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Government Workers Threaten Strikes, Demand More Pay
Public teachers striking? Someone has to say it: Who do these public servants, these government employees, think they are to make demands of the public and our elected representatives? The way politicians fawn over this set of government employees is topped only by British MPs prostrating themselves before the temple of the National Health Service.
Let’s be clear. Teachers are not nobler than nurses or nurses’ aides. Teachers do not matter more than plumbers or mechanics. Teachers matter less to our civilization then sewer workers and police. And educrats, hiding behind classroom teachers, are leaders in social decay and loss of real learning. While police have job protection similar to teachers, none of the other professions or trades cited do, and none of the others are able to demand wage increases without fear of job loss.
If government workers want new contracts, it is time to demand pay be tied to results — for the children!
Published in Politics
It was that way in the ’80’s, too. I remember reading a ranking of GRE/GMAT scores by major back then.
What do you think they are taught now ?
My first wife went back to teaching when she got laid off in a bank merger in the late 80s. California was trying to reduce class size. New teachers were required to take a test called “CBEST” which she said was 8th grade level math and English. She had a lifetime credential. There were lots of complaints about the test being “racist.”
She was horrified by the teachers she met went she went back. She had not taught since 1965 when our son was born. They ridiculed their students, had no interest in what they were doing and did not help each other. She complimented a second grade teacher on her students reading readiness (she was teaching third grade.) and the woman burst into tears. No one had ever complimented her on her teaching.
She quit after 6 months to go back to banking. She used to see the principal in the supermarket. He tried to talk her into coming back to teaching.
Wow, but yeah.
My nephew works in a school where most of the teachers and students are Hispanic. He’s even more Anglo than I am, and did not speak Spanish. The administrators and other teachers wanted to get rid of him, but then the test scores came back. His students were actually learning English and scoring much higher than others in the school, and they needed the standardized test scores. I don’t know if he’s still at the same school, but it was an interesting situation.
Sadly, academics make a Faustian bargain when they join the giant public education bureaucracy. They ally themselves with an institution that really doesn’t value education. It values public approval instead. Those teachers who want to challenge their students with high standards fight constant headwinds which originate from both parents (at least many of them) and administrators.
The anecdotes cited above are rarities. Administrators hide aggregate student test results on AP exams for teachers in their building and district. They do this to protect those AP teachers who lower their standards as a way to accommodate the large numbers of mediocre students who are encouraged to enroll in AP courses. Thus, the image of racial and social class equality in their programs is promoted.
The emphasis on graduation rates has the same pernicious effect on individual teachers.
In grades below the secondary education level, these same efforts to obscure the instructional success or failure of individual teachers happen. For one, it’s hard to measure, given the varying student populations in different teachers’ classrooms. Second, it would be a political nightmare for administrators if there were concrete indicators of which teachers were successfully educating their students and which were not.
So, as an educator, you play the game and hope you’re charming enough to be demanding and still get away with it.
And then there is the recent advance of the Left through the AP tests to enforce their ideology on any who aspire to university success. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/12/ap-history-repeats-itself.php
That the state will tolerate quite a lot of nonsense as well as poor outcomes for students.
Margaret Thatcher’s attitude was, if you don’t want to work for the government I’ll privatize you. She did.
Everything you say is true, but the public education system can’t be fixed by simple things like tying pay to performance or any other technical bureaucratic fix. The public education system as it exists today is destroying millions of children at a very high cost per student. The educational bureaucracy is worse then superfluous. New Zealand eliminated all of the educational bureaucracy and turned schools over to parents and teachers but allowed every parent to send their children to any school in the country. The money followed the children so schools had to compete for students. New Zealand education went from the bottom of the industrialised world to just below Finland and Singapore. While we’re too big to do such a thing and indeed we don’t need the Federal government involved at all, there are important lessons. Parents care more and know their children better than remote bureaucrats and teachers and parents know who the good teachers are.
Could do it per state, though.
Really over-the-top destruction costs more. Just ask Michael Bay.
That’s sort of what I had in mind, without simulation and special effects.
My son’s third grade teacher didn’t go to college. She went to normal school. She was a really good teacher, one of his best.
I would also point out that this falls on the parents. How well are parents doing at motivating or coercing their children to study hard and to do their homework? A few ethnic groups are particularly strong in this area, i.e. Jews and Asians. With other groups, the high number of single parent households does not help matters.
