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<p>JHS, you’re absolutely right about the small size of the Teach For America 2010 corps.</p>
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<p>Based on such number, it is doubtful that the charter movement that serves more than 1,500,000 students is based on the availability of TFA teachers.</p>
<p>Yup!! You catch on quick, GA2012MOM. My momma didn’t raise no fool :D</p>
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And how do you think those laws came to be? Do you think they were brought down from Mt. Sinai on tablets? Do you think they can’t be repealed (or in the case of minimum wage laws, frozen till they become economically irrelevant)?</p>
<p>xiggi, did you read what I wrote?</p>
<p>I wasn’t claiming that the charter movement that serves more than 1.5 million students is based on the availability of TFA teachers. </p>
<p>I was claiming that the handful of charters in this community that actually outperform equivalent public schools (a) have very high per-student budgets, and (b) rely heavily on high-turnover TFA (or similar program) recruits. I am talking about 10-20 schools serving a few thousand kids. They are important, because their successes are real and impressive. But it really does remain to be seen whether anyone can replicate them on a district-wide scale (much less a national scale) without losing the magic.</p>
<p>A bit melodramatic, nightchef. Teachers don’t get paid minimum wage. That analogy is sillier than the flippant Mt Sinai comment. Why should teachers have any more protection than any other white collar professional?</p>
<p>I wasn’t suggesting teachers get paid minimum wage, of course. I was responding to a specific comment by bulletandpima, not about teachers but about unions in general. The point of the Mt. Sinai crack was to point out that people take the gains for workers that were produced by the labor movement–i.e., unions–for granted, as if they’re just a part of civilized life. They weren’t a part of civilized life until unions flexed their political muscle and went out and got them.</p>
<p>Why should teachers have any more protection than any other white collar professional? Because they’ve negotiated it. If other white collar professionals want the same thing, they should do the same thing (as nurses, for example, have increasingly been doing).</p>
<p>Well, just because they “negotiated” it when the environment was so different doesn’t make it right or relevant now. The ones who are suffering are the children, and that is just disgusting, IMO. Times have changed. The stuff they “negotiated” is in many cases not relevant in todays society. If the unions had negotiated that every teacher should have an AB Dick Ditto mimeograph machine in their classroom, would you still feel that was relevant? Times have changed.</p>
<p>My late mother belonged to a teacher’s union-- probably because she felt she had to, not necessarily because she wanted to. I wish she was alive to tell me her opinions about it.</p>
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<p>Perhaps I made the mistake to focus on too few words, namely “none has demonstrated that their model of a few experienced teachers supported by **legions ****of **Ivy League **TFA **corpsmembers can be **expanded **to the point to actually educate a meaningful segment of the school population.”</p>
<p>Is the charter model really one that is based on a few experienced teachers supported by legions of Ivy League TFA corpsmembers? Or did you want us to consider that only the few that rely on such model are delivering positive results? Are TFA teachers only active in charter schools? </p>
<p>Some statistics show there are more than 6,000,000 teachers in the US. At this stage, charters have the same impact of homeschooling at about 3 percent of the education market.</p>
<p>Education Reform at the Heart of New Documentaries | Edutopia</p>
<p>Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture
Release Date: 9/17/2010</p>
<p>Director Vicki Abeles’ new documentary is about the pressures faced by American schoolchildren and their teachers in a system and culture she describes as obsessed with the illusion of achievement, competition and the pressure to perform.</p>
<p>The Lottery
Madeleine Sackler’s film The Lottery endeavors to uncover the failures of the traditional public school system by following four families from Harlem and the Bronx who have entered their children in a charter school lottery.</p>
<p>The Cartel
The Cartel shows us our educational system like we’ve never seen it before. Balancing local storylines against interviews with education experts, The Cartel explores what dedicated parents, committed teachers, clear-eyed officials, and tireless reformers are doing to make our schools better for our kids. </p>
<p>Check my post 34 for the links:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065627855-post34.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1065627855-post34.html</a></p>
<p>xig:</p>
