<p>Thanks, PayFor!</p>
<p>Agreed that “kids are losing out while adults protect their own interests.”</p>
<p>Nightchef, the movie also explains that teachers’ unions were necessary when they were formed in the 1950s (?) to protect mainly female teachers from low pay, retaliatory actions, political firings and crony hirings. Now? There are so many employment laws on the books that would protect them from these things, that unions are less necessary.</p>
<p>In my own D’s HS. No back to school night where parents meet teachers. Asked principal why. Teachers don’t want to come to school at night and, per their contract, principal can’t make them. This makes no sense.</p>
<p>Night.</p>
<p>Let me take a guess, you or someone close to you is in a Union. We are in the 21st Century with many Civil Liberty Laws that did not exist in the early 20th Century. Unions have outlived their needs.</p>
<p>Tell me, do you expect sweat shops again? Do you expect minors working 18 hour days? </p>
<p>Tell me exactly in your opinion why in the educational system we should still have unions?</p>
<p>90% of my friends are in the educational field. NOT ONE supports being forced into the Union. 50% of them have gone private so they don’t have to be in a union.</p>
<p>The irony is those that are public, have the big classrooms, crappy conditions and very little parental support. The ones private have the dream job as a teacher. What exactly is the union doing for the students, when the great teachers leave to go private?</p>
<p>Our educational system is failing in part because of unions. They hold the govt hostage because of contracts that are negotiated over a multi-yr time period. The unions hold the teachers hostages too. I will keep saying it the minute anyone understands how the fiscal system works within the county, they will understand how it impacts the school system.</p>
<p>I’m not much of a fan of unions in general, or of teachers’ unions in particular. But my daughter has a slightly different perspective after a year teaching at an underperforming high school in the Bronx with an arbitrary, vindictive principal using her authority to carry out various personal vendettas. Were it not for the union, some experienced teachers she admires would essentially be blackballed from the profession, and a set of administrators she believes were incompetent would still be running the school. So experience has given her a more nuanced view of unions than she had before.</p>
<p>I think teacher’s unions do a lot of counterproductive things, but look at the states which are considered to have the best schools - they are all states with strong teachers unions.</p>
<p>The film showed many states with poor performing schools that had strong unions as well.</p>
<p>Can’t wait to see the film this week.</p>
<p>The NEA is the single biggest culprit in the failed mess that is our educational system today.</p>
<p>Night, the conditions that spawned the need for unions in the first half of the 20th century in America are long over, and we have many systems in place to prevent them from occurring today.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, unions use their extreme power, bullying tactics, and iron fisted control to provide outlandish benefits to their members that are to the direct detriment of kids in the educational system. </p>
<p>My mother fought the union for her 40 years of teaching, and a great deal of pressure was brought to bear against her. Happily, she has lived to witness the beginning of the end for unions, and couldn’t be happier.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, as I write this, my two neighbors, both retired teachers with masters degrees, with between 30 and 35 years of teaching apiece are out puttering in their garden as they do every day in between pleasure reading, socializing with friends, and afternoon naps in the hammock, just returned from 3 weeks in Europe, as is their yearly custom. Between them, they draw down over $110,000 per year for doing absolutely nothing to contribute to the education of a single child, yet they’ll receive this lavish, unearned income for the rest of their lives (likely another 25 years) – on our backs. This is obscene.</p>
<p>
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. It has been less than a hundred years–a few generations–since such things were common here, and they are common in other parts of the world. What we need is more unions in the third world, not fewer unions here.</p>
<p>You’re right that I am a union member myself–an NEA member, in fact, though not a teacher–and connected with union members. My parents were public school teachers, and my mother worked in a public school where the union had not yet succeeded in negotiating tenure for its members. I remember hearing at the dinner table about the endless, exhausting, time-sucking battles the principal waged with disgruntled parents who wanted a perfectly good teacher fired or reprimanded because she had dared to scold their precious Johnny or give their angelic Janey a bad grade. This is why tenure exists. I agree that it should not be impossible to fire a teacher. But it shouldn’t be easy, either.</p>
<p>And I am friends with many teachers at my son’s schools (at which I have volunteered extensively). While they don’t agree with everything the union does, I’ve never heard any of them say anything to suggest they wish they weren’t in one. They know better.</p>
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<p>Not the only one in the country. Beverly Hills High School has an indoor pool that has a gym floor that can roll out over it, thus it is called the swim-gym. It’s actually pretty amazing and was made many decades ago. I believe there is a dance scene in It’s a Wonderful Life that demonstrates the pool and the floor.</p>
