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All You Need to Know About Teachers’ Unions… — Rob Long
…is right here in this video, courtesy of Gateway Pundit, which is always excellent:
So, math is political. Which I suppose I wouldn’t mind if I really thought they were teaching math effectively. American high school students keep slipping down in international ranking.
I know I’m prone to noticing — some might say “inventing” — trendlines, but let me suggest one to you: the liberals have gone too far. With Obamacare, religious freedom issues, that sort of thing, they’ve overstepped. This screed from a teachers’ union boss is a perfect example.
That should be the message for November ’14: they’ve gone too far. They’re too radical. They’re out of the mainstream. (It works when they use that on us. Let’s turn it around.)
Published in General
Everything is political in our public schools. That’s why more conservatives should consider teaching. Today as a volunteer, I led an art lesson based on Jacob Lawrence’s work to my son’s 2nd grade class. My kids’ school has a rotational art teacher, so they only get art 5 times a year. Our PTA tries to compensate with a supplemental art program. We only do about 3 lessons a year, but it’s three more than they would’ve had. I talked to the kids about Lawrence’s Migration Series, a multi-paneled narrative about blacks who moved from the rural South to the industrialized North to work in factories. I told them that these people helped grow the American economy through manufacturing and improved their lives and the lives of their families in the process. I left out the narratives of victimization, oppression, and exploitation that usually are associated with his work. Having just finished Black History Month, I figured they got a big dose. Instead, I associated free market capitalism and hard work with a demographic whose political affiliations promote the opposite. Because I could. We aren’t helpless. We just have to be more subversive.
@ Karen: Wow!
what video?
I’d like the What Video comment since I don’t see it either, but that just takes me back to the top of the page.
Here’s the link.
Edit: She’s right, of course. The stories we use in math word problems, like anything else, reflect something about our worldview. That can be subconscious, or it can be purposeful.
Almost nothing is neutral.
I think you go to Gateway Pundit and scroll down to this story:
“Posted by Jim Hoft on Friday, March 21, 2014, 10:52 AM”
I thought the progressive “Jumped the Shark” when the interim White House Communications Director, Mrs Anita Dunn was caught stating to high school students that Chairman Mao was her favorite Philosopher.
Yep. No more likes for you :-D.
Thanks for the link, Leigh :-)
Indeed. The thing is, we lament over the decline but we don’t put our money where our mouth is. Like Karen, we need to roll up our sleeves and get involved.
I say we – because I am just as guilty as the other. Rob get’s it – he started this website for the right conversations to happen. What we as a group need is the enrollment of people who are right leaning to start working in schools, volunteering, etc. etc.
I am working on the “Julia Entrepreneurship Club for girls” to this end. I was a bit miffed (to put it mildly) when the Julia campaign came out. So, I I am going to help Julia not only get a job, but be a job creator.
That is where it’s at. BTW – if there are any schools wanting to participate, send me a PM.
I am a conservative and teach math to 6th graders in a public school. While I don’t think it’s appropriate to push my political views on my students, every now and then I attempt to make a point for the conservative cause. For example, I charge my students a “popcorn tax”. When they’ve earned a popcorn reward in my class, the privilege of using my microwave comes with a tax of one piece of popcorn for the teacher. I’ve already got quite a few thinking “tax” is a dirty word.
Karen Lewis , our big Emma Goldman . What a gift to people of Chicago ! That big shouldered city now produces community organizers instead of agricultural machinery.
Community organizer is the new euphemism for agent provocateur . The only reason Bill Ayers gets to live there is that his daddy was a very big wig in the biz community, anywhere else he would just be a former terrorist . His presence as a powerplayer in a town where gangleaders have been powerplayers since the 60s and the congressmen are former Black Panthers should be the indication of an evil recipe . A recipe that landed one of their own in the White House. Sorry to veer off the math problem,but Karen Lewis needs background to sufficiently frame her as a leader of teacher’s unions which provide a platform that completely discredits their organization by her presence.
As contrary and non-communitarian as this will sound. The public schools are irredeemably and irremediably bad. Local efforts here and there to improve them may help some students for a little while, but it only allows the school union employees to retrench and focus on more intensely propagandizing their charges to a Leftist worldview (or goofing off, or both).
