You would expect something else from the NEA? - Granite Grok

You would expect something else from the NEA?

Little Red Schoolhouse 

Over at Betsy’s Page:

The teachers union messing up a good thing
 
We’ve seen example after example of charter schools that have succeeded partly by requiring longer work weeks for the students. They come to school earlier and leave later and often have Saturday school. Such a regime requires, of course, teachers to work longer hours. And the unions can’t stand for that. Jay Mathews writes of the plight of a high-achieving KIPP charter school in Baltimore that the teachers union is threatening.

Sometime last year, while negotiating a teacher contract for the KIPP Ujima Village charter middle school in Baltimore, founder Jason Botel pointed out that his students, mostly from low-income families, had earned the city’s highest public school test scores three years in a row. If the union insisted on increasing overtime pay, he said, the school could not afford the extra instruction time that was a key to its success, and student achievement would suffer.

Botel says a union official replied: "That’s not our problem."

Such stories heat the blood of union critics. It is, they contend, a sign of how unions dumb down public education by focusing on salaries, not learning. 

 

Contemplate that:  "That’s not our problem."  If a politician had said it, it would be classified as a gaffe (a slip of the truth).

Read that again, and if you are like most, you’ll wince again.  After all, we all want to believe that Ms. Teach is all about helping Johnny and Jane along with their studies, learning the basics while in school.  More and more, however, we see that unions do what unions do (even if it is a teachers’ union).  It is not about what the union members do for work, it is about the power and who controls the work place.  It seems, no matter how we may wish otherwise, that parents see schools as classrooms while the teacher unions see schools as not much more than a factory shop floor.  Swap the kids for modern day work center equipment; they are interchangable.  For the union, it is about how the work is to be done and what do the members get.  Meritocracy?  Ha!

Again last night I had the chance to tell of my little practical joke on cashiers:  bring the items up to be rung in, haul out the bills, let them ring that in, and while they are looking for the change amount to pop up on the screen, slip in some of my change with the bills (e.g., if the bill is $2.98, bring out three $1s and then add in 3 pennies.) to 1) see if I can get rid of change as I hate having it in my pocket and 2) see if they can cope.

Everytime they can’t cope right away (which is about 60% of the time), I thank God that I was in grade school 40 years ago….and just shake my head at the poor education these kids are getting today.

Especially as I just saw that NYC is now the higher per student cost in the US at about $20K per kid…with one of the highest dropout rates and poorest standards…..

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