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Sometimes, but not always. They're not looking out for the kids if they make it almost impossible to fire bad teachers and reward good ones.
But they don't!! This is another old wives tale. What unions do is make sure protocol is followed before someone is fired. It's the fault of the adminstrators if they don't do thier job to get rid of bad teachers. No union could protect me if I were failing to do my job. All my administrators would need to do is document that I'm not doing my job. What unions do is stand up for teachers who stand up to administrators.
We have some great teachers here who grate on the administrators because they won't do as they're told. They know how to teach. They know how kids learn. Their students do learn but they don't play by the rules. Because of the union, the admins can't fire them because they can't show cause. They can't show that the students aren't learning because they are. Without the union, they'd be out on their butts. And they really are great teachers.
We have few bad teachers but it's not the union that protects them. It's administrators who don't document what they need to to fire them. They play by the rules so the administrators leave them alone even though the kids will tell you they learn nothing in their classes. Administrators only seem to go after the teachers who stand up to them.
oops...guess this one is getting chewed to the bone..I had thought this would be a discussion about how teachers are VIEWED by the system, particularlly the federal governement.
The OP had a letter addressed to MR. PRESIDENT and sort of outlined grievances about how there were more and more laws, regulations and accountability being placed on teachers and yet we are supposed to be the professionals.
It is disheartening to see these discussions all too ofetn devolve into anti-union, anti-tenure, and other anti-personalities.
No wonder the government has been so successful in destroying a once great profession.
As far as the comment about the union looking out for its's members, and by doing so, they are looking out for the kids...I'm not sure this is how it works out.
I've been a union member. Being a union member does not mean you are using your energy and time in meetings to do what is best for kids.
Our local teacher's unions used to have their minutes available online.....there was almost no mention of students, or professional advancement.
Unions exist largely to serve the members who plan to stay in a job for a long time, and help ensure that the most senior members are getting most of the advantages.
Let me tell you about that devil. That "devil" works to keep my class sizes down so I can teach your kids more effectively. That "devil" makes sure I get the supplies I need in my class so I can teach your kids. That "devil" makes sure I get the training and support I need. And that "devil" will be there to support me in the event a parent or adminstrator has it out for me when all I'm trying to do is teach your kids.
I was never pro union but after two years of working in a non union school where safety rules were broken daily, work loads were too high to do a qulaity job and the pay so dismal, many of us needed second jobs to make ends meet, I'm glad to be in a union district. If my only choice is to teach in a non union school again, I will not teach. The open hatred and disrespect of teachers is much worse when you're going to work every day and working in dismal conditions for lousy pay. I may still be hated but I have a lab that is large enough to be safe, the union stands up for me when I cite safety research on class sizes in lab based classes and, at least, some day I can hope to make a decent wage. I think the union has done a lot to improve education. My teaching conditions are so much better now that I can concentrate on teaching instead of trying not to have a stroke or a heart attack. I can be a teacher now . I can do labs without fear I'm placing my student's in harms way. It's sad it takes a union to do this but it does. I've seen first hand what you get without a union. That's why my kids no longer attent a non union charter school. While the union's job is to look out for the teacher, they end up, by doing so, looking out for the kids too.
And, FTR, I pay a portion of my own benefits (about 20% more than I did when I was an engineer and no one told me I didn't deserve my benefits then...go figure...) and 11% of my pay goes towards my pension (compared to zero percent when I was an engineer (pension plans are almost identical). I WISH I had the benefits people like you think I have. I don't.
That "devil's" job isn't to make your life easier, or the kids learn more. Their job is to benefit the union. They keep class sizes down so that there are more teachers, which means more dues. That "devil" will support you against the parent whether you deserve it or not. Whether you are competent or not.
You will NEVER convince me that the union, by looking out for the teacher, looks out for the kids. They care about neither. Otherwise, our kids would be improving academically, instead of falling. Our kids would be graduating instead of dropping out.
That "devil's" job isn't to make your life easier, or the kids learn more. Their job is to benefit the union. They keep class sizes down so that there are more teachers, which means more dues. That "devil" will support you against the parent whether you deserve it or not. Whether you are competent or not.
You will NEVER convince me that the union, by looking out for the teacher, looks out for the kids. They care about neither. Otherwise, our kids would be improving academically, instead of falling. Our kids would be graduating instead of dropping out.
All kids every where are failing hmm?
Look at the close correlation between strength of teachers unions and students success. Clearly unions are not to blame for student failures.
I teach in one of the best school in the country. My students have never met a standardized test they couldn't ace. Should I be paid as if that were due to my efforts alone, the same way many people want penalize teachers whose students are failing? Because as good a teacher as I am, my students would ace those exams with even the worst teachers.
That "devil's" job isn't to make your life easier, or the kids learn more. Their job is to benefit the union. They keep class sizes down so that there are more teachers, which means more dues. That "devil" will support you against the parent whether you deserve it or not. Whether you are competent or not.
