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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.'"
I get evaluated at my job, should i be outraged? Maybe this will motivate them to actually try harder to be better teachers instead of just griping about a paycheck. There are worse jobs out there with even worse pay, i say start firing teachers that rank the worst.
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
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. If this article leads parents to question schools about why they are employing sub-standard teachers, then it can only be a good thing, that should be extended everywhere.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
While I think that teacher's unions are "part" of the problem, I'm convinced that the bigger problem is that there is a lack of discipline and kids aren't afraid of anything that a teacher or principal can currently do to them. "Time out" just doesn't motivate a teenager to change their behavior. Parents just are not supporting teachers in this area. We have a complete generation of children that "can do no wrong" in the eyes of their parents. Until parents quit thinking their child is a complete "angel" and always blindly takes their side against teachers and administrators we will continue down this path. How things have changed in the last 30 years.
No I will admit that teachers and administrators could be wrong, but parents have got to go into this with the assumption that the child is probably wrong until proven otherwise. Assuming that the children are always right hasn't and won't work. They are children after all. While there may be times when the child is right, it is extremely important that they learn to work within the power structure that exists. The real world just isn't going to change to accommodate them even if they are right, they must find a way to adapt or we are setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment. The workplace is just not going to put up with the lack of discipline that teachers are forced to endure today and it is the children that are in for a rude awakening.
In return for this support, parents should expect teachers to be accountable. Asking teachers to be accountable for their student's proficiency without discipline or any ability to modify the student's behavior can't work.
Should it be illegal for cartels to set commodity prices?
That is illegal; there's a reason OPEC meetings aren't held in New York, and that LCD makers were fined for collusion (like here; that's from 2008, or here, for the new suit by the state of New York)
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
I'm not aware of any "free market purists" who think cartels are a good thing. After all, teachers aren't barely-literate manual laborers; they have college degrees - shouldn't they be able to negotiate a salary on their own? 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. Instead, in most public systems, pay is determined by seniority and box-checking. (Got a master's degree? Check. Gone to summer course X? Check. Collect for each box checked.)
Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?
There is no law that says a school system must sign a contract with the teachers' unions. There is no law that says they must agree to contracts that say shitty teachers can't be fired, just as there's no law that says CEO's can't negotiate multi-million dollar golden parachutes so when they destroy a company they get a fat benefits package (like Carly Fiorina and her successor). There was also no law that said big car companies had to give their unions ridiculous pensions and post-retirement health care packages. They did so because they didn't want to agree to the modest raise that was being requested back in the '70s. The CEOs thought they were being clever, thinking that their retirees would continue to die at age 68 and they'd pull a fast one, but when people started living a decade longer, they were fucked and cried "the unions made us do it!" And the Chamber of Commerce and the Club for Growth and other anti-middle class organizations spent millions of dollars spreading FUD about unions so now knuckleheads spout crap like "Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system" when they ought to goddamn-well know better.
You want to improve schools? Do what I did and run for the school board. I ran as a parent when my daughter was in school, and I ran as a citizen-at-large after she graduated. I've been on and off the school board for 16 years and even in a city where there's a very powerful teachers' union, like Chicago, you'd be surprised at what can be done both to get rid of bad teachers and to improve kids' educations. The problem is that management is unwilling to assert itself, not that teachers have done what anybody could do, which is negotiate the most favorable pay package they could. It's not their fault that they're negotiating with cowards and imbeciles who themselves are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars (and they are NOT in the union). The head of a school system in a medium to large size Chicago suburb is making several timesthat school district is performing below average. Who's fault is that?
The second biggest problem with the US educational system is that people think they should just send their kids to school and hope for the best. The third biggest problem is that public schools are forced to serve every single child, regardless of disability or behavioral problem, which is something so-called "private" schools don't have to deal with. One severely handicapped student can take up as much teacher time and school resources as two classrooms full of normally-abled students.
And that list of problems doesn't even include the fact that we've got growing numbers of people who are requiring public schools to teach nonsense, like is being done in South Carolina and Texas. This crap about "unions are the problem" is just a denial of the history of the US, which if you're from Texas, is to be expected because that's what the textbooks do now.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The teacher's union is the largest problem with education in this country. It is virtually impossible to fire a bad educator. Almost all school jobs are union, so it's actually almost impossible to fire a bad systems administrator. I know of at least one whose job I would have as I have on two occasions been hired as a contractor to do things he should have known how to do, in fact things covered by his job description.
Unions are leeches sucking the lifeblood out of this nation. Before the invention of labor laws, they were a necessary evil. Now they are an unnecessary evil often run by the mafia or other organized criminal organizations (yes, even today) and they exist to secure special rights for some individuals when what is truly needed is labor laws which cover all employees.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You do realize that Obama made the bond holders and other high priority creditors (according to current bankruptcy law) accept less money than a bankruptcy court would have awarded them, while the unions got basically all that they were "owed" (when in bankruptcy court they would have gotten next to nothing)? That Obama threatened said bond holders with IRS audits and investigations by other branches of government if they failed to agree? Such audits and investigations would have been very expensive for the bond holders even if they had not broken any laws or regulations. Bush made some government loans to GM and Chrysler, but the major bailout was by Obama. Bush wanted to use TARP funds, but Congress would not change the wording to allow that. Obama used those funds anyway.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison