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The Global Teachers' Anthem
"Raise the threat level to a code red," they cry out.
From Baghdad to D.C., a growing chorus of a-tonal anti-union executives around the world (the only choir that may be left after all the public school budget cuts) are asserting that the teacher union menace must be neutralized.
In Iraq, Paul Bremer (as former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority) threw out most of Saddam's legal code but kept the 1987 Decree No. 150 that made it illegal for employees in the public sector to have a union or negotiate over the terms of their labor. This opened the door for the Iraqi government's inharmonious announcement at the end of March, 2009 that it intended to dissolve the Iraqi Teachers' Union (ITU)-a move sure to make Washington, D.C. public school chancellor Michelle Rhee's cheeks flush with excitement.
Rhee's discordant bluster was on display in a March 2nd interview with the Huffington Post: "We are going to impose the new evaluation tools regardless" of the outcome of talks with the union. "We are going to be moving people out who are not performing."
New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof stated in his out-of-pitch March 10 column, "Education reform is going to mean challenging the unions, and Obama signaled that that's what he plans to do."
None of these recent union-busting voices have been as off key as George W. Bush's Education Secretary, Rod Paige, when he called the largest teachers' union in the US, the National Education Association (NEA), a "terrorist organization." However, the similarity of the current tune from corporate education deformers is unmistakable: because teachers have some measure of job security, schools in America are dysfunctional.
If only we could treat our teachers like Wal-Mart employees, test scores would rise and students wouldn't be left behind. As a Time Magazine article recently contended, "The most glaring example of the backward logic of schools is the way most teachers receive lifetime job security after one or two years of work."
But as the NEA explains, "Tenure does not mean a ‘job for life,' as many people believe. It means ‘just cause' for discipline and termination, be the reason incompetence or extreme misconduct. And it means ‘due process,' the right to a fair hearing to contest charges."
Moreover, these Pinkerton style attacks on teachers' rights to collectively bargain suffer from the common problem middle schoolers face when attempting a first research paper: a scarcity of factual information to back up claims.
Those who argue that unions prevent improved student achievement are at a loss to explain the high unionization rates of schools internationally that they lament are outperforming American youngsters. Or why Southern "right to work" states that have managed to avoid unions in public schools score lower on the standardized tests that antiunion zealots overemphasize as the only real measure of student success. As Arizona State University's Education Policy Research Unit reported, "Several studies found math, economics and SAT scores in unionized schools improved more than in non-unionized schools. Increases in state unionization led to increases in state SAT, ACT, and NAEP scores and improved graduation rates. One analysis attributed lower SAT and ACT scores in the South to weaker unionization there."
In addition, a Department of Education study found that public school students' test scores in reading and math are as good as or better than the scores of comparable students in charter schools-the vast majority of which are nonunion.
The gospel truth is, teachers unions the world over are raising the volume in the struggle to improve public education. Time and again these unions have used their power to collectively bargain-and collectively strike-in defense of the schools:
- In 2005 the British Columbia Teachers Federation in Canada led the 46,000-strong union in a successful strike in protest of budget cuts to education, large class sizes, and government attempts to take away collective bargaining rights.
- In May 2006, 70,000 teachers in the Mexican state of Oaxaca went on strike to prevent the privatization of education and demand more funding for student services.
- On February 21, 2008 the Teachers Federation of Puerto Rico led a strike that was successful in stopping government's privatized charter scheme.
- In Bellevue, Washington the teachers' union proved it was the most important voice for public education in the region when it led a successful two week strike at the beginning of this current school year to protest the implementation of what the school district called the "curriculum web"-a system that would ensnare students in mandated, daily, scripted lessons that would deny them access to the teachers' individualized knowledge, skills, and passion for the subjects they were teaching.
On March 28 of this year, over 500 protesters joined the Iraqi Teachers' Union in a demonstration against the attempted undemocratic government takeover of their union. Champions of public education and union supporters are encouraged to sign their petition that demands that the union remain independent and that the union organizers not be imprisoned for their activity.
If coming teacher struggles are successful at keeping funding for our music programs, students across the world should be taught in every language the great Woody Guthrie anthem "The Union Maid," with a refrain as relevant today as when America's great troubadour wrote it in 1941:
"Oh, you can't scare me,
I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til
the day I die."
