WatchWow, I just saw "Waiting For Superman" on DVD.
http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/page/production-about-production
The main point I got from the movie is that the majority of American public schools suck mainly because teachers' unions suck. Teachers' unions demand tenure for pretty much every teacher that can breathe, and are implacably opposed to differentiating teacher quality. This imposes two enormous harms on the public:
1. Bad teachers are not allowed to be fired for being bad teachers, ever.
2. Good teachers are not allowed to be paid better for good teaching, ever.
I kind of doubted the huge clout that the movie claimed the teachers' unions have in federal politics until I checked it out:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php
Look at the #5 and #10 top bribers of Congress. It's true. Combined, those two teachers' unions donate far more than any other group bribing Congress, far more than the NAR.
Teachers are good, but in America the teachers' unions are pure evil and deserve no support whatsoever.
Yes, I see that the teachers' unions mostly donate to Democratic candidates. The Democrats suck for taking their money.
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Madison, WI
Goes both ways. I WAS in a professional union, my brother was not, but he works in an industry that has fear of unions. In fear of being unionized his company had moved his salary up 15k in the four years my salary has been frozen. He gets bonuses, gifts, all kinds of neat little kickbacks you'll never find in a union shop. BUT, they work him hard.
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Ruki says
It's because the unions support Democrat political candidate with lavish campaign fund contributions.
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If you really want to fix public education, stop tenuring parents.
The qualifications are absurdly low. Ego, excess alcohol, incompetent condom use -- they should be barriers to the gig. Instead, they are often the base criteria.
Don't feed the kids properly? Burn them with cigarettes? Beat them as if you're in a bar fight? You can do all three and not permanently lose this job. And if you spoil them rotten, no one will ever interfere. You'll be the parent who gets an untenured, demanding teacher fired for not giving your pampered brat an easy A.
Reform unions. Don't eliminate them. Teachers are already at the mercy of incompetent parents. Principals with no backbone will kowtow to the parents and destroy good teachers.
I'm sad to see Patrick falling for this simplistic view of public education.
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Oh no. I just read the Patrick comment about parents' voting on teacher pay.
Dumbest thing I have ever read here. Parents are the biggest problem with schools. They are not, and never will be, the solution.
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Bronx, NY
Patrick I know some NYC teachers. I attended Bronx high school of science with one who left to become an ironworker. He was denied tenure and he was a good teacher. Principles are now denying tenure purely because it's the flavor of the week. Good teachers are being denied because they need the stats. The entire system is incredibly broken. And it is not the unions who are at fault.
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It's pretty disappointing to see the comments on this thread, starting with Patrick's. I'm usually a big fan.
Public education and its success/failure is much more complicated than just blaming/praising unions. It starts with the school board.
I have served the last 6 years on the local school board. I am not an educator; hardly. I'm a technology entrepreneur in the Bay Area with an MBA who previously spent time in corporate America.
Yes, there are things that suck about teachers' unions. The fact that it is difficult to fire teachers is hard to understand. Also, unions tend to eat their young. We offered our union the choice of furlough days or larger class sizes during the budget shortfalls. They chose larger class sizes, even though they knew it would hurt kids and we would have to fire the younger, untenured teachers, all to protect their STRS retirement packages. We dug our heels in and forced them to take furlough days.
The problem though with a movie like "Waiting for Superman" is it examines unions under a microscope, but doesn't even mention the ineptitude of many school boards and administrators. In my opinion, a good/bad school board and the administrators they hire can make/break a school district.
Many school boards have retired teachers, or worse, PTA moms-types who have never managed anyone, don't have P and L experience, are temperamental (or worse, lunatics), and have poor judgment. They hire incompetent Superintendents that are just wasting time, trying to spike their salaries for retirement benefits, and are wasting taxpayer dollars. I've even heard about school board members that burst into church songs in the middle of school board meetings and the superintendent joins them in chorus.
School boards wield enormous power. They control budgets that can be hundred of millions, if not a billion, dollars. They hire/fire the people to carry out their vision. They either back, or stab in the back, any administrator that is willing to go to the mat to fire incompetent teachers. (And yes...you can fire teachers. We just fired one this week.)
School districts have to abide by the terms of their contracts with unions, but many administrators don't evaluate their teachers and principals every year, and don't keep up with the paperwork.
This leads to the problems you see in the movie.
