In Shaun Johnson's latest blog he wanders into the minefield surrounding teachers' unions. Like Shaun, I support the idea of unions. However, at this point in time I think we need to openly criticize the unions for their inability to counter the "adults first" narrative and how -- at the leadership level -- the teachers' unions are complicit in the corporate takeover of our public schools and therefore selling out both children and teachers.
First, teachers' unions have been absolutely horrendous in demonstrating how collective bargaining benefits children.
Second, the teachers unions have sold out to the corporate reform movement that will eventually dismantle our public school system.
Last year, after governor Walker took away collective bargaining rights for teachers and Wisconsin exploded, the local media (here in Central PA) contacted me to set up an interview to discuss the issue of collective bargaining. They wanted to know why teachers should be "entitled" to a contract that was collectively bargained. It was a very simple interview for me. I explained how collective bargaining allows teachers to negotiate for the conditions that create an environment that supports learning. Such things as working conditions, class size, teaching resources, aids, and planning time all benefit children. Even when it comes down to salary and benefits the ability to bargain for a fair wage benefits helps children. Teachers (in order to teach powerfully) need to have some feeling of economic stability. This should be common sense. Teachers that have the resources, time, small class sizes, and economic stability make better teachers. What parent doesn't want a better teacher?
However, what I am dumbfounded by the most is the almost 15-year reciprocal relationship the unions and the corporate reformers have cultivated. Think about not advocating for what's best for teachers and children. This is what our unions have done by supporting the Common Core curriculum and Value Added Measurements (VAMs).
The Common Core curriculum will usher in an era of testing and teaching to tests that will make the last ten years of NCLB seem like recess. And as many others have pointed out, there is absolutely no evidence that doing this will make teaching and learning more powerful. In fact, the Common Core curriculum and the "next generation assessments" will create an atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety that will damage the entire teaching and learning process. This is not good for children and teachers.
What about VAMs? What do we know about these statistical models that are supposed to show how much "value" a teacher adds to a child's learning? According to the experts (not the reformers) they just don't work. They have a reliability problem and some have error rates that exceed 40%. Why would the union support using VAMs in teacher evaluations? Isn't it obvious that this is just wrong? Think about the conditions that will exist in our classrooms when teachers start to look at children as data points instead of learners in need of a caring teacher. This is not good for children and teachers.
So what should a supporter of unions do when the unions fail to communicate effectively with local communities and endorse corporate driven reforms that will simply devastate public schools? It is going to take individual stands from union rank and file members -- openly challenging union positions that do not support children, teachers, and communities.
Rank and file members must first help their neighbors understand that collective bargaining benefits the children and the community school. When children and schools benefit, the entire community thrives. Union members must insist that union leadership take a strong stand against the Common Core curriculum and the use of VAMs. These corporate reforms will not only hurt the profession, they will hurt children and community public schools. Union members must then insist that the unions protect members that take these individual stands.
If the unions don't protect individual stands, then what good are they? Along with good working conditions, we need to be focused on the principles associated with powerful teaching and learning. We need to reclaim our schools for the children and families they serve. When we do this, our neighbors that don't get it might come to understand that a strong teacher's union means a strong community school in which powerful teaching and learning thrives. How is this not a benefit for children?
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If teachers are overworked, underpaid, and tortured, why don't the sell their immense skills to another emplyer?
The answer is NOT for the love of children.
a) Because they believe it is irrelvant whether children are hungry or not. It has nothing to do with learning.
b) Teachers are not responsible for the welfare of children.
c) Teachers are afraid that spending money on feeding children witll reduce the amount of raise they get each year.
d) Feeding children represents change, and therefore potentially more work for teachers.
e) More research and grant money is needed to determine if hunger has a detrimental effect on learning or not.
f) All of the above.
e) All of the above.
Yes, as a true teacher, you respond by bullying and defensiveness.
Reallly if the job of teacher is poisoness beyond belief, why to these wonderful people stay with it?
Why is it apparent that the Unions could care less about educated children, but are compulsively focused on raises, without accountability to all teachers?
Got a respnse?
Why should schools pay for a free lunch for well to do kids? Heck, who wants cafeteria food? My kids make their own dang breakfast and lunch EVERY DAY.
On a side note, the teachers are there to TEACH, not be substitute parents. If you want substitute parents for kids, raise the pay to about $200K/year.
I am also worried about a "school system" that some wealthy man started in the San Jose, CA community. It seems that he is using technology to teach hispanics. That's great, except I find it offensive that one group, a group that we have been told will control the USA in the very near future has been given these advantages. Is it POSSIBLE that these children are illegals and are being taught to take over the USA? Just a question to think about.
As long as teachers are only concerned about "what's in the best interests" of teachers, then they will be held in disfavor.
You are so right. The teachers have been so successful, that nothing, nothing needs to be improved.
Who ever heard of technolgy be an expander of human abilities. I thought that notion was disposed of the by Luddites of England 200 years ago.
Ever consider that in the private sector, it is condisdered perfectly acceptable to measure compentcy, whereas teachers find the notion of measure knowldege, effectiveness and comptency completely WRONG.
That's how little kids get to walk across the LBJ Freeway in Austin to go McDonald's for lunch every day. Their charter found food not profitable.
Really and how many people get to have such "environments" in the private sector. The reality is that teachers need to accomodate the the real world and not some protected class. I do believe a lot of the ills with education are poor parents -- but teachers and schools are need to be held accountable to results, with the approriate environment put in place to get results. It doesn't need to be "negotiated".