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<p>This is so true. My daughter showed me a trailer for a film that will be coming out called Race to Nowhere that I’m sure will generate much discussion on CC. It’s about overworked, driven kids who lose their childhood because they work so hard to get into college. After the trailer, my daughter (who teaches in an inner-city charter school) said something like, “Well, this may be a real problem, but it’s a middle-class problem. It’s not the kind of problem that those of us teaching in the inner-city have to deal with.” Waiting for Superman is about those kids, I think it will be interesting when the other film comes out and we see the other side of what is happening for the fortunate kids in our country.</p>
<p>I graduated from a public HS in … (dating myself here) 1971. We had an indoor pool as well. I was a timer for the swim team practices. That was fun :D</p>
<p>Nightchef, </p>
<p>I need you to expound upon your last post (168)</p>
<p>“It wouldn’t surprise me in the least. It has been less than a hundred years–a few generations–since such things were common here, and they are common in other parts of the world.”</p>
<p>You are honestly saying you believe sweat shops could be a factor in the US if unions cease to exist?</p>
<p>You do know we have federal laws regarding minimum wage, age, hours worked, sex, age, etc…right?</p>
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</p>
<p>Before I respond to that, tell me how you feel about our military invading Iraq, Afghanistan. How about Croatia, or putting our noses in Israel? You can’t say we should impact our capitalism into their country, if you don’t support us putting our noses in politically.</p>
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<p>We both agree on this stance.</p>
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<p>Yep, they do know better…these conversations are held at the workplace. When I talk about my friends that are teachers and their opinion, it is held in our homes over a glass of wine or at the community pool beacching. There are no ears.</p>
<p><psst. mimk6.=“” county.=“” not=“” country.=“” b&p=“” said=“” “only=”" one=“” in=“” the=“” county".=“”></psst.></p>
<p>[Central</a> Falls to fire every high school teacher | Education | projo.com | The Providence Journal](<a href=“The Providence Journal: Local News, Politics & Sports in Providence, RI”>The Providence Journal: Local News, Politics & Sports in Providence, RI)</p>
<p>A school superintendent in Rhode was instructed by the state commissioner of education, Deborah A. Gist, to choose one of the four state reform plans, which were modeled on federal recommendations and included the school’s closing. </p>
<p>Central Falls High is one of six of the state’s lowest-achieving — the only one not in Providence — and has a four-year graduation rate of 48 percent. It has 800 students. </p>
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</p>
<p>Her plan called for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring. The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.</p>
<p>The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000. </p>
<p>Reply from a teacher? "“It’s all about the politics,” she said, “about making Fran Gallo look good. The issue is having the right to negotiate. Once we allow the superintendent to get her foot in the door, where will it stop?”</p>
<p>The board voted 5 to 2 to accept a plan proposed by Schools Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire the approximately 100 faculty and staff members at the chronically underperforming Central Falls High School on the last day of this school year in June. </p>
<p>Secretary of Education Arne Duncan thought this was wonderful; he said the members of the school committee were “showing courage and doing the right thing for kids.” </p>
<p>President Obama thought it was wonderful that every educator at Central Falls High School was fired. At an appearance before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on March 1, the President applauded the idea of closing the school and getting rid of everyone in it because only 7% of the students are proficient in math, and the graduation rate is only 48%.</p>
<p>The Delegate Assembly of the New York City United Federation of Teachers (AFT) passed a resolution on March 24 which condemned Obama and Duncan for their “complete lack of understanding of education as displayed by their comments and position on the Central Falls firings” and declared that they were prepared to mobilize buses to go to Central Falls and support the teachers there. </p>
<p>According to its leaders, Teacher unions must of course defend their members’ pay, conditions and benefits and do so without apology. They need to fight for** real democratic control of schools by the teachers** and working class communities they serve.</p>
<p>The Teachers’ union has sued Central Falls school district in April.</p>
<p>I work in a school system, but I am not a teacher. The area I work in does not have any evaluation tools. Let me repeat that - there are no annual evaluations of employees. Or semi-annual. No formal reviews, ever. Why? Because it has never been negotiated with the union. So if we have an opening for a higher level position, and two people apply for it, picture the following (which has actually occurred):
Person A - when asked to do something, she responds, “Absolutely. Whatever you need me to do.” She makes positive suggestions. She goes above and beyond on a daily basis.
