The Diane Rehm Show

Teacher unions or all public sector unions everywhere are pretty much the same, delivering poor results at unsustainable costs. What we are seeing is the pulling of the knife blade across their own throats in slow motion, they are inching towards the jugular and soon enough we will beat them down. It is perfect justice for cities like Chicago to boil in their own democrat party vote buying excrement.

There are few people who know that, historically, teacher unions actually started the public school system. Teaching is SO much more than babysitting youngsters and herding them into mass activities. Each child in the modern era is prescribed an IEP.....Individual Education Program....designed and suited to the specific needs of each child, based on solid research and continuous adjustment. By the same token school boards and the administrators they choose are basically political chess pieces prone to the winds of local change.
Unions do not hire or fire teachers. period. If there are so-called bad teachers, they have been chisen and protected by administrators and boards. Even the selection and retention process is defined by boards. A typical teacher must have proper credentials and degrees and go through a three year trial period....and can be dropped arbitrarily for ANY reason. Unions have done bare knuckle negotiations to insist on due process after the trial period.....as would be done in any business....but still no absolute guarantees as the current "strike" guarantees. Administrators and boards dictate mandatory meetings, training, data collection and analysis, and all the specfic methods.....tools, materials, techniques, and evaluations. Hiring and firing is mostly based on budget rather than results........drop as many experienced "expensive" staff as possible and bring in the inexperienced lowest paid possible. Wages are always inflated in the public eye and show total benefit costs not conrract salaries. Average teachers apply at least 11 hours per day during the 180 day contract period and do SO much more for kids than teach. Anybody who knows a real teacher knows the truth.
So, IF results are poor, guess whom is blamed.....but guess whom should be blamed.

HonestAbe wrote: "Each child in the modern era is prescribed an IEP.....Individual Education Program....designed and suited to the specific needs of each child, based on solid research and continuous adjustment"
Actually, IEP's are designed for children with special needs/learning disabilities. With it, there are a myriad of ancillary workers and specialists involved. Many children who are diagnosed with ADD, AD/HD, ODD, and other disorders are prescribed an IEP. With that, there may be a TSS, a Behavioral Specialist, and a medicinal cocktail. I think they are prescribed a little too often.

"If there are so-called bad teachers, they have been chisen and protected by administrators and boards. "
You cannot deny that there are bad teachers...because there is. You do have those teachers who only care about salary increases, tenure, and summer vacations.

"So, IF results are poor, guess whom is blamed.....but guess whom should be blamed."
So, should ALL the blame be put on the parents? Is that what you're saying?

Nils Kristian wrote:
"It is a contentious issue with politicians often making teachers and public employees the villains for the deficits."

This x1000. The two main gripes I have EVER heard about Unions (and Teacher's Unions especially) are these:

1. Bad teachers can't get fired.
2. Teachers get paid too much.

Rebuttal:
1. Plenty of bad teachers get fired for illegal, immoral, or incorrect behavior and we all know it. Some GOOD teachers get fired because of misunderstandings. I've personally seen it happen where parents want a teacher fired because they believe the teacher is lying about their son/daugher misbehaving in class. Ridiculous.
2. Teachers get paid far too little. The most important thing in your life should be your children (and their education, by extension) and yet you want to pay them so little they have to commute from poor areas to the rich schools. They take care of your children for longer each day then the parents do and all they want is a wage worthy of the massive amount of training/diplomas they go through/earn, student debt, and health care (given how often they get sick with your snot-nosed kids making them sick).

Since when are our neighborhood teachers the enemy, politicians? Soon you'll be saying that veterans shouldn't get special treatment either because of how much those programs cost...

Many Conservatives preach teaching to a test. However,many college admissions officials are highlighting the shortcomings of the students,who meet the testing standards,who now need remedial courses to bring them into reality.

Citizens must pay attention to what State School Boards are putting in,and omitting from text books.FRIGHTENING! The only safeguard against this indoctrination are UNION PROTECTED TEACHERS!

