The Teacher Unions demand: (1) No Charter Schools; (2) No School Choice; (3) No Firing Bad or Incompetent Teachers; (4) No Curriculum Review; (5) No Opposing Questions of any kind... - Clearly, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Teacher Unions need to be given "The Regan Treatment"!
(media.patriots.win)
CORRUPTION
I am a teacher. I am not in a union. I live in a Right-to-work state. There are no unions here.
I am about to start my 18th year as a teacher. I am a veteran of the US Army. I have a STEM degree and worked for several years in a technical field before becoming a teacher. I love teaching more than any other job I have held.
I teach Honors Precalculus and AP Calculus. I teach at a school that is about 95% minorities. Maybe more than 95%. There are 1600 students at this school. I teach about 150 per year and I teach one or two white students per school year.
I arrive at about 6:15am give or take 15 minutes. There are rare exceptions. I have been absent from work 3 times in 17 years of teaching. I get home at about 5pm unless I have gate duty at an athletic event or PTO or something like that and then it can be much later.
I usually give students contact information when they graduate so that they can use me as a resource when they get to college and they get stuck. I spend quite a bit of time tutoring former students who take Calculus in college or who wait too long before taking their first math course etc.
My Precal students are tested at the end of the course and their growth is measured. A score from -2 to +2 is "meeting growth"and above +2 is "exceeded growth". The district average in the subjects that I teach is -3.6. My students averaged +21 for the 2019/2020 school year.
I did not want schools to be closed this past spring. A few weeks ago I got an email survey from the school board asking about returning to school. I want them to reopen on schedule. I am ready to go back.
I am not a liberal. I do not indoctrinate students. Many of my students respect my opinion and ask me questions that are not strictly related to my subjects. If they are political/social etc I will sometimes not answer but when I do answer I present facts from reputable sources which do not include mainstream media sites.
I have been thanked by parents more times than I can count. There have been times when parents came to the school over the summer to ensure that their child would be put into my class in the fall. I cannot imagine a higher compliment than for a parent to choose you to educate their child.
For this I am now entering my 18th school year and will earn a salary and supplement amounting to about 54.5k per year. I do get 8 weeks off in the summer. I also have to take "Continuing Education Classes" which occupies some of this time. I also have to pay for those classes.
This post is about "teacher unions" and the teachers represented by those unions. As such, it does not apply to me personally. However, I have read many posts disparaging teachers on this site. They typically do not differentiate between union and non-union teachers. To be fair, the vast majority of teachers I have worked with during my career are absolutely horrible and should not be paid as much as they earn. In a perfect world, they would be fired and replaced. Unfortunately that is not the world in which we live. There are, of course, a handful of teachers in every school who are working very hard to help.
The community in which I teach is an impoverished, minority community (I am white). If they closed the school where I work, most of these families, even with a federal voucher would not be able to educate their children. Virtually none of them could home school their children and which of them would teach their children AP Calculus? The best and brightest of these students (and they are very good) would never be educated to their full potential.
The problem is real but it is also complicated. The simple solution of firing teachers and issuing federal vouchers would be a disaster by itself.
You may want to give it a bit more thought.
Regards
The problem is the majority you speak of. They are ruining the kids, while you do your best to help them grow. If the other teachers were all like you, this country would be a better place. Unfortunately, as you know, that is not the case.
Thank you for your work though.
Thank you for your service.
Your own words: "To be fair, the vast majority of teachers I have worked with during my career are absolutely horrible and should not be paid as much as they earn. In a perfect world, they would be fired and replaced. Unfortunately that is not the world in which we live. " Let's make it the world in which we live - fire them all, you included, and let them all apply to staff a new system of public schooling where the students come first, education is the focus, and indoctrination is done away with. The free market finds solutions. Status quo is clearly not a solution.
I agree that the status quo is not a solution in this case. The status quo is at best impotent and at worst toxic.
On the other hand, if we fired everyone at once a sea of new charters schools are not out there waiting to be filled with high quality staff and students.
I think an alternative might be merit based pay based on objective standards.
Test students at the beginning and end of each course and see how much they've progressed. Base a teachers pay on their results. Basing pay on anything other than results is ludicrous.
Teachers that are doing good work would end up being well paid (and the pay needs to be good enough to attract quality people). Teachers that are ineffective could then be fired because better applicants would be available.
That would be truly allowing the market to function in education.
You aren't wrong but it's like telling a hit and run driver to hit the brakes. The only way you can have any input on the situation is deploying spike strips and destroying the tires. We aren't in the driver's seat and the people in charge are determined to run our country over.
I too thank you for your service.
Math and Science instructors trend more conservative, than those who teach other subjects.
My uncle is also a Math Teacher. He's the one who introduced me to The_Donald in the first place.
As someone with 2 higher education STEM degrees, I'll add this observation. "A good teacher is priceless. Those who are knowledgeable and passionate about there subjects can change lives. If only they weren't so rare."
First of all - a well written and thought out comment deserves acknowledgement and a focused, detailed response.
Many of us have had teachers who changed our weltanschauung. It could be that you are that person to others - and for that you get nothing but respect. There are a handful of teachers on my journey that definitely impacted the preparation, direction and outcome of the adventure so far! They had the similar qualities you defined - capability, determination, passion for their subjects - and it rubbed off on me. In many ways it made me challenge my own ways of thinking - which before snowflake culture took over - was considered a good thing.
I agree with you that sometimes teachers are one of the best parts of society. They are now, unfortunately, being asked to play more and more a substitute parenting role. For those who don't not know, there is a series of offerings these days called "Adulting Classes". Students are showing up to university so woefully underprepared and ready to survive, that they need to be taught "how to live" before they can be taught "how or what to think" and thrive.
I would wonder, however, how many of your colleagues approach their profession with the same level of dedication, professionalism and competence you describe?My experience, again, is that this is an individual quality - and not necessarily something that is learned. What I have seen in higher education would put you as an exception and not the rule. And if they do have these qualities, how does the union block them from innovating and improving student results?
Thomas Sowell has a lot to say on this theme. I highly encourage you to read more on his studies and findings in looking into the subject. This is only one of his books on it - there are others.
Case in point, read in the Thomas Sowell books about Charter Schools in high poverty areas. The students coming from the same environments score astronomically higher on testing, get into better schools, and thus become better contributing members of society. It has little or nothing to do with their skin color or family situation. It has to do the students attitude and self-belief, and with teachers who are motivated (and rewarded) to make the students into the best they can be. It simply works. That is why the teacher's unions are fighting it. Competition will expose the failure to deliver results - in apple-to-apple comparisons.
The teacher unions are blocking competition, diversity of thought, innovation, and thus preparation and development of their customers (there students). They are supporting the teaching of revisionist (false) history and false biology and false _______ (insert snowflake topic here). That's not OK and needs to stop. It's one thing to say, here are 2 opinions on the topic, here is the data to support these positions, you decide. It's another to force feed snowflake content down the throats of students who never asked for it.
There is a beautiful saying on this theme: "A Baccalaureate student tells you how they feel about it. The Master's student says "here is the data" to support my position.
The fact that the teacher's unions are becoming so vocal - only confirms how much of the problem they are for the rest of us. Making demands? Really. I think the best response for those demands is G.T.F.O. - and we will find someone or some group that wants to help students.
To your point, in the end, it is the relationship between the teacher and student that makes the magic happen. The point here is to give the teachers every opportunity and tool they need to do that better... something that the teacher's unions are NOT doing.