Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/14/judge-tosses-much-of-wis-collective-bargaining-law/?hpt=hp_t1" target="_blank">http://politicalticker.blogs.c...pt=hp_t1</a> This is one of those times where it feels very good to say I TOLD YOU SO. Contracts mean something in this country. So does the Constitution. You can't use ballot measures as a way of getting around that. Jut like California's Prop 8, the anti-union measure too it first step towards extinction.
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder King of the Typos. Just like California's Prop 8, the anti-union measure took it first step towards extinction
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 Teacher union's are out of control, at least he tried to take a step to fix it... Look at the Chicago strike right now, the teachers want max pay with no accountability for the education they give our kids.. Our education system is broken and one of the reasons are the teacher unions...
Originally Posted By SingleParkPassholder "Look at the Chicago strike right now, the teachers want max pay with no accountability for the education they give our kids.. Our education system is broken and one of the reasons are the teacher unions..." You're kidding, right? Education budgets are always the first ones targeted every time a budget needs to be cut. Classroom sizes are out of control. Teachers pay for many supplies out of their own pockets and have been doing that for years. Increasingly, many of today's parents take no responsibility for their own children and try to shift the burden to teachers. Making the teachers 100% accountable for the "education they give kids" is a joke. PARENTS need to step in and discipline the kids. PARENTS need to make sure the kids actually attend school and do their homework. PARENTS need to ensure the kids don't have cell phones in classrooms that take away the kids' attention. PARENTS need to make sure the kids know enough to show teachers respect. And since you brought up Chicago, a little anecdote. Teaching in many Chicago schools is like being in a war zone. I went to Forest View High School in Arlington Heights, Il. The school has been closed for something like 25-26 years now. It's now an adult education center. Arlington Heights is considered to be in an affluent Northwest suburb. Middle class you might say, although Romney would differ. When I started there my freshman year, we had two full time campus police officers assigned to the school. In 1972. There was a book published in 1973 called "Students! Do Not Push Your Teacher Down the Stairs on Friday". It's account by a teacher who used the alias Alan Jones. It's a documentation of his time at DuSable Upper Grade School (high school) located in the inner city. Here's a link from ebay: <a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/STUDENTS-DO-NOT-PUSH-YOUR-TEACHER-DOWN-STAIRS-FREE-SHIPPING-/230706544160" target="_blank">http://www.ebay.com/itm/STUDEN...06544160</a> The book is very hard to find nowadays. Scroll all the way down the link and read the blurb on the back of the book. Chicago teachers were going through this crap 40 years ago. Nothing's changed.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip When people point out that Chicago teachers earn $75k per year and feel it is outrageous, they forget what it costs to live in the Chicago area. That salary would be comparable to about $37K in many parts of the country... not an unreasonable amount to pay for a job that today typically requires a Master's degree.
Originally Posted By skinnerbox Excellent post, SPP. William, you are way out of your league here. This is my professional territory. I've got an M.A. in Education and worked for years developing academic testing for K-12. You're listening to media pundits who work at the behest of those who want to privatize our public school system. You have ZERO clue about the situation in the Chicago public schools, what the unions have already conceded to regarding pay, pension, and promotion, not to mention the abysmal state of the schools themselves. Working hours for teachers and staff keep increasing, class sizes keep increasing, the physical school buildings keep decaying with toxic mold infestations. Most of them don't even have air conditioning! Do you want to teach a bunch of little kids in an overcrowded classroom, August through October, in 95 degree heat? Not to mention heating systems which are corroded and failing, producing near freezing temperatures in the winter. You need to educate yourself about the war being waged in this country by corporations who want to take over our schools, the way they've taken over our prisons. The tax payers will get screwed and the students will get screwed. Nobody will win but the private investors. Unions will be eliminated, which people like Donny believe is a good thing. Not so fast. Those unions are what have kept many teachers from walking away and doing private sector jobs that pay better. Without the union, teacher quality will diminish in direct proportion to the decent pay that 5 to 7 years of college typically affords. Good teachers will leave or retire and be replaced with folks who barely graduated from college, if at all. (W. Bush wanted the requirement to be dropped to AA degree levels.) You'll be left with a bunch of worthless teachers who can't even cut it as Starbucks baristas. As a result, STEM professional availability will continue to decline, while colleges will turn more and more to foreign students to stay solvent. Then those foreign students will be allowed to remain in this country under an expanded H1B Visa program without annual caps. Then the American Dream for middle class kids or anyone wishing to improve the quality of their lives will finally be pronounced dead and buried. This is what the top 1% wants and has wanted for years. I saw this first hand as a program manager for one of the largest test programs in the country. These private investors continue to get more and more of the nation's public wealth -- government run programs -- while our society continues to slip into a third-world status. America is basically turning into Saudi Arabia, where a very small handful of rich and powerful families control 95% of all the assets and government. Is this what you really want? I'm guessing not.
Originally Posted By skinnerbox <<When people point out that Chicago teachers earn $75k per year and feel it is outrageous, they forget what it costs to live in the Chicago area. That salary would be comparable to about $37K in many parts of the country... not an unreasonable amount to pay for a job that today typically requires a Master's degree.>> Right spot on, RT.