Unions can have good or bad leadership. The best run airline is Southwest. They have unions and happy employees. Why are they good? Their management, which is smart, does smart things like hedging fuel prices and standardizing airplanes to save money on maintenance.
There are good and bad school districts. All have unions. The best school districts have excellent management and school boards. The bad ones have poor management and school boards. Nearly without exception. Want to know why many countries do better than us? They dont have local school boards, but well paid, competent administrators, that make decisions.
I challenge all of you to look deeper. Yes, unions are an obstacle, but managerial incompetence, in my experience, is a much bigger problem.
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Ruki says
So, basically every private school, which doesn't have unions, is better than every public school, which does have unions? Seriously? How much do you really understand about education beyond the usual talking points on unions?
I can point to about 6 public high schools in my area alone that run circles around the private schools in the area.
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Patrick says
What do you think the role of a labor union should be? Traditionally, its job has been to be an advocate for its members, to protect their rights, and to fight for the best working conditions possible. So do you think unions should take on a different role now, instead becoming the arbiter of who is or isn't good enough to deserve his/her job?
I hear this meme all the time now that "bad" teachers should be fired (or paid less) and that "good" teachers should be paid more. I'm curious what your criteria are for deciding who is a "good" teacher and who is a "bad" teacher, and who gets to make this judgment.
The only criteria I have heard mentioned is test scores. The obvious problem with this, and I have heard many good teachers complain about it, is that students are simply being drilled on the test material, and aren't really getting an education. They are just being trained to provide the correct response in a very limited situation, like monkeys at a circus. Do we really want to raise a generation of people who are only adept at regurgitating a few specific facts, but have no independent thinking/reasoning skills?
Perhaps even worse is that such a system is patently unfair to teachers. I did some teaching when I was younger, and WITHOUT FAIL, children in higher socio-economic areas do better academically than children in lower socio-economic areas. You tend to do poorly on tests when you didn't eat breakfast because your mom was out buying crack. Hiring/firing teachers by test scores alone amounts to punishing those who work in inner-city schools and rewarding those who work in affluent suburbs. Yes, we all saw "Stand and Deliver", but the fact is that judging a teacher in the ghetto against a teacher in the rich neighborhood with the same test scores is like testing 2 people's driving skills by racing a Hyundai against a Lamborghini.
So yes, it's very easy to criticize teachers and the teacher's union, and everybody seems to be doing it these days, but I want to know what YOUR plan is. Who decides who gets fired? Who decides how much money they make? What is it based on? How would you keep politics out of the decision process? Should we do away with tenure? What happens when the school principal makes a pass at the attractive English teacher, is spurned, and then fires her? No tenure = you can fire anyone whenever you feel like it, whether you have a good reason or not. THAT'S WHY TENURE EXISTS. Right now, with all the teacher bashing that's going on, I shudder to think what would happen to teachers if they didn't have a union to protect their jobs.
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Ruki says
Correlation does not equal causation.
Private schools usually have fresher paint on the walls than public schools. Therefore, paint causes academic excellence?
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Buffalo, NY
Molly K says
Hey, do you know how much time, effort, and money was spent by neoliberal think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Cato Institute, to come up with and disseminate this anti-teacher, anti-union view of public education? It was anything but simple.
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futuresmc says
True, so simple isn't the right word. But it is true that usually Patrick isn't the kind of simpleton that falls for propaganda so easily, without doing any homework what so ever. At least I don't think so.
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In the future that many republicans want, government funded education will be history. One of the first steps is changing the system so that working for a private school is as good or better deal for teachers than working for a public school. If being a public school teacher is way harder, and yet pays less, with no job security, public education will be easy to kill.
Destroying teachers unions is the key step to destroying public education as we know it.
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marcus says
As it stands now, being a public school teacher is way harder than teaching in a private school, but it usually pays better, and there is some job security, but not nearly what people think.
The system is changing in many places, but not in an entirely good way to where teachers are evaluated more on test score improvement than ever before. Teachers aren't trusted as they once were.
(this next quote is from way earlier in thread)
marcus says
Read Diane Ravitch if you want a balanced view. She worked for GWB and was at one time an advocate for the charterization of schools. But she's very smart and eventually turned 180 degrees.
THat quote is from the above link, an artivcle Patrick should read if he's open to criticism of "waiting for superman."
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Does anyone have any idea how many REALLY good public schools there are ?
How can perception of public education in general be based on the worst performing inner city schools which are an extremely small fraction of all public schools?
