<p>An Associated Press story about your tax dollars at work: </p>
<p>Report:</a> NYC spends $65M a year paying teachers pulled from classrooms; some in limbo for years</p>
<p>This has been pretty much known for years (perhaps not an actual $ figure). LMAO @ NYC. What do you expect when you get in bed with the unions?</p>
<p>Give NYC credit for at least getting them out of the classrooms. In my wife's district, they hold on to the drug addicts and those who sleep in the classroom because they have tenure and are protected by the union. Instead of getting these deadbeats out of the classroom into someplace where they won't do any harm, they are in the process of laying off all of the non-tenure teachers (the ones who still are motivated to teach). And we wonder why our inner city schools are failing.</p>
<p>65 million dollars? Oh that is only a drop in the bucket compared to the real cost brought by the AFT, NEA, and UFT to the US education and the US taxpayers.</p>
<p>Sign me up, i'll take pay and sit in a rubber room.</p>
<p>Here comes the teacher bashing. Take a look at one of the comments posted beneath the article:</p>
<p>"The first few comments demonstrate exactly why we NEED our teachers union. You all have the teachers tried and found guilty before they have been to court. How quick the public is to believe accusations of wrongdoing against teachers. Did ANYONE say that any of the teachers in NYC have been found guilty of anything? Thanks for confirming the need for strong unions in this country!!!"</p>
<p>There are at least two sides to every story.</p>
<p>No unions here! (Texas) Well, no strong unions. Teachers can join unions or prof. organizations but they have no power, and we have no rights to strike, etc. In my district, union members are definitely in the minority.</p>
<p>speaking of that, i live in nyc, and two of my teachers have been pulled from the classrooms for allegations of "sexual harassment"</p>
<p>I heard a story on this on NPR, and I found it pretty sad that the 'wheels of justice' turn so darn slow. Plus, I had to admit I felt a little sorry for the teachers who have to sit there being bored, bored, bored while they wait their turn. Although I'm pretty sure one teacher interviewed for the story I heard was actually taking a laptop to the rubber room and working on other jobs while being paid by the school system to sit there.</p>
<p>
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Here comes the teacher bashing.
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</p>
<p>And and here comes the usual misrepresentation of the argument. The criticism of the egregrious --almost criminal-- activities of the unions is **not **a criticism of the millions of hard working and poorly respected teachers, who are as much victims as are the students and parents. It's an indictment of a group of people who are keeping an entire system hostage for the benefit of a few abusers and thieves. </p>
<p>"Teachers" is far from representing a homogeneous group who loves the representation by the unions and the extorsion of dues that are predominantly spent on political pursuits and payoff fat cats that are masquerading as educators or people's representatives. </p>
<p>There are indeed two sides to any stories. We'd love to hear more on how the unions contracts that restrict working hours to a strict minimum, render contacts with parents all but impossible, reward seniority over qualifications, and of course the rubber rooms are good for .... students and education in general. </p>
<p>If there is another side to the story, could you please tell us how the teachers' unions have the best interest of STUDENTS at heart? Or could it be more pay for less work, no reducing of work force, and many others items that were extorted from "supportive" politicians.</p>
<p>Twenty five years after the release of a Nation at Risk, could you please tell us how the teachers' unions have made the situation any better? We are now spending MUCH more, have smaller classes, and are still the laughing stock of the world when it comes to the ratio of performance of public education versus the cost. </p>
<p>Yes, there are two sides to the story: one is atrocious and the other one is even worse.</p>
<p>I think any parent who has dealt at all with their school system has run into not only competent but incomptent teachers. The problem is that the unions protect the incompetent at the expense of students, parents and taxpayers. A simple example: in our district, we had a particularly gifted, but small, cohort of math kids (they actually taught themselves pretty much all of their 8th grade year because they knew more than the math teacher did...). By the time they reached 10th grade, the class they would have taken in 12th grade was under budget pressure. We parents thought (naively, it turned out) that we could sit down with the school administration, the teachers and the district administration and find a solution. And believe me when I tell you that we came up with some very creative and workable solutions that would have satisfied everyone - except for the teacher's union rep, who unilateratelly rejected every suggestion, because he had determined he could hold us hostage for some demand. And note that the teacher who eventually taught the class was very supportive of our efforts all the way through.</p>
<p>We eventually did find a solution, and the kids and their teacher had a fabulous year - more than half the kids ended up at ivies and virtually all got merit scholarships. </p>
<p>It would have been a lot easier if the union rep had been constructive.</p>
<p>And I'd feel a lot better about their motives if they actively worked to rid the system of incompetent teachers...</p>
<p>Some of those teachers in the rubber room did absolutely nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong with tenure in principal, but too often the unions go to bat for them. In our elementary school there were two pretty incompetent teachers. One got nudged into being the librarian. He wasn't too bad there, though he was apt to show Reading Rainbow videos instead of reading to the kids himself. Still I don't think he did too much harm. The other got judged into working only half time - he got one of the reading groups in several different grades and wasn't too good even at that.</p>
<p>I'm curious how the union justified using taxpayer dollars for a librarian who didn't read to kids and another who wasn't even able to lead the reading groups.</p>
<p>I don't know that the union was involved. It was a case where the principal chose to find less harmful activities for somewhat slacker teachers. They weren't child molesters, they were just lazy. But schools are afraid to even try to get rid of the lousy teachers. That's a shame. At the same time, there are teachers in those rubber rooms because they've been unjustly accused. They deserve their day in court. Unions wouldn't get such a bad name if they'd admit they don't need to protect every single teacher. </p>
<p>By and large though states with unionized teachers have better schools than those that don't.</p>
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By and large though states with unionized teachers have better schools than those that don't.
