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Union Boycotts LA Times Over Teacher Evaluation Disclosure
Atypical Geek writes "According to Newsweek, the local teachers union is infuriated over the disclosure of teacher performance metrics. Quoting: 'Do parents have the right to know which of their kids' teachers are the most and least effective? That's the controversy roaring in California this week with the publication of an investigative series by the Los Angeles Times's Jason Song and Jason Felch, who used seven years of math and English test data to publicly identify the best and the worst third- to fifth-grade teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The newspaper's announcement of its plans to release data later this month on all 6,000 of the city's elementary-school teachers has prompted the local teachers' union to rally members to organize a boycott of the newspaper.' According to the linked Times article, United Teachers Los Angeles president A.J. Duffy said the database was 'an irresponsible, offensive intrusion into your professional life that will do nothing to improve student learning.'"
The fifth-graders at Broadous Elementary School come from the same world the poorest corner of the San Fernando Valley, a Pacoima neighborhood framed by two freeways where some have lost friends to the stray bullets of rival gangs.
...
Yet year after year, one fifth-grade class learns far more than the other down the hall.
Palm trees and 8
There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.
Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system. They are more concerned with teachers' benefits than they are about students. Of course, that is their job, but they give campaign contributions and students don't, they've become a bit too good at it.
I love it when teachers bitch about pay (although, sometimes warranted) and we get the following conversation:
"Haven't teachers always been underpaid?"
"Yes, and we need to fix that once and for all."
"Then why did you take the job?"
"Because I love it!"
"!??!!!?!!?"
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It would be nice to hope that this was the first step in recognising that (indirectly) real people pay for and therefore employ teachers. These real people would like to think the primary role of teachers is to impart knowledge, skills and abilities to the children in their charge.
I'm a prof in a school of ed, but my background is in psych, not ed. I've noticed that many teachers (and those teachers who go on to become profs of education) do not feel that imparting "knowledge, skills and abilities" is their major goal. Rather, as I see it, they envision teachers as replacing the home, family, and parents as the conduit of social morals.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
It's only "gunpoint" when people are prevented from negotiating other than as a group. Which is in fact the case with teacher's unions (and most surviving unions), but the problem isn't with group negotiation; the problem is with the force required to sustain it.
Just remember, it was management's idea to give those ridiculous retirement benefits, not the unions. The union requested a modest pay raise, and management thought they'd get away cheap by giving retirement bennies instead, thinking workers would only live to 68. In hindsight, the pay raise would have been much cheaper.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher.
I think you are badly and dangerously wrong. Correct facts are a prerequisite for a robust debate, and your facts are wrong.
According to a recent study, the true economic value of an outstanding kindergarten teacher is somewhere around $320,000 per year. As in, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars. A high school teacher is not worth anywhere near as much. That's because, by the time students get into high school, they are too old for a teacher to change them very much. In order to make a significant difference in a student's life outcome, you have to get to them while they're young.
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
Being from Canada, I always found the SATs to be an odd thing. You go through 12 years of schooling, getting graded the whole way along, and then the only thing that counts for getting into university is a test that takes a few hours. Seems like a bad system. It's prime target for cheating, first of all. A bad student could hire someone to take the test for them. I'm sure they check IDs and stuff, but I wouldn't go so far to say it hasn't been done, or isn't done on a regular basis. In Canada, they look at your marks from high school. There's a "university application centre" that handles the applications, and they know how different schools vary from other schools, and take that into account as well when processing the applications. It's a much better system. You get into university, not just based on a single test, but on your overall performance during high school.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Since Unions are such a big problem, I assume that than non-union Mississippi has better schools than unionized Massachusetts.
No, they didn't get pay raises. They got the bennies in place of the pay raises.
Sorry, the best I can do is this: When I was a kid, my grandfather, who lived in the same big house with my dad and mom and sister and grandma, worked at a GM supplier on the South Side that worked under the same contract that GM had in Detroit. I remember hearing about those negotiations every single night at the dinner table.
I come from a union family. Three generations before me, from railroad-workers unions to firefighters and policeman's union to Teamsters.
If it hadn't been for those unions, I would not have grown up in a middle-class family, and I'm betting neither would you, because those gains made by organized labor did things like create the 5-day workweek, and paid vacations, and sick leave. If it wasn't for those unions, and their influence on the political system, I would never have gone to university or grad school. If it wasn't for those unions, there would be no middle-class in the US. Just an ownership class, a merchant class and a bunch of workers who lived paycheck to paycheck and owned nothing. Just look at the decades before the organized labor movement to see what I'm talking about. Women dying in shirt factories, kids working in meat packing plants instead of going to school, company stores. Starting with the Reagan administration, we've been heading back in that direction, and combined with his (and his three successors) all rewarding companies that shipped jobs overseas, we will never again have a strong manufacturing sector in the US. That's gone for good, finished. US wages are headed for China levels.
And that's going to apply to tech workers, too. Already, there are places in the US where it's cheaper to have a call center than India, because of declining pay levels. Tech workers are working longer hours, having fewer benefits, and in more and more cases they're just contract workers so they get no benefits at all, not even vacation.
Don't believe that because you're a high-flying tech worker that you're immune from the decline of the middle class. During the period from 2000-2008, your real income went down by an average of $2000. If you're still middle-class, it's largely thanks to your credit card and huge mortgage, and even those are going to be going away. The US is down to about #11 among other countries in quality of life and dropping fast. And no, it's not due to the past 19 months.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You honestly believe it was unions that sent the manufacturing jobs overseas? Do you realize that those jobs moving overseas had everything to do with "free trade" policies begun under Nixon, expanded by Reagan and then put into overdrive by Clinton. It had nothing to do with unions, because no matter how much less American workers took, they'd never take the kind of wages that are paid in the developing world.
"Globalism" and "Free Trade" are the agenda of the corporatocracy that killed Detroit, and Pittsburgh. South Korea drives the cost of American manufactured goods through the roof, but we've got to let Hyundais and Kias in for nothing. This has never been about getting elected. It's been about our politicians doing what they're paid by corporations to do. And the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court has just taken the last gate off the hinges. Now it's a cakewalk for corporate power, driving America into the Third World.
It's so short-sighted to think it's labor's fault. You've got to think a little deeper than the Rush Limbaugh party line.
Did you know that a starting UAW autoworker today is making the exact same wage as a starting US auto worker in the 1970's? And by the way, back then the car companies were profitable and a new car didn't cost the equivalent of an average family's income.
If America has any hope, you've got to stop being so easily fooled by advertising and the corporate media. After half a century, they know exactly how to play you and the vast American "middle" is singing right along, unfortunately. If that keeps up, you might as well accept that the America you grew up is gone forever and our quality of life is heading straight into the toilet.
You are welcome on my lawn.