Disagree!
The unions are the biggest defenders of maintaining the “status quo” over who can teach & who can’t. They are part of maintaining the “fiction” of the need for “education degree” as the entrance requirement for teaching. They defend and use college departments of education to give “pseudo-intellectual” justification for maintaining an education career as a medieval-style guild! Most “college of education” teaching theories are the modern equivalent of using the “bumps on one’s head” to determine IQ, personality and destiny. Mankind has been “teaching” since the beginning, its not a “deep dark secret”! The latest whiz-bang idea, electronic toy & “psycho-babble” excuse for bad behavior doesn’t improve things.
Pre-Nixon days NEA/AFT (Unions) campaigned relentlessly for a federal department of education. Knowing full well that this would be their siphon into a continuous money flow bypassing all those annoying things like parents, school boards **, state legislatures, etc.
School boards ** - Later the unions captured them by making sure that their well-funded “candidates” ran.
Always remember the famous 1970s-1980s quote from the AFT Prez head - paraphrasing “If students paid union dues we would be worried about students”!
> The unions are the biggest defenders of maintaining the “status quo” over who can teach & who can’t. <
That might be true at the national level. I have no idea what goes on there. My point is that teachers - and their unions - have no input on what is actually taught in the schools. That is decided by state functionaries and by local school board members.
Might some of those folks be listening to some union guy? I guess. But in my long working career I’ve never heard a single union leader say “We’ve got to quit teaching X and starting teaching Y.”
I agree with you that much of what is being taught in public schools is garbage. And I agree with you that things must change. But the culprits are not the teachers, or their unions. The culprits are higher up on the food chain.
Side story: Maybe 20 years ago our district decided to make American History an optional course. Instead of taking that once-required course, you could take African History or Asian History instead. Imagine that. An American student need not learn his own history!
The history teachers were outraged by this. But nobody listened to them. The union stayed neutral, as this was a management prerogative. So who should get the blame for this stupid decision? Not the teachers. Not the union. I’d say it’s 100% on the school board.