<p>With some allowances for my usual hyperbole, I think it’s fair to say, at least here, that the handful of charters that outperform public schools rely very heavily on young, untrained, elite shock troops that work much more than 40 hours/week, including odd hours, have no family responsibilities, and generally leave teaching in a few years. Maybe that’s not true elsewhere, I don’t know. Someone is doing all the tutoring and enrichment and Saturday hours the successful models seem to entail.</p>
<p>And, again, I don’t know the national figures at all, but this has been a very charter-friendly state in recent years, and there are dozens of charter schools operating in this district. And when you look at the various outcome measures that are available, the range among the charters looks pretty much like the range among the regular public schools. There are some very good charters that achieve superlative results (just as there are some very good regular public schools, although in fairness I think none of them serving quite the same challenging demographics as the top charters). But not that many of them, not enough actually to look like a solution rather than a sketch of what a solution could be. Most of the charters are thoroughly mediocre schools, just like the schools they replaced. They are wildly popular with parents and legislators, but they are not delivering the goods any better than their School District peers.</p>
<p>As for what I know about TFA – one of my children is a second-year TFA corpsmember working at a regular public school, but with lots of colleagues working at charters. Several friends also have kids currently or recently in TFA, or in other alternative-credentialing programs, some of which the charters themselves run. A cousin I see regularly was an early corpsmember and has worked for TFA or similar programs for more than 15 years.</p>
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Then bring tenure back to the negotiating table, if it’s really become “irrelevant”–though I fail to see how it has, as long as it’s implemented in an intelligent way. Yes, you’ll have a hard time getting teachers to give that up, but if they won’t, there’s always arbitration, and in the present political climate you just might get an arbitrator to rule against the teachers about this. If so, so be it. </p>
<p>There’s so much out there about the intransigence of unions, it’s become a settled meme, yet in my experience it’s not true. Example: my own union (an NEA affiliate, as I’ve said) agreed with very little gnashing of teeth to accept a delay in the implementation of a negotiated raise last year. We knew the money wasn’t there, and the alternative would have been layoffs, so we dealt with reality. I think you’d be surprised how often that happens. </p>
<p>As for this bit,
What are we talking about here? Tenure? Pensions? I’ve lost track. In precisely what way are teachers’ unions responsible for the children’s “suffering” (and as someone who has put his son through an urban public school system–I suspect, one of very few people in this thread who have–I think that word is an absurd exaggeration in all but a very few cases)?</p>
<p>Wanted to respond to a couple of things b&p said a couple of pages ago:</p>
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When I say “what we need is more unions in the third world,” I certainly didn’t mean that we should send our soldiers to other countries to force their workers to unionize. I just meant that when workers in developing countries win the same leverage in their economies that their counterparts have in ours–and that’s what unions are about, leverage–it will be better for everybody.</p>
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Actually, you’re mistaken. The conversations I’m thinking of have taken place precisely “in our homes over a glass of wine” (or in the case of one teacher, a couple of bottles of beer). These teachers have become friends of ours, not just people working at our son’s school, and they speak very frankly. I’ve heard them complain occasionally about how their union is run (too top-down and centralized–probably a common lament). But I’ve never heard any of them suggest that they would prefer to be non-unionized.</p>
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<p>JHS, please note that I did want to challenge your conclusions about charters. I merely focused on a few words, and solely wanted to add the statistical references and comparison between the TFA and the size of the teachers’ market. </p>
<p>In previous posts, I offer the opinion (and one that was described as odd) that the jury on charrters will be out for many more years. There is no denial that for every school such as American Indian in Oakland or the successful KIPP schools in Texas there MUST be equal numbers of failed schools and programs. After all, it is expected that people with a wide range of experience and qualifications jumped at what might be a fad --just as the profession attracts stellar members in the public and private schools as well as … not that great! In the meantime, the results will be remain far from uniform, hard to scale up, or even hard to duplicate. My theory is that too much is expected from the charter movement, as it were the ultimate panacea. </p>
