What a got damn shitshow. [warning politics]

[Quickbeam]

I shouldn't have even gotten involved with this conversation, but now that I dragged my ass in, I'll say what I have to say.

Education is a field which everyone thinks they understand and very few non educators actually do. One of the things that I enjoy about this site is the level of expertise here. We have great respect for expertise, but somehow when we talk about education that goes away.

Teaching isn't what you guys think it is. The solutions you want to put upon schools will (usually) hurt teachers and students more than you'll ever realize. And this is the kind of thing which you won't understand unless you've done your time in front of kids, having successes, failures, kids who love you, kids who hate you. It's a place which requires wisdom, and modesty. What kills with one group of kids might be an absolute failure with another. The reason: you're dealing with people — kids. They don't bend to rules well and they are as varied as the world.

I could refute a lot of what you're saying, but I don't really have the energy. I don't want argue about this. I don't come to StandupZone to argue. I'm a mid-career teacher, having done this for about fifteen years. All I can say is that if before you make pronunciations about how teachers should be teaching, how how to fix schools, or why unions or bad, you should walk a few miles in a teacher's moccasins. If you want to refute me, go right ahead. As I said, I don't have the energy for any unnecessary arguments.

This is a far more complex topic than most of you understand. Neither teachers nor teachers unions nor public schools are the enemy to a good education. They want the exact same thing. Really. No ifs, ands, or buts. I could post pictures and videos of me in action, so you could see how committed I am to teaching well, but all my pictures have kids in them and it's against professional ethics to use them on social media. But this sin't about me. Most teachers feel the exact same way. And sure we get burnt out or depressed or negative sometimes. That's part of the job too. We're human, not supermen (and women).

Excellent post Ichabod,

Absolutely agree with you. I've had a number of teachers in my family and all have been dedicated, hard working professionals, and yes members of the Teachers Union. To say in essence that you need to destroy the Teacher's Union to fix the education system is just plain wrong.

[freetobeme]

Bernie. Just callin em as he sees em.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-democrats-donald-trump-20170212-story,amp.html

[johnysmoke]

The intelligence community is withholding info from his team as well.... http://observer.com/2017/02/donald-trump-administration-mike-flynn-russian-embassy/

[southwesterly]

Typo alert!
To for "too".

Morans.

[PonoBill]

Excellent post Ichabod,

Absolutely agree with you. I've had a number of teachers in my family and all have been dedicated, hard working professionals, and yes members of the Teachers Union. To say in essence that you need to destroy the Teacher's Union to fix the education system is just plain wrong.

I wandered a bit sideways here, I was really wondering about the nature of one particular battle. I'm not against shooting from the hip, but I generally do a fair bit of research to support or demolish positions I consider adopting. I didn't come to my conclusion about public employee unions and particularly teachers unions in a vacuum.

I read this study some time ago, and it lead me to a number of other interesting economic and social policy studies: https://education.msu.edu/epc/library/papers/HowUnionsInfluenceEducationPolicy.asp

It's not that long, worth reading, come to your own conclusions. Some of the citations are pretty interesting too.

I'm capable of changing my mind, but I haven't seen any analysis of the effect of unions on the education system that indicates anything but profoundly negative effects, from oppositions to reform, to skewed budget allocations, to undercutting administration, to massive spending on political control--the teachers union over the span of years spends more on lobbying than any other organization. The only two studies I read that showed positive effect--studies that showed lower dropout rates and higher performance by students learning from union teachers--turned out to be egregiously and obviously fiddled.

In the face of that, "just plain wrong" isn't really all that compelling.

[tautologies]

Yeah I think unions in their current form are not doing much good. Having been in one in different capacities, having seen how they deal with disputes (no my dispute) I've lost respect for them in general.
I do not think it is impossible to have good union and they certainly plays a role in keeping larger organizations from abusing employees, but today they are in many cases too strong. I tend to like balance.

At the end of the day they should be judged on the salary level of their constituents.....

[TallDude]

Typo alert!
To for "too".

Morans.

He has a great editorial dept. He doesn't really need them though. We meant what he knew.

[PonoBill]

He looks a lot better when they crop off the top of his head.

[tautologies]

....and if you don't believe the article, just see the video at the end of the page. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bannon-trump-the-ultra-conservative-roman-catholic_us_589b6d50e4b02bbb1816c257

[Ichabod Spoonbill]

You guys only hear the stuff that goes on in the papers about teachers' unions. You hear about the fights, which happen sometimes. You don't see the inside stuff because it's protected by confidentiality. The fights to get special education kids their proper help. The fights to reduce class size. The fights to improve conditions in schools. Again, this stuff goes under the radar.