Comments
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30 Comments so far
Show AllThank You, Mr. Hagopian, you speak well for this family of teachers. Thank You.
GADS, HOW ORWELLIAN CAN IT GET? THANK YOU J.H. FOR THIS ARTICLE & THE PETITION TOO, THOUGH I'M PROBABLY GOING TO BLOW A GASKET NOW JUST THINKING ABOUT THESE ANTI-UNION ROBOTS.....
"We are going to impose the new evaluation tools regardless" of the outcome of talks with the union. "We are going to be moving people out who are not performing."
CODE FOR PRIVATIZERS (ESP THE VERY LUCRATIVE TESTING INDUSTRY) SEEKING TO DROWN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL BABY IN ITS BATHWATER.
New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof stated in his out-of-pitch March 10 column, "Education reform is going to mean challenging the unions, and Obama signaled that that's what he plans to do."
AND ARE THE STANDARDIZED TEST/CORPORATE 'EDUCATORS' GOING TO BE CHALLENGED AS WELL???
None of these recent union-busting voices have been as off key as George W. Bush's Education Secretary, Rod Paige, when he called the largest teachers' union in the US, the National Education Association (NEA), a "terrorist organization." However, the similarity of the current tune from corporate education deformers is unmistakable: because teachers have some measure of job security, schools in America are dysfunctional.
SAME OL COMMODIFYING MISSION CREEPSTERS BUSY BASHING TEACHERS FOR NOT BEING ABLE TO OVERCOME ALL THE OBSTACLES THEY CONTINUALLY THROW IN THEIR PATH TO ACTUALLY EDUCATE CHILDREN. GOD FORBID WE HAVE A POPULACE OF CRITICAL THINKERS, EH?
If only we could treat our teachers like Wal-Mart employees, test scores would rise and students wouldn't be left behind. As a Time Magazine article recently contended, "The most glaring example of the backward logic of schools is the way most teachers receive lifetime job security after one or two years of work."
LIKE YOUR JOB HANGING ON THE LINE DUE TO THE WHIMS OF THE TESTING IDIOCY IS 'JOB SECURITY'??? ASK YOUR LOCAL SCHOOL TO LET YOU HELP OUT WITH PROCTORING THOSE TESTS AND CHECK OUT THE CONTENT OF THOSE 'INSTRUMENTS'.....TOOLS FOR KEEPING EVERYBODY COMPLIANT AND HELPLESS... NOT TO MENTION BORED OUT OF THEIR SKULLS.... SUCH INSULT TO HUMAN INTELLIGENCE/POTENTIAL!...AND CHECK OUT NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND...REALLY LOOK INTO IT. VIRTUALLY CONTENT-FREE EDUCATION FOR YOUR CHILD. DON'T LET THEM BE LEFT BEHIND, TORTURED BY ACTUALLY.......THINKING. TIME MAGAZINE....NOW THAT'S JOURNALISM FOR YA.
Ditto Mr. DogLeg, thank you brother Hagopian. A little background on this attack on our unions. Unions that now stand as the largest in this nation as the UAW and our industrial unions are disemboweled.
As far back as 1950, the iconic University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman wrote in his book Capitalism that “The privatization of schooling would produce a new highly active and profitable industry.” Friedman is the neo liberal ideological godfather of today’s assault on the public school system across the country.
From the world’s richest human being Bill Gates to the world’s most powerful corporate entity Wal-Mart and the Walton Family Foundation to the billionaire mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg, the enemies of public education can dip into a bottomless well of money to execute their mission. They carry political leaders around in their pockets like so much loose change. The President of the United States and the mayors of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. are just a few who belong to their “destroy disguised as reform” movement.
Our nation’s history recalls public education as a partner of the abolition of slavery in a grand post-Civil War experiment in expanded democracy. The neoliberal's dream is to arrest and reverse this expansion. They are men unsated by billions in profits plying young people with X-Boxes, iPods, Big Macs, Air Jordans, cell phones, Sprite, MTV, and B.E.T. They want their cake and they want to eat it too. Their appetite includes the transfer of billions of dollars in annual public school funding into their own pockets. They will have a downsized and exclusive for-profit school system to train and educate only the children created in their own image and likeness.
