re: #356 Stanley Sea

I’ve said this before, I have a great friend who is a special ed teacher. I have never seen anyone so dedicated and hard working (she cannot miss a day easily, and works over the allotted frame of hours)

She’s not rich.

SFZ has attested to the work of teachers as well.

That the GOP picks on the teachers and the teacher’s union is the problem is so blindly shallow and ignorant.

They should pick on the cop and prison guard unions. Those folks make their huge living on overtime.

Gah!

Can we distinguish between the teachers and the union? It’s not as if the teachers have a choice to be in the union or not.

OK OK but they have to pay dues either way. Same difference.

The problem with teachers unions isn’t that they demand unreasonable wages. It’s that they demand unreasonable job security. Let’s say your students, year in, year out, make a lot less progress than they’ve made in past years, and somewhat less than they’ve tended to make in the years after you had them. Computer models take everything that’s known about their habits and capacities and project the progress they’d make, all else being equal. And when they’re with you, they don’t make half that.

All the other teachers have stats too, ranging from below average to above average to quite a bit above average in one or two cases. But you’re the outlier. And it’s not as if nobody has a clue why. You drag through the day. You’re defeated by discipline problems. You don’t keep up with the grading. Sometimes you’re confused about the subject matter.

Is your job safe? Should it be? At what point does there have to be a line? Teachers unions have objected fiercely to the kind of standards that would lead to dismissal of one half of one percent of teachers per year. As with disruptive students, really bad teachers can do harm all out of proportion to their numbers. Reasonable standards are within reach of most teachers, and it would be a relief to the mass of them to be shed of the worst of their own. It has to hurt to see a year of hard work go down the drain when your charges land with Teacher X.

Look at it from the other end. Let’s say you’re the outlier at the top end. You’ve got the teaching world by the tail. But—-where is the reward? Virtue can be its own reward. If that were not true, we wouldn’t see the heroes we do see. But for many, it’s not enough, not long term.

Michelle Rhee did her level best to reform the schools in DC. There were visible signs of progress. Her reward? To be fired for upsetting a cozy deal that was cozy but not for the students.