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</p>
<p>I'd have to look at the examples to see if that's a correlational statement I agree with. I know you are knowledgeable enough to understand that such a statement doesn't prove anything about causation. It may be that states with union shops today would have even better schools without union shops, but that would take a different kind of observation to determine.</p>
<p>tokenadult, I definitely don't have enough statistics knowledge to even begin to parse out the reasons. I just saw a graphic at some point and was a bit surprised. It was pretty striking. No links - it was a long time ago! However I don't think unions are the biggest problem with our schools, though I think they can contribute at times.</p>
<p>And really how bad does a teacher have to be before they need to be fired? I'd love all my kids' teachers to be great, but the reality is some will only be adequate. The librarian actually was a nice guy, and better with the older kids than with the younger ones. There were battles I chose to fight in my kids' elementary school - and he wasn't one of them.</p>
<p>Don't bash the NYC teachers so fast. Have you ever been a NYC teacher? Well I'm a product of the NYC school system(OK 30+ years ago), but I have seen teachers both verbally and physically abused by students. A teacher's salary is not that great compared to the work needed. Teachers would be like indentured servents without unions and so would many other groups. Plus have you been to the post office lately? That's a speedy bunch!</p>
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By and large though states with unionized teachers have better schools than those that don't.
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</p>
<p>Should we review the performance of the fifty largest public school districts? Should we look at the graduation rate of say .. Detroit public schools where unionism is king.</p>
<p>And, why are schools that are not and never will be unionized ... simply better. Unions routinely oppose every single measure that would make our K-12 better or mere competitive on an international basis. Unions oppose --and with visceral malice to boot-- any progressive ideas such as vouchers or competition. Unions only believe in a status quo that will ensure the protection of the mediocre and dishonest. We will never stop our continuous slide in performance as long as the power of the unions is drastically diminished through competition and absolute school choice. </p>
<p>Teachers' unions should have never been given the voice they received since the 1960s. If you're looking for a correlation, take a look at the absolute deterioration of the system in the past 50 years. Hardly a coincidence!</p>
<p>At a time when disappointing student performance, stark achievement gaps, and an ever-"flattening" world call for retooling American schools for the 21st century, the most daunting impediments to doing so are the teacher collective bargaining agreements that regulate virtually all aspects of school district operations. These agreements are a harmful anachronism in today's K-12 education system. The rubber rooms, and the reason behind their existence, are just more examples of a system that has forgotten the value of both ethics and education.</p>
<p>Teachers unions do several things.</p>
<ol>
<li>They make it harder to fire incompetent teachers.</li>
<li>They hold back schools from paying higher salaries to better teachers and thus continue the cycle of bad education for a particular school.</li>
<li>They take large portions of meager teacher salaries even if the teacher does not wish to join the union.</li>
<li>The NEA, the largest labor union in the US, is a public school teacher union which consistently opposes homeschooling and decries parents as inadequate for teaching their children when the statistics suggest otherwise (homeschoolers do better on standardized tests than public school kids).</li>
</ol>
<p>The problem is a system that takes years to determine guilt or innocence.</p>
<p>$65 million boggles the mind.</p>