Schools and teachers are by and large all always trying to do better, regardless of pressure from politicians and right wing think tanks.
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woppa says
I opened another browser to see what he said, and my last post was in part a response, but I have him on ignore. He's a troll and takes pride in being a troll.
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Ruki says
Then by all means share your methodology with us. I assumed you were talking about the fact that public school teachers are represented by unions, while private school teachers are not. But you seem to be saying you have done some sort of large scale controlled study of union vs. non-union teachers within the public school system. I'm not sure how that's possible, but I'm sure you will enlighten us, what with your vast knowledge of logic skills.
Oh, and Simpson's cartoons don't constitute evidence.
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Ruki says
O.K., I'm beginning to see your problem. Maybe you need to be quiet now and let the grown ups talk, m'kay?
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Corning, NY
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One solution would be to eliminate "compulsory" public education.
No, I'm not talking about eliminating public education.
Public education should be *available* to those who want to learn, but not *mandatory*.
There are too many low-lifes who don't value education. They just make it miserable for the people who DO value education.
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marcus says
Pretty much but I think there has to be some said about the differences in private. If a school is religious it kinda has no real standards. I've talked to some administrators and because it is religious they don't ask for teachers licenses or to have their students pass state tests! Um...if someone wants to be religious that's fine but why the heck do religious schools still exist? I'm sure they can teach someone to be a better Christian, Jew, Moslem etc but that doesn't really translate into anything else
Private school certainly have the luxury of not admitting students either by standards or by charging fees but there's some holes. Some schools to woo teachers offer free tuition to students of teachers. As such there is no incentive for them to perform as they might be given this free to them and they would see it as such. So if you are a teacher and see half the classroom filled with these students it might as well be a public school then.I don't see any real correlation between higher spending on students and grades, I'm sure in some cases it can be needed for capital projects and maintenance..I mean if there's holes in the roof and it is leaking that is one thing. But giving ipads and laptops might not totally solve matters either.
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Dublin, CA
The problem is that there are many students there who simply don't want to learn. Also, they come from backgrounds where education was never emphasized sufficiently. Blaming teachers uniions for this is disingenuous and straight up 1984 doublespeak when the true motivation of the "critics" is simply to break the unions because it goes with their political dogma. In regards to these "students", the issue is that you can bring horse to water, but you can't make it drink. This problem can only be solved by the households of these students adoptiing a different value system, but this is a difficult cancer to eradicate. In fact, in best case scenario, we are looking at a process which can at best be accomplished in 4 generations, at best!
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dublin hillz says
dublin hillz says
Exactly.
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Ruki says
Oh, I see. You want to be able to make ridiculous claims like "Schools without the damn unions do better", but you don't want to have to back up your claims with any sort of evidence. Sorry I asked you to "prove that the sky is blue" - LOL. I should have realized it was beyond your abilities, since you obviously get all your news from "The Simpsons". Apparently you don't realize it's a fictional cartoon that frequently uses exaggeration and sarcasm for humor.
Maybe you need to find some sort of hard core right wing forum where nobody will question your angry rants. I'm sure there's got to be plenty of those around.
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dublin hillz says
I see many instances of it happening in less than two generations.But I agree with most of what you're saying here.
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Homeboy says
In all due respect to what manner and what extent can it be argued that a union would help the students or the teachers?
Let's be honest here if you wanted to unionize a place and help employees by all means look at a walmart or mcdonalds.
If a place has good pay and bennies then there's no reason for a union to take it over. However, would a union really make thing that good for itself? If you operate a closed shop that makes it a monopoly and encourages private and charter schools. If you have a open shop then what teacher would join the union if they don't have to?
Unions generally work when there is little competition (i.e. no private/charter schools) and no other labor solution (unions don't compete with each other creating no bidding processes for contracts), that's the real issue with them today.
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mdovell says
Sorry, but this is completely non-responsive to what I wrote. I asked Ruki to back up his statement that "schools without the damn unions do better". A very simple request, actually. If you make a claim, you ought to have some sort of reason for believing it is true, that can be demonstrated to others. Your response is just gibberish.
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Patrick, CA voters will have a chance to go after "what feeds the beast" in the Nov. election by voting for Prop 32. Former Democratic CA senate majority leader Gloria Romero is leading the charge for Democrats for Education Reform.