But the American people’s deep reverence for equal opportunity stands between the privateers and their mission. For that reason their designs must be concealed behind the façade of education reform and the smokescreen of school choice. Genuine reforms like class-size reduction and increased teacher salaries are violently opposed. The principle of increasing budgetary outlays to build a more effective homeland defense does not seem to apply to public education. Instead they employ weapons of mass deception that include voucher programs, merit or performance pay plans for teachers, charter schools, and canards like the so-called “data-driven education”.
Then there is the most potent weapon in their arsenal—standardized testing. They bludgeon 8 and 9-year-old children, parents, teachers and their unions, administrators, elected school boards and whole school districts with it. You failed! You are a failure! You are failing! Yours is an F-school! Strange how something so uplifting is confined to the public schools but testing is for public schools only! Start testing the pre-teen child in the third grade. Keep testing every year until the schools become testing factories and then testing sweatshops where children labor to no useful end. The music, art, dance, theater, physical education and vocational classes are for private schools. Recess and field trips are for rich kids!
With these tools they have battered public schools as Hurricane Katrina did the Gulf Coast. The ensuing New Orleans-style exodus has transformed those schools into America’s Superdome. Huddled inside now are the mostly Black, Latino and white children of poor and working-class parents. Their broken bodies and spirits will be found amid the wreckage after the very idea of universal public education has been demolished.
"Genuine reforms like class-size reduction and increased teacher salaries are violently opposed."
I am with you on class size but I don't understand what increased teacher salaries (in and of itself) would do. Aren't salaries determined to be the least amount of compensation required to get the necessary manpower? If there was a teacher shortage, then perhaps that would signal that we need to offer higher salaries. If we were going to require more of our teachers (like say a Masters degree in the subject they teach or a certain performance level on a standardized test) then perhaps we would have to increase salaries to prevent a shortage. I don't see how leaving everything as is but increasing salary will change anything. Is it that we don't currently have the necessary number of teachers(so that the salary suggestion is related to the class size issue)?
"Instead they employ weapons of mass deception that include voucher programs, merit or performance pay plans for teachers, charter schools, and canards like the so-called “data-driven education”."
Why are performance pay plans and voucher programs weapons of mass deception?
Lets face it, there are shitty teachers out there with little incentive to do better. One needs to be very careful in designing a good method of measuring performance but I don't see what is so bad about the idea itself. I like the idea of the student/parents getting to pick the school they send their child to. It is just like single-payer health care where you get to pick your own practitioner.
For certain subjects (like math and science), you can design standardized tests the do a good job objectively determining the knowledge of the students. In our current system, students are given lots of mindless, content-free busywork that does little to reinforce and elucidate concepts (the current institutional structure drives the system to be this way). Hence you hear over and over that people do good on the homework but are just bad test takers. They have been deluded into thinking that there work amounted to anything--which is really sad! The intelligent students are often turned off by the useless busywork and the people who succeed most are the people who are good at following orders and not making their own value judgements. If knowledge is what is important(to society and potential employers) then it is the scores on standardized tests that matter--not grades, which often reflect conformity more than knowledge. If the students know that they will be judged on their knowledge, then they will seek out a good school with effective teachers to get what they need. If they don't give a damn about a given subject, then forcing them to sit in a classroom will do them little good and will do harm to the quality of education of the other students in the class. Learning requires thinking and thinking is volitional--we can't make people think. We can however condition them not to think and that is what we are doing now(just paint the fence/wax the cars and don't ask the master why).
In summary, I think the current institutional structure of education is really bad and trains people not to think. We need to change the structure and doing so will require a confrontation with the status quo and that includes the teachers unions. As it currently stands, teachers are only required to get education degrees for which the greatest difficulty is the general university requirements. It would be a battle with the venerable teacher unions to require more of them.
Re TXProgressive April 3rd, 2009 1:32 pm, who writes in part,
"I don't understand what increased teacher salaries (in and of itself) would do."
According to Adam Smith-style classical capitalist theory, it would attract a larger pool of potential employees, resulting in more qualified applicants for a given teaching position.
Maybe if kids saw their teachers paid as well as pro basketball players or stock brokers, they would hold them in higher regard; some might even want to emulate them.
I suspect, but have no way to prove, that keeping teachers down is part of an overarching strategy by "conservatives" to completely discredit public education.