The only real answer is separating public funding for education from public provision of education. Parents should receive a voucher for each school age child equal to the full amount that would be spent on that child’s education (which can run from $10,000 on up, not the cheese-paring $2500 vouchers currently issued when they’re issued at all). Homeschool families should be allowed to bank the vouchers against high school and college after deducting cost of materials, online courses, etc.
A child’s education and future should not be left to whether there are adequate parents at the school to volunteer, or the luck of the draw in a charter school lottery.
I’m a teacher. I’m a union rep for my building. I’m a conservative! I like to be there to learn for myself what is going on and to provide a voice for balance. Individual teachers, especially at the elementary level, tend to be more conservative than liberal because we spend so much time working with the consequences of liberal policies. I consider it my duty to be a voice of reason in my profession, both in the classroom and the union meetings. I’m sorry that so many teachers have given my profession such a bad name.
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Teacher’s unions have got to go!
Lots of time dealing with government regulations — federal, state, local.
Lots of time dealing with the consequences of family breakdown. Plenty of opportunities to see human nature as it really is, not as we wish it were. Children are inconveniently politically incorrect.
It’s a profession that tends to attract optimistic idealists, so on the one hand the tendency towards liberalism is understandable. But it is a profession that should make one conservative.
I saw a bumper sticker today that read:
I am a Democrat. I support teachers.
While supporting teachers is necessary, it would have been far more convincing if it said, “I support education.”
That and when California public educators were training their high school students to propagandize — I mean, talk to their parents about signing up for Obamacare. Fascists love to use the kids to advance their agenda.
You really need to raise the tax rate in your classroom. One piece? Take twenty-five percent and then see how they feel about taxes!
If it was truth in advertising it would read: “I am a Democrat, I support ignorance thru education.”
Taxes would have to be raised at least 100%–I’m kind of OCD when it comes to letting them touch my food (which they’d have to do for any lower tax increase).
&p>For some strange reason, I can’t delete my comment to include another poster’s quote – user error, I’m sure. See below.
Bless you — keep fighting the good faith on the home front. As a former elementary teacher, I understand just how difficult your job is, with or without the craziness of the teachers’ unions. Thank you!
If your beliefs cannot stand up to scrutiny, then you’ve either got to change your beliefs or impose them by other means. Shouting down the opposition and brainwashing children not yet capable of critical thought are very effective ways of passing lies off as truth.
OK, so the quote button isn’t quite working. In regard to the popcorn tax, that’s not really a good illustration of taxes. That’s an example of a free exchange of goods and services. You want a service, you have to pay something for it.
&em>Community schools are what we need! Charter schools are corporate greed!
This slogan has everything a community organizer could want:
1. It neatly sidesteps the issue in question (i.e., which type of school
does a better job of teaching children)
2. It casts the opposition as not just mistaken but evil
3. It uses transference (accusing the opposition of the greed of
which teachers unions’ are themselves guilty)
4. It rhymes
Here’s my response:
U.S. schools no longer teach, all they do today is preach.
Public schools are bad of course, but they survive through use of force.
Ew. Understood. First a lesson in personal hygiene, and then you take their popcorn!
The “Bob Peterson” mentioned in her speech is the founding editor of Rethinking Schools. If you really want to worry about the health of our education system, visit their website with the understanding that people have respect for Rethinking Schools.
If you’re the union rep, you are supporting an institution that uses your dues to pay for political lobbying and rent seeking. Even in a state like California, where you are required by law to be a member of the union if you want to teach, you are betraying the citizens you serve.
Unions were established to fight for workers against the “profit seeking” interests of management who might not “share” the fruits of the corporate profit with stakeholders who help produce that profit. They are a negotiation about how profits are divided.
Where is the “profit seeking” interest in public education? There is only the fruits of taxation. Unions take taxpayer money from educators to lobby to take more tax money in an endless cycle where the taxpayers are exploited by the “member” class. Being a member of a public union is the equivalent, in my mind, of being a member of “the party” in socialist regimes. You have special status, benefits, and guarantees that the rest of us don’t have. And in CA, you control the legislature.
The truly conservative, and radical, act would be to protest the unions in the first place.