Person B - when asked to do something, she responds, “Why can’t so-and-so do that? She’s not busy.” Comes in and leaves mostly on time. Does exactly what she has to do and not one iota more.
Person B has 3 years seniority over Person A. Person B will get the job.</p>
<p>We are now trying to negotiate to get an evaluation measure in place, although the union is fighting it because it has the potential to be “unfair.”</p>
<p>The film showed a Simpsons clip from season 20 with these lines
Don’t know whether to laugh or cry.</p>
<p>*** I see that this thread has been merged with one xiggi started on the same topic last week. Why does it not surprise me that we both independently started threads about this film…</p>
<p>Slightly OT, but as it’s come up…the new school that includes the indoor pool is less than 10-15 min from a stunning aquatic facility at a local college. Local school swim teams have been using it since it opened less than 10 years ago. Again, the decision of the BOE to include such a luxury is mind boggleing!</p>
<p>There are many, many indoor pools at public schools around here, including my kids’ school.</p>
<p>In this city, the (nonunion) charter schools’ performance, on average, is just about equal to the average performance of the (unionized) regular public schools. A few of the charters do extraordinarily well, but most don’t. Ironically, the charters that do the best have by far the largest budgets per child. Without meaning to be, they are something of an argument for “throwing money at the problem”. And none of them has convincingly demonstrated that their model of a few experienced teachers supported by legions of Ivy League TFA corpsmembers who burn out to a cinder in their two years, to be replaced by fresh meat, can be expanded to the point where they would actually be educating a meaningful segment of the school population. There just aren’t that many TFA bodies available, and if the economy turns around there will be fewer of them still.</p>
<p>momofsongbird:
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<p>Personally, I find that argument a bit offensive. Assuming a 33-year teaching career, it would have taken somewhere between $10,000 and $12,000 per teacher per year to fully fund the retirement benefit you are describing. That was part of the compensation they agreed to! I have no trouble believing that good teachers are underpaid by at least that much compared to what they would make in the private sector. So what is “obscene” about having some compensation deferred as a retirement plan? </p>
<p>What’s obscene is the school district not having funded it, leaving today’s and tomorrow’s taxpayers to foot the bill for compensation that was agreed to and earned long ago. And what’s also obscene is the way the Tea Party et al. is making personal attacks like this on retired public employees. While I agree that it’s untenable that current taxpayers should have to make these payments – especially in states with declining populations and school sizes – and that there needs to be some adjustment, I have to acknowledge that it’s profoundly unfair to the men and women who earned their benefits long ago, and it’s not their fault that the states and school districts have been acting irresponsibly for decades.</p>
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The reverse is true here. Salaries for teachers in the private schools are far lower than those in the public schools.</p>
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<p>Boys in speedos jym? :)</p>