"According to Adam Smith-style classical capitalist theory, it would attract a larger pool of potential employees, resulting in more qualified applicants for a given teaching position."
Yes, and that is pretty much what I said--but what I was trying to explain is that in my view "more qualified" doesn't really equate to a better education or educator without merit-based pay. When the whole structure of the institution is the problem, then better participants doesn't fix anything.
There are set qualifications for teachers for the most part. If you have a shortage of applicants who meet your qualifications, then you need to either lower your qualification standards or increase pay. If you increase pay well above that established by this criterion, you just get more willing and qualified teachers then there are positions. Would increasing the pay of the president get us a better president? Of course not, since there are already enough people who want that position.
I think it would be better to have teachers who command respect based on their knowledge, integrity, and ability to inspire curiosity as opposed to the kind of car they drive and the clothes they wear(which presumably would be based on their compensation). Our current system does not reward or promote any of these positive attributes and I think it is the whole system that is at fault, not teacher pay.
Public education does not need the help of conservatives to be discredited. It does that all by itself.
When those who are philosophically (and some viscerally) opposed to such systems as public education are allowed to tinker with the laws governing those systems, we can observe those systems failing to operate as their sponsors and benficiaries had expected.
So-called conservatives have done everything in their power to destroy public education. It's not the concept that's at fault---this country's literacy rate was once the envy of the world, and the basis for a robust (if imperfect) democracy---but government, conservative-dominated since 1947 at least, which has treated public education like the proverbial red-headed step-child.
And to suggest that I believe teachers who roll up in a Benz will be respected more by their students is to misunderstand my point; pay is the measure of how society values a given job, so U.S. public school students can be forgiven for thinking their teachers don't really count for much.
One would hope that students made their own value judgments on the teachers, rather than inherit them from society. You are right though, that isn't necessarily the case with other professions. I don't think it is the pay that makes kids admire professional athletes or musicians, but you might be right in regards to lawyers or business professionals.
I question whether higher pay would cause society to respect teaching more. It might create more animosity if many felt that the pay was undeserved. I know that in Russia, doctors make very little money but are highly respected. Currently, I would say that society has a lot of respect for people that serve in the military. That has nothing to do with the pay. It is possible for teachers to earn respect if they are very good at their profession regardless of their pay. I think it is hard for teachers to be good at what they do (in the sense of inspiring interest and adding insight)in the current system.
i would challenge you to volunteer at least twice a week in your district's most 'at risk' school and you may have some answers and rethink some of your conclusions.
Yeah, that could be. I really can only draw conclusions based on my own experience in school as well as my experience tutoring high school students. I have spoken with several teachers about the state of education, but I have not spoken with someone who is teaching at a really bad school.
In general, when you have students who don't want to be there and don't listen, teachers who are forced to stick to a stale curriculum, etc. etc. I am not sure that the students are much better off than if they didn't go. I mean, what is the point of public education? I personally think that it should be a vehicle of self-determination rather than a rite of passage that every member of society has to run through. One would hope that with this type of system in place, that a person of any income could become successful(whatever that means to them). With that in mind, you can (hopefully) see where we might disagree on what to do about our schools. In general, would you prefer a system which does a poor job of educating but limits future income inequality or a system which is equal opportunity in principle but in practice created greater inequality?
I have degrees in math and physics and find these subjects to be very important, both for people who go into careers relating to them and people who find the subject interesting for its own sake. But I don't see why every member of society should have to learn geometry or physics. Would it be better if everyone knew geometry? Sure, but you have to consider the opportunity cost of what else could have been done with that time (students and teachers) and money. There is an unlimited amount of information out there and more great and important books than one could read in ten lifetimes. Do we just cram as much of it into the students as we can or do we concentrate more on general things like critical thinking? With every course we require, that is one less slot available for a class the student finds interesting and less choice a student has over their own destiny.
Sorry, I am getting off track. But yes, I concede your point that my views on an ideal education system don't take into account the problems in some of the worst schools.
TXProgressive: I don't know where you get your information, nor where you were educated, but my fifth graders could find the mistaken word choice in this sentence: "They have been deluded into thinking that there work amounted to anything--which is really sad!"
Sorry, it is "their" not "there". It has less to do with my education than it does my typing as I think. Where would I be without your help? Please let me know if you catch any other typos or grammar mistakes! It will help me be a better person and will perhaps weaken my argument by showing how uneducated I am.