And yes, teachers fight for salaries too. Not for salaries that will get you rich, salaries that ensure a living wage. I don't think it's unreasonable that a teacher can afford to raise a family, or buy a modest house, or to not have to work two jobs in order to make ends meet. That's all we want, to be able to live in our near the communities we serve. That wage is different depending on the community, but that's all we want. Nobody gets into teaching expecting to get rich. If salary is your biggest concern (and I've seen teachers who think this) then you should get out of the field.

Unions also protect teachers against unfair prosecution, which happens much more than you think. Consider that your job in one of public service but part of what you do is push kids hard and give bad grades. There's constant pushback from parents and the administration. Some of it is valid (I've done some pushback as a parent myself), but some is “Why did you give my kid a C?” We need protection because we're constantly in situations where we could lose a battle, and then educational integrity goes out the window. I need to be able to give a kid a C, or fail him/her, because that's my job. We get pushback from this all the time. Upping grades. Socially promoting kids because it's easier. Putting kids in advanced classes who don't belong but the parents insist on it because it looks good on the kid's college application. I need some backup to be able to say where the line is, what's good education and what's bad. Are we perfect? No, of course not. I've made mistakes and I will continue to. However, I need that freedom to make some mistakes so I can become a better educator..

Part of being a teacher also is that your job doesn't end at dismissal. You have kids to help after school. You have parents to e-mail. You have papers to grade. You have lesson plans to make for every day. Sundays are grading/planning days for me. I rarely go out and do anything dramatic because those papers are waiting for me. You also can't talk about my job on social media, or even in public, because something you say might get back to you. This is especially true if you live close to where you work, like I do. The union is really the only safe place we have to talk about work issues.

I think most of you guys who work in private enterprise see things very differently. I get it. I worked IT in Fortune 100 companies where things are much more black and white. The thing which you need to understand is that education is a different type of system than private enterprise. Success and failure can be very different things. I'll give you a good example. Take a kid who's three years behind in reading, and with intensive instruction one years is now two years behind in reading. That's still failure in the eyes of all these metrics about failing schools, but it's really a success because a kid is advancing towards a goal of being on grade level. The thing is, the metrics won't and don't see that. Even if you metric advancement (which some states do) that has its own set of problems. There was a recent lawsuit on Long Island where a teacher was declared a failing teacher because her kids didn't improve substantially. The problem was, she was teaching gifted classes where her kids were scoring at the top of the chart. They didn't improve because there was no higher for them to go on the scores!

Kids aren't widgets. You can't throw out bad materials because there's a bad run. You have to take what you get and do your best. And sometimes that “best” isn't as awesome as you might want. We struggle too with kids who don't want to learn, with behavior issues and learning disabilities, attitude problems, and all those things you heard of. In the meantime we're expected to be supermen and advance every kid past these testing metrics. This is a crazy situation, but my union gives me at least some protection against all these things coming at me. The union still expects me to do my damned best, BTW. The union president recently chided me for raising my voice in class, which I appreciated. We all are expected to do our best, always. There's no tacit acceptance of mediocrity. Quite the contrary. I suppose that might not be true in all unions, but it sure the hell isn't where I work.

Unions also do not protect an incompetent teacher from getting fired. The union guarantees due process, that's all. You get a hearing and representation, but teachers can get fired. It happens. It happened to my father, who deserved it (which horribly screwed up my college career, BTW). They protect a teacher against a vindictive parent or unfair administrations. You get a teacher who has a different teaching philosophy than a principal, and the principal thinks that that teacher should go. This happens pretty often, BTW. The union protects that teacher, and if the teacher needs to change his/her way of doing things, the union will make sure that teacher gets what he/she needs to change.

That said, I don't love unions. Really, I don't. I'm glad it's there, but I'm not super impressed. Last year the head of the AFT was in my school talking to the union president. I shook her hand and listened to what she had to say, which was quite different of what I was hearing her say in the newspapers. (I'm pushing confidentiality here.) I bit my tongue. It's a bureaucracy too, with all the problems of a bureaucracy. The union tends to left-leaning, but in my school there are many republicans. That causes friction too.

A lot of this is inside baseball stuff. Unless you're in the thick of it, you can easily get a skewed opinions of unions. Keep in mind that unions are made of people who want the exact same things every parent wants, a good education for kids. There may be different opinions on how we get there — that's democracy for you — but we all want the exact same thing.

[Ichabod Spoonbill]

BTW, I don't expect you guys to jump on my bandwagon. I just want to say that the situation is a lot more nuanced than at first glance.

[Bean]

But the union's "fights to get special education kids their proper help. The fights to reduce class size", to an outsider, can give the appearance that they are just ploys to increase the number of teachers.

[Ichabod Spoonbill]

Bean, you're right. That's how it can seem. I don't have a good answer to that.

[Area 10]

Why would increasing the numbers of teachers be a bad thing?

[Bean]

A-10, increasing the number of teachers is a cost/benefit issue.

Everyone wants the right number of teachers for every situation, trouble is, no one can agree on what that number is.