<p>Ok–have to give my 2 cents here as a person who has spent her career in public schools (except for the years I homeschooled my kids) and is now a grateful member of a teacher’s union. </p>
<p>I felt the same way about unions when I first started teaching. Then I began doing adjunct work in a non-unionized community college where we were all paid $1100/course, with no benefits. Adjunct faculty far outnumbered full-time faculty, for obvious reasons–and many were teaching 24 credit loads per semester on 3 different campuses each semester to make ends meet. Our pay literally doubled when we moved from a non-unionized to a unionized state. Mind you, we’re still not rich–we qualify for generous financial aid–but we can afford to raise a family and stay in our vocations.</p>
<p>So I now teach in a unionized state where all teachers are paid fairly for their work. Do we have some lousy teachers, just waiting out their retirement? You bet…but that’s the fault of the administration which generally does not want to put the time into observing, evaluating, warning, documenting…taking the necessary steps to get a teacher fired. I’ve seen it happen though, with motivated enough leaders. Bad teachers make lousy colleagues–we don’t want them there either. But please…unions are not the enemy…I’ve taught at plenty of non-unionized schools where bad teachers droned on for years. </p>
<p>(And most of the charter schools I’ve seen pride themselves on the fact that they don’t hire unionized faculty–haven’t seen Superman though.)</p>
<p>Why did I homeschool? It has nothing to do with teachers and everything to do with a factory-worker model of education that encourages mindless adherence to rules and mediocrity. It’s hard to fight that, no matter how idealistic and hard-working you are (and it’s a big reason why I moved from high school to community college teaching)</p>