Where do I get my information? I have been through the system. I was educated in a public school in the U.S. I haven't actually referenced that much information in my post. Which part of my info is incorrect?
Above, I attack the education system for being devoid of content and giving assignments that have little to do with ideas. It is all syntax and no semantics. In math, you are taught the abstract rules for algebraic manipulations without understanding why they work. In english, you are tested on the names of the characters in the novel without being asked the significance or meaning of anything. With that in mind, it is just ironic that you, a member of the system, say nothing about the content of my post but instead point out a grammatical error.
Sioux Rose
TX: I am a former English teacher and when I graduated from SUNY at Albany, there was a teaching "surplus" so standards for accreditation were narrowed. One of my student teaching class assignments was to teach Shakespeare to a group considered the "slow" readers. The superintendent walked in and observed, and then took me to lunch to discuss what he had encountered. He told me he was seldom so impressed, and the reason was that I DID bring the lessons of Shakespeare's play HOME to the students, made the information relevant to THEIR experience. They were lively in my class and INTO the material which surprised him.
One cannot lump all teachers together. I remember my senior year of advanced math in high school, and already being accepted into college(s) I could CARE less to start with... and the calculus topic was "simplifying equations." From the moment the math teacher put some long formula on the board I turned off mostly because the premise--simplifying--had NOTHING to do with the evidence before my eyes.
Although I was in advanced social studies all through junior and senior high school, I never learned anything remotely akin to a good many things shared on commondreams by those who have obviously studied history from sources that were not censored, sources that were more in synch with Howard Zinn.
Education has much room for improvement, but those at the controls as many in this forum have noted, just want to create a pliable citizenry mostly amenable with boring jobs that will get them no where. In other words, slaves by any other name appears the goal of modern education. Until one really takes into account what the brilliant young Naomi Klein has put together insofar as a pervasive, DEADLY economic model being utilized around the world (when there IS no disaster, they will create one), one will not connect the dots to that engineered style of "learning" that makes for persons intended to live their existences as serfs.
"Education has much room for improvement, but those at the controls as many in this forum have noted, just want to create a pliable citizenry mostly amenable with boring jobs that will get them no where. In other words, slaves by any other name appears the goal of modern education."
Yes! I completely agree--at least with the end result. I am not yet convinced that people designed the system with this goal in mind, but nonetheless a system is in place that creates workers who are good at following orders rather than independent thinkers.
It sounds like what you did for your students was in effect, convince them that the material was worthwhile and/or interesting. I think that motivating students is a hallmark of a good teacher. I bet you have a passion for Shakespeare and that passion is passed on to the kids.
Also, your experience in the math course your senior year fits in with what I was saying. If a student doesn't want to learn the material, then trying to force feed it to them does no good. You saw no reason to learn the material other than to get a good grade on your transcripts (which is conforming to institutional standards--something we all have to do) which also didn't matter since it was your senior year.
America's public schools will be made healthy, productive and effective when they are controlled and managed by teachers and their unions without any interference by the military-industrial complex.
Sioux Rose
PAUL A: An absolutely sterling analysis. Thank you for so deftly tying a number of otherwise loose strands together to make an excellent case. Your posting is one of the best I have ever read in the comment section on C.D. If only minds like yours could design public policy!
Thanks for your very kind comment Sioux Rose and your consistently cogent postings on CD. You may not be as familiar with this nation's education policy, I've been a teacher for 26-years now in an inner-city public school and an elected official in a local AFT-NEA union. In that time I've watched the wealthiest and most politically powerful forces wage war on the children of the poor and the working class in our public schools. I speak of Bill Gates, the Walton Family (WalMart), Micheal Bloomberg, Eli Broad and all the CEO's who function under the umbrella of the Business Roundtable. Their objective was to create a pool of slave labor from the children who managed to survive their attack on public education. A force that could allow them to compete with slave labor in China and India.
Their effort recently came under the most serious strain it has ever encountered with the collapse of the global economy. As a union teacher, I've become confident enough about where we are heading to write Eli Broad a letter. Tell me what you think.