Diane focused right now on the senseless killing in Libya of a U.S. Ambassador and staff. But hearing Clinton say anything about senseless killing is absurd. She voted for the Iraq war resolution. Her bloody fingerprints are on the dead, injured and displaced in Iraq. Now clearly the Bush administration is far more responsible...but Clinton went along

HonestAbe wrote: "There are few people who know that, historically, teacher unions actually started the public school system"

Yeah, and fish made the ocean.

We all know that there are terrible teachers out there that are extremely difficult to get rid of. Somewhere there is a balance between protecting teachers and what is best for the children. I know teachers who the system has wanted to put them out to pasture 10 years ago. The teachers I am talking about are focused at getting the highest pension they can possibly get. That is their focus. Where is the balance?

So, if a student never bothers to show up for class, does not study for tests, never does his/her homework and (big surprise) does poorly on a standardized test ... that is the TEACHER'S fault????? What ever happened to personal accountability?

We are using these standardized tests in a way that they are not intended to be used. Nobody has normed them to figure out what percent of the students' test scores can be attributed to the teacher.

Furthermore, has it occurred to anyone that putting "at risk" youth into a classroom where they do nothing but rote memorization and "drill and kill" work to prepare for tests is MAYBE a really, really STUPID idea? How does this help engage the students? How does this help them deal with their problems outside of school?

Is "learning" the same thing as regurgitating disparate facts onto a multiple-choice test?

The truth is that these "reformers" don't give a fig about these kids who are struggling. If they did, they would be fighting child poverty instead of the teacher unions.

Poverty is the real problem. This is clear to anyone who has ever bothered to pay the slightest attention to the data, or who has ever actually worked in a school.

How can we hold teachers responsible for student learning? We don't hold the parents responsible and we don't hold the society responsible. No one has been able to help poor students in the past and so our education system continues to decline. It seems like we are passing the buck to teachers. Teachers can only teach, it is up to the students to learn. There needs to be a better way to evaluate teachers.

I think you have it exactly right. However, this is not the current mood of the country, who wants to blame teachers and unions.

ecgberht wrote: " would also suggest you check out "Stupid In America"--"
The Stossel piece? Yes I have seen it. Actually I believe there are two; the one from 20/20 and a later version for Fox News."

I only saw the 20/20 piece. I have a BA in early childhood education, but am not certified. And truth be told, NCLB turned me off from wanting to teach--as this cannot determine how well the kids are learning based on a standardized test.

This 20/20 piece has totally turned me off from the public schools altogether. In addition, there is another school of thought that the public school system was actually started by The Rockerfellers and John Dewey based on communist thought. In this, kids are removed from their homes for education, are segregrated by age, and are admonished to learn based on obedience, to not take things at face value, and to not question. This is to prepare them for being "slaves" to the industrial work force. Have you heard of that?

The teacher unions are a bit unique. Performance evaluations are dependent on a child's test scores, yet those children and their grades are as much or more dependent on their parents as their teachers. The teachers unions are being demonized for low student performance and low graduation rates, which seems to me to be a scapegoat for poor PARENT performance.

I hope this discussion is followed up by one that includes statisticians familiar with the use of standardized test to determine value added scores for teachers. There is a great deal of controversy about the appropriate and valid way to use students' test scores mindful of the wide of diversity in students' knowledge and abilities as they enter a classroom. How can we use standardized tests as a large measure of a teachers effectiveness IF the field is not in agreement about how this can be done accurately?

This part of the conversation dismisses other problems, on is that currently every subject is not tested every year (much less at the beginning and the end of each year). Thus teachers' pay is sometimes determined by students' scores in other subjects. This is fundamentally wrong-headed.

Finally, particularly in the sciences, the state assessments designed to satisfied No Child Left Behind are often terrible measures of what students should know about science and be able to do. Thus, to use them as a driver of instruction and student success and teacher retention is very questionable.