<p>And considering the slow but inexorable downfall in the past 5 or 6 decades, I do not know what most expect mewer schools to do MUCH better than the local schools in just a few years, and especially with the important number of limitations imposed on most charters. </p>
<p>Charter are here to stay. And that is not exactly the best of news, as it represents nothing else than a compromise that still serves to protect vested interest, and another delaying tactic.</p>
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<p>Could that be because the casual observer has little problem in finding example upon example of the intransigence of unions, but would need a garguantan effort to find evidence or reasonable attitudes? </p>
<p>The reality is that it was much easier to hide the truth when people had to rely on the reporting by a usually supportive media covering “negotiations” that were of little interest to the readers. Except for having their attention drawn to scandals such as Black Panthers showing up at school board meetings, most of the parents ignored the finer points of negotiations about collective bargaining agreements. </p>
<p>With today’s 24/7 reports coming from sources outside the “old guard” it becomes harder to show the “conciliatory attitude” of Weingarten on Education Nation and hide the acrimonious stances she is known for. It becomes harder to hide the rubber rooms, and the evidence of opposition at all costs. It becomes harder to pretend that the unions in Washington, Dc were agreeable to the new contracts before being pushed by their national leaders! </p>
<p>For what is worth, most people do not want to deny the role or participation of unions in education. What they resent is the egregious attitudes and the unacceptable level of (mostly negative) influence on an education system that should PRIMARILY serve the interest of student and families.</p>
<p>There is a role and place for a reasonable and progressive union in our country. However, the current chapters of the Teacher’s unions hardly deserve such label.</p>
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I.e., Fox News and right-wing/libertarian/Church of the Holy Market websites…</p>
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Of course the education system should “primarily serve the interest of students and families.” (Really, it should primarily serve the interests of the entire community, but it does so by serving the interests of students, so we can fudge that.) But that doesn’t mean that teacher’s unions should primarily serve the interests of students and families. They exist primarily to serve the interests of teachers. This is a problem only if you perceive the unions to be omnipotent (which they certainly aren’t, and certainly shouldn’t be), and if you perceive the interests of teachers as being fundamentally opposed to the interests of students (which they may sometimes be, but that’s what negotiation is for). </p>
<p>Granted, an enlightened union should understand “the interests of teachers” as including a workplace in which they can do their jobs very well, because their jobs will be more satisfying in that case, and job satisfaction is (past a certain point) at least as important to most of us as money. Also granted, not all unions are that enlightened, and if one of the effects of this movie is to strengthen enlightened forces within union leadership, that’s a good thing. From what I’m hearing, I tend to doubt it, as it sounds like a pretty un-nuanced union-bashing exercise, which is more likely to strengthen the hard-liners.</p>
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. It is pretty clear your heels are dug in and not budging. Are we supposed to be impressed that you took a “delay in the negotiated pay raises”? Cry me a river. What percent of your union members have been directly hit with job layoffs like the rest of the US?</p>
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None recently (though that may change soon). I’m aware of my good fortune, and grateful for it. But what does that have to do with what we’re discussing here? What’s your point? Because some people are being laid off, that means unions that have been able to avoid layoffs for their workers are the bad guys? Why?</p>
<p>And no, I wasn’t expecting anybody to be “impressed” about the delayed raise, nor do I think tears are necessary (good grief). I was just pointing to it as a modest example of the fact that unions don’t always dig in their heels.</p>
<p>You so don’t get it, nightchef.</p>
<p>Quite possible, jym626. Fortunately, what I do or don’t get is of small importance. Our educational system, OTOH, is of great importance. Shall we get back to talking about that?</p>
<p>Yes, by all means, lets do that. How did we get off track from my starting this thread earlier today about this documentary (now merged into an older thread from last week)? Oh yes, when a poster started, 5 posts later, dissecting b&p’s posts and focusing on defending the union, rather than talking about the poor state of public education. Now let me think… who did that again???</p>