Dear Eli Broad:
The days of the reckoning have arrived for you. Your soul died long ago but if
your decrepit physical being survives just a little further into the future the
full weight of justice will be meted out to you. And it will be the sweetest
justice for the harm you have done to children of color in America's urban
public schools is incalculable. No system of data collection is capable of
quantifying it but there are an inexhaustible parade of human exhibits to be
heard. Your crimes will be proven premeditated at trial. You've known all along
what you were doing but the potential payoff drove you forward anyway.
See you in the docket of a people's court soon.
Sioux Rose
PAUL: It is so difficult for those of us with hearts to understand those absent such precious organs. My most recent understanding of the dangers behind the whole bogus "No Child Left Behind" program came from an article published in Harper's perhaps 2 years ago. Seems a lot of inner city school property can be taken over by these private "educational" firms if the schools, which is to say students, don't produce as per the test scores.
I now have two young grandchildren and may encourage my daughter to move to Spain (she is bilingual). I cannot countenance my grandchildren being put through what education now passes for in America. My best friend is raising her now 10-year old grandson and he is SO lucky to have her. She honors who he is, and when he deals with punishments at school, she is always on HIS side. She sees what the kids eat, and how they taunt one another, and how unnatural it is to have kids seated all day reading material with NO relevance, stressing out over all those insane tests. It is a travesty and a crime against humanity!
With every aspect of life, our diets corrupted by biotech, our money supply corrupted by falacious exotic "instruments" that ultimately make ABSENT any wealth but manage to define what's missing AS a measurable quality; our educational system more suitable to lifeless robots; our national policy one of punishing people while arming them with guns... I mean only the most depraved minds could begin to design a culture that put a premium on all the worst things for human health and spiritual wholeness. I cannot imagine this scenario lasting much longer because it is rotten to the core...
As for your letter, people tend to turn off words if they prove too immediately insulting. Is there a way to be more covert, make the guy think you are flattering something about him, and then once you have his attention, gently project the knife (via words) to penetrate what's left of his core?
With what 6 billion of us now breathing on this earth, seems like every soul that ever incarnated on this blue-green sphere has shown up for the grand finale. We are witnessing the end of an epoch... and what will come out of it is yet to be determined. Imagination is so very important when it's our turn to reinvent the world. JK Rowlings did children a service in opening their imaginations to intriguing concepts, magic prominent among those.
Amen Sioux Rose. Amen.
I'll try harder to suppress my rage in future letters but I think the criminals need to be warned of the fate that awaits them once the veil is lifted from the people's eyes. They hung effigies of bankers in the streets of London this week, how long until those are real bankers?
Here's an interesting parallel for ya -- "Students are not graduating with the skills they need and teachers in the inner city are often as much cops as teachers. Therefore, we should attack the Teachers' Union." and "We've been attacked by an Islamist radical living in Afghanistan (or Pakistan), let's invade Iraq!"
Capitalist ideologues always use every excuse they can get to further their agenda. They need to be called on it every time.
Sioux Rose
TENSTRING: Good points. And note the analogy between "sentencing guidelines" that tie judges' hands also restricting their knowledge of their profession to suit not only capitalist ideologues, but the wave of new authoritarians who are not too far from demanding we all worship at their churches and behave as THEY tell us to behave. One size fits all is their narrow credo. Whether defined as such or otherwise, many in the US (and there are some parallel trends being seen around the world) wish for a return to a Dark Age.
The priorities of those in the ruling elite appear determined to render the world's now educated workers equivalents of slaves. The Chicago School and its "liberalization" of trade is nothing more than a legal form of international bribery that forces the leaders of nations in fiscal trouble to accept a line of tactics that robs increasingly from the poor (the canceling of social service programs across the board) to feed the insatiably dark appetites of the rich.
I do believe things have gotten, and are getting so bad, so disproportionately unfair in the glaring light of day (the bonuses to paper pushers who wrecked the global economy) that masses around the world WILL rise up. Working against this inevitability are the new Tasers and other "crowd control" weapons insidiously devised as a probable strategy to offset what the masters of the new global economy recognized would result. The Pentagon has recently devised plans for handling urban warfare... no doubt a generic blueprint equally suitable to deployment in US cities.
