day.
How selfish can you get?
We need a forensic audit because as a reporter for the Chicago Reader found in a very controlled meeting with budget chiefs, there are two sets of books. The one posted on the CPS web site that is incomplete and has errors. There are the real set of books. Karen Lewis has offered to sit with Ron Huberman and look at the budget line by line to see where possible cuts of inessential services may be had. To this day, Mr. Huberman has not responded. That is irresponsible. Tell your wife to go work for the charters. UNO Charters are looking for teachers every year. I wonder why!
I'm so glad that you continue to speak out for children.
I seem to remember, back in the eighties (when they closed both of my community public schools), the charter movements' main argument was how they could do everything public schools could do for almost no public money. They were always saying that we can't fix education by "dumping" money on our problems... Seems that as soon as they got their foot in the door of public funding they changed that tune. Now all they need is access to all the public funding they can get, and then a few billion more from a few super-wealthy entrepreneurs, and if we just dump that money on THEIR problems it will fix everything.