"If we don't deal with how the beast is fed, and what maintains that, and what gives it status and opportunity to run roughshod over the educational lives and futures of six million kids in California, then shame on us," she says. "It's do or die. And I've talked to a lot of Democrats," many of whom have been supportive in private. But "they are just afraid to come out" publicly for it.
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This is not what it seems. She says, yes the union can still deduct fees for non political activity. But what she doesn't explain is that without any ability to lobby the government, in time the teachers unions will be completely destroyed as will public education. This is the real goal of the Koch brothers and others.
Sad that the general public may be unable to think this through, and what the consequences would be.
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Pleasanton, CA
Gee, does that mean that teachers can't bribe, lobby, extort and pressure politicians directly? Instead they will have to appeal to a majority of the voters on the basis of merit?
Bribing and lobbying are so much more efficient to get what they want disproportionate and at odds to public interest.
This is a tragedy of epic proportions. Poor teachers, lets build them a palace on a gorgeous coral atoll in the Pacific where they can party and weep.
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Ceffer says
Are you talking about Exxon, Chevron, BP, farmers, the Military industrial complex, the Wall Street and the Banks, or was it the super powerful teachers unions ?
There's some things teachers unions fight for that I don't agree with, but forgive me, are there just too damn many entities out there supporting politicians on the Left ?"
Who is going to support their continued existence if not the unions themselves. As for the majority of voters being influenced on merit ? Sorry, but I've seen how easy it is to turn the public against teachers. Even otherwise intelligent people easily become a drooling boobs on the subject. THe lazy fuckers with their easy job. Off at 3:00pm with no worries and summers off to boot. Fuck the teachers. Why not just say teachers suck instead of the teachers union sucks. It's the same statement.
I guess now that corporations are people, able to donate infinite amounts to their candidates, it makes sense to take down the unions even further.
I think I see your reasoning.
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Pleasanton, CA
The teachers are pawns and ciphers in an ever increasingly bizarre game of politics, funding, crooked spending and union control.
The school system is becoming the perfect government bureaucracy, it consumes assets, demands increasing and accelerating tax tribute, protects itself as a totally detached, self feeding and self serving constituency, while abdicating the goals and purposes for which it was originally intended.
Time to start over.
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Ceffer says
I see you like the propaganda. So you're convinced public education is way worse than it used to be ?
Schools don't demand increasing taxes (adjuted for inflation) than they used to (per student). In fact in California it's WAY less. The one thing that has gone up is pension funding, but that's due to underfunding in recent years (when stock market was booming).
There is plenty of misinformation out there. As a public school teacher I can tell you we are under incredible pressure to do better. Our evaluations are shifting to where they are going to be based more on test score improvement. And we are undergoing various reforms, while our class sizes are huge and our pay has been cut since 2008.
So I don't know what you're talking about. But hey, I'm just in there on the front lines, and I'm obviously biased. Still, I'm pretty sure you have no clue and are just repeating bs propaganda.
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Ceffer says
It's time to stop looking at public education as some kind of sacred cow.
Public education should be *available* but not *mandatory*. There are too many low-lifes that don't value education. Those people just make life miserable for those who do value education. And they make life miserable for teachers who want to actually *teach* and not babysit.
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marcus says
I agree that teachers are unfairly targeted. As if teachers are somehow making big bucks. I wouldn't want to be a public school teacher even if it paid six figures. It's a terrible job. Student success in school is tied to parental involvement. If Johnny won't do his homework, it's not the teacher's fault. It's the fault of the parents.
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Bluetooth says
You can't compare the Teachers union to a union of a public company. For one SW has competition. They are accountable for being profitable and providing flight service with more efficiency than their competitors. What is holding a public organization with relatively no competition accountable? Yup, you guessed it, nothing. Like Patrick said, if you give everyone tenure and don't reward the people doing things better then your system sucks. You do that approach in a public company and you will find yourself out of business pretty fast. This is our children we are talking about and we all should care enough to fix this. Yes, the unions are part of the problem.
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"Public education should be *available* but not *mandatory*. There are too many low-lifes that don't value education."
Easy to say, and it would make my life easier. The problem is that those "low lifes" were born in to their situation and don't know any better than not going to school, if they were given that option.
Even from a purely cold economic point of view, it would be best if said "low lifes" can grow up to make a decent living and pay taxes, rather than end up in prison or possibly harming others. Also, if a person doesn't have helpful adults in their lives, who are good role models, isn't public education one way they can find such influence in their life ?
It would be nice if answers were as simple as you wish.