Originally Posted By DyGDisney >>>You're kidding, right? Education budgets are always the first ones targeted every time a budget needs to be cut. Classroom sizes are out of control. Teachers pay for many supplies out of their own pockets and have been doing that for years.<<< This is so true. I have been very involved in my kids' schools...on PTO for 2 years, substitute taught and serve on music boosters board. I see how much the teachers put in, time and money. Many teachers spend their own time giving extra help and spend a lot of their own money. They are wonderful and our kids are blessed to have them. On the other hand, I agree with William to some extent. Teachers can be awful, rude, mean, scream and cuss and say degrading things to the kids. These are all things I've witnessed at the elementary level: and their jobs are untouchable. There needs to be accountability to the job, not just -- well, you have tenure so you're here to stay. If/when they ever do get fed up with a teacher at a school, they just move them to another school. How does that help anyone! If you haven't watched "Waiting for Superman" it's a great documentary about these problems.
Originally Posted By skinnerbox "Waiting for Superman" is thinly veiled propaganda produced by the for-profit education industry. The following article from Daily Kos explains the problems with the film: <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/10/20/912100/-Is-Waiting-For-Superman-stealthy-right-wing-propaganda" target="_blank">http://www.dailykos.com/story/...opaganda</a>
Originally Posted By TomSawyer Is the problem with schools really that teachers make too much money and have too many benefits?
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 Is the problem with schools really that teachers make too much money and have too many benefits?<< The problem is that many teachers don't care and are just collecting a paycheck... Once they hit tenure, unless they sleep with a student or do something else drastic, they can basically do what they want...
Originally Posted By skinnerbox Did it ever occur to you, William, that MOST teachers actually do care but they're burnt to a crisp from overwork? You make it sound like there are millions of teachers across the country who are lazy, incompetent, sliding on tenure until retirement. That is simply not true. This entire issue of "blame the teacher" is simply to give the parents a bad guy to point fingers at other than the real culprits, the corporate business suits sitting on school boards making decisions about stuff they have no professional experience with. This is about making public education such an abject failure in parents' eyes that they can sell the magic elixir of "charter school" to fix the problems. Of course, charter schools are private institutions, run by for-profit corporations. Buying into the "lazy teacher on tenure" mythology is no different that believing Reagan's old propaganda about the stay-home welfare queen driving a Cadillac. It simply isn't reality for the vast majority of educators.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer William, you can still fire a teacher who is in a tenured position. The school district just needs to show just cause for the termination. One of the causes that they could use for termination could be a measurable job performance issue.
Originally Posted By WilliamK99 William, you can still fire a teacher who is in a tenured position. The school district just needs to show just cause for the termination. One of the causes that they could use for termination could be a measurable job performance issue.<< It's extremely difficult to do so though..Once they hit tenure it's hard to do. All I know is we went from our kids going to DoD schools to Georgia schools and I am disgusted with how horrible the teachers are... In Germany the teachers actually cared, in GA the teachers we have dealt with have poor attitudes and act like it's such a pain to talk to us about our kids. The American education system is broken and part of the reason are the teachers..Plain and simple.. In the Army I worked 80 to 100 hour weeks for months with my decisions affecting thousands of troops, I was burnt out but I didn't allow that to effect y job performance. Teachers get 3 months off every year, if they are burnt out, suck it up and do your damn job...We are all underpaid....
Originally Posted By TomSawyer I agree with you in regards to pay and time off. I wish school went year round, with 11-week quarters separated by two week breaks. Then we could pay teachers for a 240 day contract instead of a 190 day contract, which would increase their pay quite a bit.
Originally Posted By DDMAN26 I'll tell you straight from family and friends who have years of service in the public education sector, that the biggest problems is the teacher's union.
Originally Posted By DDMAN26 These are Wisconsin teachers more specifically Milwaukee. So maybe it's different where your sister teaches. The problem is both the unions/Democrats and Walker/Republicans cared only about themselves. Neither side cares one iota for the students. And it's not about them, it's about the students.
Originally Posted By DDMAN26 <<I wish school went year round>> They do have some schools here that go year round. My sister and some other friends said they would love to go year round.
Originally Posted By skinnerbox <<The problem is both the unions/Democrats and Walker/Republicans cared only about themselves. Neither side cares one iota for the students. And it's not about them, it's about the students.>> We've already had this argument before, that devolved into very nasty ugliness that I'd rather not see repeated. But I will say that this statement is an overgeneralization of the worst magnitude. It does not take into consideration of the bigger issue of public education as a whole across the nation. Walker is working at the behest of the Koch brothers and ALEC. They want every single school in our country privatized and Christianized, pushing conservative fundamentalist agenda. That is the goal. Raise a bunch of kids to adopt their backwards immoral beliefs while also profiting from that action via taxpayer dollars. Your relatives, according to past statements, feel that teaching should be a charitable activity for everyone who comes after them. They themselves will be enjoying nice pensions, thanks to the union and collective bargaining. But they don't seem to want younger or future teachers to have the same luxury, since they'll be paying for it in retirement through their taxes, which they'd rather keep for themselves. It was OK apparently for others to pay for their good salaries and pensions when they were young educators. But heaven forbid they should have to do the same, once they leave the profession. And you're also incorrect about the selfishness on the part of the teachers. The union offered deep concessions to Walker and the legislature at the very beginning. But Walker turned them down, so he could push his BS anti-union laws, per his marching orders from the Koch brothers and ALEC. So don't be so quick to slam the union for being selfish and not cooperating. They were cooperating. But Walker wasn't going to meet them half way, because total destruction of their union was his one and only goal.