As for salaries -- that's bunk too. Everyone would love to have the feeling of security. But its the feeling of insecurity that provide the motivation for many to achieve results -- to better themselves, and to not expect a paycheck just for showing up. Your arguments are silly and people are waking up to them.
As long as the only interest of teachers is to protect themselves, competent, indifferent, drunk, senile,, and so long as the have a profound resistance to accountability, and as long as the continue to blame failure on everyone but themselves, they will not garner a lot of respect.
Given that teachers who graduate in pure education have no saleable skills, and have guaranteed llifetime employment, they are doing pretty well.
I don't really care whether CEO's hire family members or not if the people are qualified and they achieve results. As for being sold out -- you know who is selling out the system -- ineffective, uncaring parents who expect the school system alone to take care of ensuring their children are education.
Detroit should have been allowed to close, it would have been best for America.
No not enormous salaries. But with a C+ average. and being basically unemployable in any other capacity, they are doing pretty well.
Of course there is the taboo subject of being paid for 12 months work, and only required to work about 4.5 days a week for 9.5 months.
http://www.cacs.org/ca/visualization/index
The problems are that the number of administrators per student have increased and that money is being redirected from current spending to fill up the hole in historical pension underfunding or losses by the state hedge funds run for teachers (CalSTRS).
Those costs result in less dollars for current teachers. The money is there, it is not going to the right people.
I wish I had your luck.
"Cry me a River"
American democracy and the American economic system doesn't stop you from getting a fulltime job.
The teacher's union and the elected officials are the two at the negotiating table. Since the teacher's union does not support activities that improve the classroom education for students and the elected officials care more about where the next donation is coming from instead of the classroom education for students, you have a problem. This problem has morphed into a flow of money out of the classroom and into administrative jobs and hedge funds for the benefit of high paid public employees (typically not teachers). On top of it all they used GASB accounting (basically cash based) which under valued future costs, which is moving current dollars to back fill past (undervalued) promises.
San Jose and San Diego are classic examples.
In California the teacher's union collects two sets of dues. The first covers the collective bargaining costs and cannot be used for political activities. It is mandatory. The second is used just for political activities. It is voluntary. You don't get a vote for the union management if you don't contribute to the second. So, at least in California, the teachers are not the union. The union is a political organization, which happens to take money from teachers to execute the collective bargaining function along side thier political activities.
I never said that no teachers were in the union, I said the union is not the same thing as teachers, and in many cases does not represent the goals of teachers. The same can be said of the relationship between a CEO and the shareholders.
A public bus driver used to earn $200 per month and a private tour bus driver $100 per month. The pension for public driver was 90% after 25 years, so they could retire at 50 with $180 per month. The austerity imposed cut that by 30%, so the bus driver now gets $126 per month in retirement.
Taking a haircut from crazy to silly does not solve the problem.
Here in NC, a teacher can retire at 20, 25 or 30 years, but the pension (which you won't get rich living off) at 20 years is a lot less than at 30 years.
Now you can propose cutting pensions, health care, tenure, etc., but I'm guessing you're familiar with the saying "You get what you pay for".
Teacher pay is rather low when you consider the level of education AND responsibility a teacher has, the pensions and job security (supposedly) are the only things that make it worth it IMO.
Of course in most parts of the USA, teachers have no unions, or unions that are so weak that they might as well not exist.
(this issue is a bee in my bonnet as they say, as my mom taught 30 years and my DW is in her 21st year of teaching)
They will be leaving the teacher's union en masse. Perhaps the Teacher's Union leadership will listen now?
o The public is fed up not with Teachers, but with the Public Union itself. In addition, many teachers are fed up with the teacher's union.
Teachers, (in my school district in Wisconsin) were not allowed input on things that benefitted education, or children, they had to support one person's politics (the teacher's union head). Also, since Wisconsin was a compulsorary union state for public-sector unions, the teacher's union head did not need consensus of teachers to raise political funds. This was evidenced after Act 10 was in effect when teacher union heads were frantically trying to get the names and bank accounts of their "members" since they had no clue who they were.
----And as a result - the teachers in my community broke ranks with the teacher's union and made concessions via a handshake agreement WITH THE COMMUNITY since the teacher's union refused to make concessions for 2 years and would not agree to any contract - it took an ACT OF WISCONSIN CONGRESS to simply get my public schools to FUNCTION due to "collective (sic) bargaining"
Why should teachers fight a union head who does not care about them, or for education?
In July of this year Wisconsin teachers will be leaving the teacher's union, and that is what all teachers should do, to better public education.
Leave the union to better public education? How do you expect teachers to better public education without a united front? Just let ed reformers dictate changes and watch them also negotiate with children's lives for the sake of "commodifying" them with private corporations?
The State has power. Big corporations have power. Power always becomes corrupt. Without a reorganized and refocused teacher's union, things will only get worse.
I do want the teacher to have the freedom to teach the method that works best for a particular group of kids or a wide variety of ways that allows for kids to grasp the subjects effectively.
It is not a matter of what, it is a matter of how. This is where the unions fail their teachers the most.
I send my young kids to private school. It teaches the state curriculum, but one year ahead (so my 3 grader is learning the 4th grade material). The cost is less than the annual cost in the public school per child and the class size at the school is capped at 12, most are around 9. There is one administrator who also doubles as the janitor, counselor, and secretary. It is a misallocation of resources and the big driver behind that is the union.
By this time next year there will be no such thing as a public teaching profession.
Just not teachers unions. We will finally have the community and teachers working together for Education without someone skimming public funds and being disruptive or stopping essential services of government.