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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (116581)	7/26/2009 11:37:18 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 542233

Steve, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. While I don't agree with Vintner, he certainly makes some good points, and the union is not all negative. It does some very positive things for teachers. I'll just give you one example. Because administrators get busy, they often try to sneak extra administrative tasks on to teachers. I remember back in 2002 I was asked to write my own review! I did it, but I could have complained to the union. I don't like to complain, so I didn't- but that was a clearly an inappropriate thing to ask me to do, and it took quite a while to write it, because those things are 6 pages at our school- and they are NOT fill in the blank. Now magnify that little request times 100 (and I'm probably underestimating the potential creep of tasks)- and pretty soon teachers are so busy pushing paper all the time they can't teach. Unions help teachers delineate their agreed upon tasks so they can focus on them, and focus on teaching- which is what we should be doing. I found the union useful when my classroom STANK of chemicals and my admin were just going to let me teach in it. I got a headache from being there for 5 minutes- and my admin was busy and I could tell they weren't going to do anything before school started, and I was worried about my students. I'm older, but my students are just beginning their lives, so I really don't want them exposed to noxious chemicals. I told my union I had a health and safety problem. My union got someone out immediately to test the air, and the classroom was blown out, and dried (turns out there was some problem with the new carpet glue). My union solved that within 48 hours.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (116581)	7/26/2009 11:54:25 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water	Respond to of 542233

V: I'm all for teachers unions--its the only thing that gives teachers any respect any more SL: In Washington State leaders are trying to make some real progressive changes - including paying teachers on how well they do - and are stopped at every turn by the union. My rural town has one school district and that district, like all of them in this economic downturn, faces real hardships. One way to make ends meet was to give all employees a day off without pay. All except teachers - they wouldn't go along. That's bull! Unions don't give teachers respect - they turn people against teachers and that is as wrong as it gets. Unions main achievment is to protect awful teachers. V: How is Washington state proposing to evaluate teachers "on how well" they do? By standardized test scores? The counter argument to the inflexibility charge thrown at teachers' unions is that without the unions teacher(s) are "expected" to do all sorts of things that falls outside the scope of their teaching duties (monitor lunch rooms, take tickets at ball games, stay after school and help with this or that) and if they don't they are labeled as "uncooperative" and fired. So how would you like to have a job description that says you are a manager and then one day your boss tells you things are tight so you are going to have to clean the floor before you go home at night? V: What happens if you grade teachers on class performance, at least in underperforming schools, is that teachers will leave those schools as soon as they can and those schools will have a constant churn of staff. SL: Oh come on. The teachers would be compared in their own school - not in some school across the state that has an entire different make-up of kids. The problem with underperfomring schools is that they get bad teachers that just stay there. Give the teachers an incentive to turn those schools around. V: If one uses standardized testing as the point of comparison then one is comparing the teachers district wide (this assumes your district has more than one school), and if you're school is underperfomring all the teachers in the school are seen as such, and the teachers leave as soon as they can as they do not want that label attached to them. SL "In other words just because its free money doesn't mean this is a good idea." You sound like Sanford. Great, give your money back and we'll take it in Washington State. V: IMHO, the "no child left behind" idea has been a terrible failure. It made local schools teach to the test and is forcing kids thru summer school because they now have to pass geometry instead of basic math and many of the them do not have the ability to do this. And you have bureaucrats who have no idea of the reality of schools trying to run the show--and this "performance data" is probably one more example of this--although I don't know all the details of this program.