Time magazine is about to use its cover to blame teachers for the problems in America’s schools. On Monday, Nov. 3, this cover will be in every supermarket checkout line and newsstand across the country—and it’s already online.
While I have not yet read this issue of Time, I suspect I will side with the magazine. The AFT and the NEA have opposed all class reforms except smaller class sizes. Charter schools, Teachers for America, restrictions on tenure, Common Core .. opposition to all these all have a common theme .. protecting union jobs. The unions even define smaller class size in terms of union teachers rather than other resources such as Teach for America as well as artists, business students, retired military, science and engineering graduate students and others who could use a few dollars and certainly would lower the ratio of students to mentors.
The AFT/NEA are built on the model of the industrial shop. The assembly line is a bad model for a classroom. In the classical industrial shop, each worker has a well-defined work day, a well-defined path to promotion, and a job that that is easily and objectively evaluated.
None of this describes a classroom.
Union rules designed to protect jobs of teachers work against the interests of schools where teachers’ efforts should be able to earn them more money and classroom content should be decided by parents and experts rather than people treated as workers on an assembly line.
Tragically, this need to protect union jobs, this “worker” attitude, combined with the liberal flight to private schools and the Republican effort to impoverish pubic schools, has meant a race to the bottom. Only the lowest rung of today’s higher education students even seek teacher jobs.
Its not the teachers, as a whole. Its the school boards and the people who elect them. Control of schools belong to the State and the States people. Federal government has no say.
I go further. I think the schools should be controlled as much as possible by the parents and by the teachers the parent choose as a faculty for the school. That is why I am for charter schools. The most important asset in any school is the kids! . Why should anyone .. the school board or the fed tell the parents what sort f school to have? BUT .. we do live in a real world. If we do not have standards, American kids will not be competitive with kids form Hungary, India, Israel or China. So, I favor BOTH .. national standards and charter schools.