I have always been perplexed by big cities caving into teacher demands. I don’t see that happening in small or rural cities. My guess is that because the big cities are run almost exclusively be Democrats, they feel compelled to go along with whatever demands the teachers union makes. But why do they have to? Maybe I am missing something, but why can’t a big city just fire all the teachers who refuse to show up for work and hire a whole new set of teachers? Especially during the last eight years when so many people have been out of work, there should be thousands of people willing to replace them.
I once looked up average teacher salaries in different cities and found that all the highest salaries are in the big cities where the teachers often go on strike. It seems to me that the Republicans in smaller cities simply don’t put up with strikes.
I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating…
No less a Progressive than FDR opposed strikes by public employees…
” Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”
– Excerpt from a letter from FDR to Mr. Luther C. Steward, President, National Federation of Federal Employees. 1937
a) I think you have the causal relationship backwards. They are not civil servants because they are Democrats. They are Democrats because they are civil servants. If your livelihood depends on the power of government, are you going to vote for the party that promises to reduce the power of government?
b) Civil servants aren’t always Democrats. Lots of law enforcement, firefighting, and military officials are Republicans. By an amazing coincidence, many Republican politicians consistently campaign on more resources for law enforcement, firefighting, and the military.
I am sure it’s just an amazing coincidence that there’s a correlation between the rise in the number of government employees have been given the right to strike and the rise in the number of government employees who don’t perform functions that are absolutely vital to the interests and welfare of the people.
How is that different from the current system of teacher education? The teachers colleges do teach teachers to teach what the state wants to be taught, and what nonsense the state will not tolerate. The problem is that what the state wants and what conservatives want are very different things.
This comment is highly local, as you have to know Tucson well to understand neighborhood patterns.
I haven’t seen the map myself, but I would think that the Trump territory was north of Ina and the Hillary territory was south of Ina. Is this correct?
I also would think that it depends on which part of Ina you are referencing, and it might be an artifact of precinct or Congressional district lines. I would think that many areas just south of Ina (say around First and Oracle) are Republican, while the Democrats might dominate a bit further west. Also, the area south of Ina is probably combined with much poorer regions (like the Flowing Wells area) that I would expect to tilt heavily toward the Democrats.
You are certainly correct that overall, both Pima County as a whole and the Tucson metro area are blue. Trump won the state 49-45, while Hillary carried Pima County 54-40.
The more gov’t money available, the higher the tuition costs for colleges and universities become. (Money that’s used to hire more educrats and other non-essential school personnel.)
Vicious cycle.
Yup. His blog is here. http://lukeknipe.com/
That is a fact, though if the payout was only available to people who signed an X-year contract, we might get some of those higher caliber teachers we keep talking about.
Addendum: My sister-in-law is an AZ teacher. Apparently the 20% raise is over the course of three years, comes after many years of not getting an indexed-to-inflation raise, and is paid for in part by removing money from the school budgets.
None of this sounds like a deal-breaker to me, but I thought I should mention it in the interests of accuracy.
Yes, the governor and legislate offered 20% over three years, but that isn’t good enough for the #Red4Ed organizers. They still pushed walkouts. 20% over three years is 6.67% each year. What trade in the private sector is getting that?
The lack of inflation adjustment over many years affected many workers, who are not getting such large raises now. It does appear that the state legislature is trying to solve the problem of local district boards diverting money to administrative overhead instead of prioritizing classroom instruction.
I am not arguing a position, I am clarifying the facts with more specific information.
Thanks. I should have replied in that tone. The pay for by removing from school budgets move is an attempt to stop local districts taking lump sum budgets and allocating away from the classroom. Instructional funding within school budgets reportedly decreased over the past decade from 57% to 54%. So, it sounds plausible that there will be a viable deal done without tax increases.
I don’t have the graph handy, but school spending doesn’t at all correlate to grades/skill mastery. We have low-grade teachers with too many toys. We have low-grade students who know very well they’re being warehoused but have no particular belief that doing better or worse in school actually means anything. To a degree they are correct in that belief. There is a huge disconnect between education and actual productive work – this is not a plea for businesses to take over education (though it’s fun to mention it to educators and watch them recoil as a vampire from a cross).
The strong positive social construction of “teachers” becomes open to the kind of challenge I posed in the OP when a state leader of #RedForEd is a politically inept woke “Arizona elementary teacher.”
Wow. They really need to work on their poster children.
I noticed that he mentioned ‘eighth-grade women’. wth?