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And stop "mainstreaming" mentally handicapped children into 'regular' classrooms.
Many of them have emotional problems, they slow the other 29 kids' learning, the special assistant costs the district more money, and they're going to be teased and harassed. Or harass themselves.
Special Needs parents want their kids to hang with the others, but it's not practical or fair. It's cheaper, more effective, and less disruptive for kids with severe learning disabilities to be in special schools.
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marcus says
Agree. But can public education really do the job traditionally given to parents? Based on what I saw growing up, I'd say it's unlikely.
That's why in my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if abortion should be not only legal, but mandatory.
At the same time I tend to believe that human life is sacred and agree with much of the "pro-life" position. That's my idealistic side.
It's cognitive dissonance.
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Belgium, WI
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Homeboy says
As someone prejudiced against teachers by the teachers I've known, I do agree with your sentiments. One thing that is missing in any union argument, though, is that people do not form unions to rip off their employers. If employees are treated fairly, and have a decent buy-in, they rarely are going to choose the homogeneous atmosphere of a union shop. The teachers formed unions because they were getting screwed by public institutions. The monopoly on education systems forced compliance with draconian rules in order to BE teachers, so the public itself (and its pursuit of selfish immediate gains) is to blame for the success of the unions and the failure of education.
What is the solution? First of all, we need a national discussion on what people are FOR, what the value of a human being IS, and how to develop usefulness in a person's labors. The lazy excuse of "market forces" can only work if we are working for a market, not for an intentional future. The market is efficient only when there are unlimited resources and disregard for the value of individuals.
To answer some of your questions directly: Stop testing students and start testing teachers and parents. Stop building buildings and sports arenas with public money and just give the money to parents(or let them keep it in the first place) to choose where and how to spend it. Get rid of the minimum hours of instruction rules. As a homeschool parent, I know that they are totally a distraction from reliable education. Smart kids don't need the rules and challenged kids need more effort, not more time. ALL students need more time spent on useful activities, not busy work. Apprenticeships should be re-worked and established (especially in natural settings, such as farms), and kids need to be involved in activities that they feel helpful and significant, not just token field trips to contrived "interactive" displays. The health care system, the food systems, and the education systems should be thoroughly integrated and cross-linked to every other government department as priorities. We cannot survive without food, knowledge, and health. Anything less is failure.
We need to eliminate 80% of the colleges and probably 50% of high schools, as well as pre-school programs and day care centers. Most children would do better at understanding life and engaging in reality if they start the rigid curriculum of school at a much older age if their parents have minimum subsistence available and time to spend with their children. (In other words, we need better programs for minimum wages, useful jobs where parents can bring their kids to work, and welfare (yes, welfare) for people).
We need to get rid of the "marriage" license systems and create a "family license": where any two people can get the benefits of a shared union IF they agree to take on a dependent (either raise a child or take in someone with special needs or other dependency). This puts the value of people in the forefront of life-changing decisions, rather than the selfish sexual desires which come and go between two people.
We need to get rid of much of the teacher qualification system and replace it with simple testing and interview/background checks. There are millions of parents, graduates, workers, and just generally decent human beings who are better qualified to raise children than someone with a degree in underwater basketweaving and a year of sensitivity training. I know some high school kids that would be better at teaching than many of the 'professional' teachers I've had.
Eliminate religion-based schools prior to the age of maturity (25). Children are their own future, not the 'property' of deluded parents. If you want to "spread the Word" of your religion, do it with people who are old enough to rent a fucking car. Don't take advantage of the young.
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Homeboy says
Everyone is fired! Then get the kids to decide on who comes back. Take the worse kids in the school and ask them to list their favorite teachers. Then take the list and flip it upside down. Start to hire back starting from the top of this new list. Easy as pie.
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RentingForHalfTheCost says
Amusing but your logic is lacking.
It's true that there may be a very small number of teachers that don't teach, that the worst students like, but only in a way. But there are also terrible teachers who know their subject well but can't connect with students or control the classroom. The students who are misbehaving the worst in those classes also don't like those teachers.
Then there are the very greatest teachers, who I don't place myself among who reach the worst students well. Of course then they aren't the worst students anymore. But some of the worst students have heard about those teachers from friends, and would rate them highly.
Bottom line, it is nowhere close to a truism that teachers are liked to a degree that is inversely related to how good they are at teaching, not even if determined only by the opinion of the laziest students.