Thank you, it has been 15 yrs since she passed this Saturday.
To her teaching was a calling and she would have never voted for a strike. I do not believe public employee unions should be allowed to strike. Her off time was spent on such things as disassembling our living room windows, stripping them down to the original one and reassembling them. She was raring to go by the time school resumed.
Union rules definitely impede removing incompetent teachers
as all union rules do. But it is a fact that they also protect to some degree teachers from being unjustly fired by principals with their own agenda or at the instigation of parents whose lifestyles are threatened by a teacher’s teaching or race. Some times these decisions are not that Black and White.
Schools are a somewhat unique institutions which people used to invest heavily in. They are almost sacred in some degree so they cannot be treated like a business. “Alma mater” and all.
Inner city schools need FAR more than what an eighth grade teacher can teach if you are interested in more than plant-like survival. There is human repair which needs to be accomplished as well, the result of generations of vicious bastards. I see no evidence that there are any institutions capable of doing this outside of religious ones. Certainly the teachers unions are not.
I would also like to send my condolences to you on the loss of your wife.
It’s never easy losing people you love.
I lost my father when I was 15, and mom a few years ago. It breaks off pieces of the soul.
I agree with you re: any government unions striking. It is part of the curse of government employment that it either protects bad employees or leaves good ones vulnerable to the wrong side of patronage systems in their various forms. A good reason to keep government as small as possible!
I remember back in the ‘70s when black-majority inner city school boards and parents started demanding that their teacher population reflect the increasingly black demographics of the student bodies. In many cases this led to much more qualified and literate teachers being let go or not hired for the sake of taking on too often lower-quality black teachers.
I can’t help but think of all of the millions of black students over the decades since who would have been better off with a higher quality education, even if it meant they encountered a caring white adult in their daily lives. And of course, the same demands trickled up to the principal and superintendent levels as well. (This is of course not to say that there weren’t and aren’t some very good and qualified black teachers in the system.)
And I agree with you that the ‘business model’ of test score-based merit pay, etc., is not the answer to our failing school systems. IMO a lot of the problem is simply caused by having adopted the ‘whole language’ or now ‘blended’ teaching of reading as well as simply atrocious processes for math. Less teacher ed and more straightforward teaching of content would do our educational systems a world of good.