Steve Leigh
Thank you Jesse, for a beautifully written, cogent and well-documented defense of teachers' unions! In an age when more people are angry about the economic crisis, the stealing of wealth from the poor by the already wealthy , and the savage attack on eduation and social programs, we need an ORGANIZED repsonse. We need to reassert human needs over corporate greed. Why defend the contracts of CEO's to their million dollars bonuses when the government forces the auto workers to rip up their contracts and drive them down to non-union levels? What sense of decency is there when schools are closed ( 5 in Seattle next year where Jesse teaches) , old pepole are thrown off of health care, workers lose their jobs and homes and the government bails out the banks, and continues to slaughter people in Iraq, Afganistan etc.? Any organized response in defense of eduation must include the teachers' unions. We all need to follow Jesse's lead and speak up loudly in defense of unions in general and teachers' unions in particular!
I'm a unionized public educator, and I agree with some points this article makes, but I disagree with others.
For instance, I don't think we should be so quick to attribute better student performance to unionized schools. It's just as likely that Southern students do more poorly than others because of a more entrenched attitude of anti-intellectualism that pervades their culture. And American students as a whole might do less well than their international counterparts for much the same reason.
I know some teachers who are true heroes. But I also know plenty of others who are little more than glorified chair-warmers. There are many reasons why this is so, but one reason (in my opinion) is that teacher unions put too much emphasis on teacher welfare and too little on inspiring educators to be truly passionate about what they do. As a retired teacher friend of mine once said, "Teachers are the closest thing this society should have to paid philosophers." Yet when I share this sentiment with my fellow educators, many reply "That's elitist," and they spurn the idea that they should do anything more than go through the curriculum-mandated motions of teaching.
Finally, as long as the NEA (of which I am a forced member) and other teacher unions remain tools of the Democratic party, they will be complicit in maintaining the status quo, not challenging it. The NEA's cred will skyrocket in my eyes when they announce that they're leading an effort to organize a nationwide general strike in the name of a more just, humane, and intelligent society. Being one of the nation's largest unions, this should be on their "no-brainer" agenda.
But I'm not holding my breath.....
I bet you are a good teacher.
I believe I was a paid philosopher. A good teacher? Who knows?
A teacher belongs to a profession whose members can be judged only by her influence on her students and her impact on the future.
"I believe I was a paid philosopher."
You were a philosopher paid by the state to instill state-mandated philosophy on children who were forced to show up and listen.
All teachers are paid by the state to preach the gospel according to Adam Smith.
Fortunately for teachers and students, the state is an abstraction, having no eyes or ears.
The students can be forced to show up but not to listen.
The teacher can be forced to teach, but the state has no way of knowing what is being taught.
Wow............people hate teachers and their unions.
The Superintendent in the high school district where I resided made $402,000 last year. She made it supervising some 300 employees and having almost nothing to do with the daily education of the children. She decided curriculum, teacher evaluation plans, the budget, and hiring.....She never went into classrooms unannounced and she never observed teachers teaching.....She is typical of superintendents.....
Many of the principals I worked under, never came into my classroom unannounced and scheduled their observations with me, usually twice a year. From my experience, my principals were men and women who did not like the classroom and dealing with the kids. So, they stayed out of the classroom to avoid having to do their jobs. Busy work was always found in the office........discipline problems could have been handled by a secretary, phone calls could have been handled y a secretary.....A good principal knows what is going on in every classroom and is prepared to document bad teachers and get rid of them. (Those principals are few and far between.)
I retired six years ago. My highest salary was $60,000 and I felt guilty because the parents of my kids averaged $16,000 a year. Yet, teachers in other districts around me made over $100,000.......Five of my former students are in jail for murder. Psychologists were used for testing students not counseling. My school district was a district that spent more money on "Life Safety" (Construction)...State inspectors would always say, "They do things differently in that district."
From politicians/government down to principals, the system (state) has corrupted and prevented the education of children in low-income districts and never given the teacher the support and supervision that was truly needed......Bad teachers are easy to get rid of, good teachers need the protection of a union. Bad teachers are easy to get rid of, low income students need the protection of good teachers and a union.....
Please read my News and Views on US Education:
http://www.geocities.com/timberbeast_1/views.htm
Written and researched by a FORMER Public School Teacher and Principal of 12 years, now working in the Natural Gas Industry.
Thank you.
Great work Jesse! It is an honor to work with you in our union and I hope we can continue to work for positive change for students, teachers and communities.