You will NEVER convince me that the union, by looking out for the teacher, looks out for the kids. They care about neither. Otherwise, our kids would be improving academically, instead of falling. Our kids would be graduating instead of dropping out.
In a non union school, I taught chemistry to 36 students in a 750 square foot classroom when the NSTA safety guidelines are no more than 24 students in a 1500 square foot classroom to conduct labs safely. Those numbers were arrived at through reasearch. Do you know what I got when I challenged the school and brought up that they had me conducting labs in unsafe conditions? FIRED.
My current school tried to go to 28 per classroom. The union took them on. Now I teach, as NSTA recommends, 24 students in a 1500 square foot lab (though we've agreed to go to 26 students if there is no other choice). So, yeah, I think the union benefits kids. Keeping class sizes down may benefit teachers but it also helps the teachers to be more effective. So does making sure the classroom is properly funded and so does knowing that if I have to take on an administrator this time over a safety issue I won't get fired.
The union improves education by imroving my working conditions which improves my ability to teach. Coming from a professional world, I've never been pro union but the normal rules don't apply in teaching. Teachers don't improve the bottom line by being better teachers so a good teacher isn't worth a dime more than a bad teacher to the district. The bargain teacher is the cheapest one you can put in front of the classroom. Teacher effectiveness doesn't improve the bottom line. As an engineer, I attained job security by doing my job well. That also resulted in raises because I was worth more to the company. There is NOTHING I can do as a teacher, besides pack my classroom with too many kids, to make myself more valuable to the district. I'm a necessary cost. The time will come when it would be cheaper to replace me with a new hire and there will no incentive to keep me no matter how good I am because the new teacher is the bargain. It takes about 5 years for a teacher to start to become effective. 10 to be a master teacher.
Teachers' pensions in many areas are simply too rich (as is true for other public sector workers). I work in the public sector. On my 50K salary, my employer paid $18,000 into my pension last year. As much as I am loath to admit it, that is just not even remotely sustainable.
It's also almost impossible to get rid of bad teachers, thanks to the teachers' unions. Even liberal leaning folks are starting to admit this. See Waiting for Supermanfor more.
The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.
Quote:
Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?
That "devil's" job isn't to make your life easier, or the kids learn more. Their job is to benefit the union. They keep class sizes down so that there are more teachers, which means more dues. That "devil" will support you against the parent whether you deserve it or not. Whether you are competent or not.
You will NEVER convince me that the union, by looking out for the teacher, looks out for the kids. They care about neither. Otherwise, our kids would be improving academically, instead of falling. Our kids would be graduating instead of dropping out.
In union states, kids do better than they do in non-union states. Exactly how do you explain that?
There’s only been one scholarly effort to tackle this problem that I’m aware of. Back in 2000, three professors writing in the Harvard Educational Review did a statistical analysis of state SAT/ACT scores, controlling for factors like race, median income, and parental education. They found that the presence of teachers unions in a state did have a measurable and significant correlation with increased test scores — that going to school in a union state would, for instance, raise average SATs by about 50 points.
Quote:
Two other findings leap out from the Harvard Educational Review study. First, they concluded that Southern states’ poor academic performance could be explained almost entirely by that region’s lack of unionization, even when you didn’t take socioeconomic differences into account.
And second, and to my mind far more interesting, they found that concrete improvements in the educational environment associated with teachers’ unions — lower class sizes, higher state spending on education, bigger teacher salaries — accounted for very little of the union/non-union variation. Teachers’ unions, in other words, don’t just help students by reducing class sizes or increasing educational spending. In their conclusion, they stated that
“other mechanism(s) (ie, better working conditions; greater worker autonomy, security, and dignity; improved administration; better training of teachers; greater levels of faculty professionalism) must be at work here.”
actually i have to say the majority of parents i have spoken with have been overall pretty nice and I can say i dont look down on them as "white trash". However, there are a select few that say they are going to speak with their son/daughter and never do.
As for YOU getting interrupted, I feel the same way when I am trying to teach and jill/johnny will not behave so that I can teach and I am constantly interrupted. Remember it is a two way street. I also honestly do not know how a teacher can refuse a meeting with a parent. Even if they could, you could always go the counselor and they could set something up. Did you try that? Trust me, if you really wanted that meeting, then you would have made it happen.
Trust ME, I didn't get any such meeting, and I did contact the counselor AND the principal. They kept saying to wait until the first report card, but in the meantime I got almost daily notes, etc, from his teacher.
No, its NOT a two-way street. Getting "interrupted" by "Jill" or "Johnny" is part of YOUR job, its called classroom management. I do NOT exist to do your job for you. Or don't you think MY job is important, too? When I offer to make an appointment, and the teacher refuses, but expects me to answer on the first ring and listen to her biotch......well, it just doesn't seem quite right to me....
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