Fear of teaching; another education rant

Last month, I went off on teachers and education administrators. I got several emails from teachers whose general theme was “not all teachers don’t care”. That may be true, but my general experience with modern “educators” is that enough of them don’t care so that it reflects on the entire profession. Yeah, it’s a stereotype – but most stereotypes are rooted in reality. Just like so few Muslims actually speak out against Muslim terrorists, it’s difficult to not equate one with the other.

But, this is about teachers. What set me off this morning was a Paul Greenberg piece in the Washington Times this morning about an education superintendent named Roy Brooks in Little Rock, Arkansas;

“In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him.”
    So much for the chances of a fair and impartial hearing for Mr. Brooks, the hard-driving school superintendent who came here three years ago with the avowed aim of making this the best-performing urban school district in the country. So he has been slicing away at a bloated bureaucracy, sifting resources to the classroom, trying to raise academic standards and in general educating kids instead of just going through the same old motions.
    All that has shaken up the dead wood and stirred up those who miss the status mediocre quo, notably the teachers’ unions.
    When the union-backed members of the school board became a 4-3 majority after last fall’s elections, it was only a matter of time before Mr. Brooks would have to fight for his job. Because when a man comes to town with a dream, it doesn’t take long for the killers of the dream to appear, too.
    This isn’t really a fight over race but over power. It’s a fight over what education ought to be about: learning or political patronage.

There’s more to this story, of course. Some of the school board members have been threatening other administration principals with the loss of their jobs if they continue to support Brooks and his reforms according to an AP story;

Brooks said in his lawsuit Mitchell had couriers deliver letters to nine administrators telling them their jobs might change as the result of hiring a new superintendent and she asked them to refrain from acting to undermine the board’s charges against Brooks. Daugherty talked to Mitchell about the letters that day, according to the lawsuit.

Eisele said he could not determine Mitchell’s intent in sending the letters, but called it “objectively threatening.”

In her statement Thursday night, Mitchell defended sending the letters.

“Intimidation was never my intent, but quite the opposite,” Mitchell said.

And why would this problem crop up this year? Well, political power;

This year, a federal judge also found the district could be released from court supervision, as it was substantially complying with a 1998 desegregation plan. That comes along with the 50th anniversary of the Central High crisis, when then-Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to stop nine black students from entering the school. President Eisenhower ultimately nationalized the state troops and sent the 101st Airborne to enforce a court’s order.

Brooks is reducing the number of union positions in his administration and increasing the amount of money being spen on actual teaching – that doesn’t sit well with the unions, of course. They (the unions) want their newly elected majority on the school board to have more say in how the district’s money is spent – the same kind of administration that caused the federal courts to supervise the district nine years ago. 

This kind of goofy crap happens everyday all over the country. New York State, thirty years ago, had the best education system in the country – high school graduates breezed through most colleges after getting a new York State education. I’m no rocket scientist, but after graduating from the New York education system in 1974, I CLEP’d out of my first year of college without a lick of studying. Now, 15% of New York high school graduates spend a portion of their first year of college in remedial writing, math and reading courses.  Even Little Chuckie Schumer recognized this problem back in 1999;

Beginning this school year, New York high school students will be required to pass Regents exams in English in order to graduate. Had those exams been implemented last school year, roughly 25% of New York twelfth-graders would have failed to graduate from high school.

But Chuckie’s solution was to throw money at teachers – more money to pay them for a job they should already be doing. If they won’t do the job at $20/hour, why would I expect them to do it for $30/hour?

We are losing entire generations of children every year that this piss poor process continues. Schools don’t teach, they create drones that mouth empty platitudes and demand respect (that they don’t have to earn – just like their grades) and high-paying jobs (at which they suck).

The District of Columbia spends nearly $20,000/year/student, and they’ve created a generation of security guards. The most sought-after jobs in the District is that of rent-a-cops to harrass people trying to conduct business in the countless Federal buildings with mindless searches (one guard tried to prevent me from entering a building because I couldn’t get a dialtone on my cellphone a few days after 9-11 – how many cell phones have dial tones?).

John Stossel wrote last year in RealClearPolitics;

The unions use their clout to fight against the interests of the best teachers. Union leaders make sure the teachers who work hardest don’t get raises or bonuses. Everyone with the same seniority and credentials must be paid the same. That guarantees that no teacher will take home a dime for making extra sure that students learn. Joel Klein, who as New York’s schools chancellor runs the country’s largest public-school system, put it this way: “We tolerate mediocrity, and people get paid the same whether they’re outstanding or whether they’re average or, indeed, whether they’re way below average.”

Klein said that out of 80,000 teachers, only two have been fired for incompetence in the past two years.

That’s tolerating mediocrity – and that’s what keeps our kids from getting the education they need – not the lack of money. Teachers who don’t join the unions are just as guilty – the only way to change the unions’ grip on our children is from the inside since we can’t depend on the courts and the feds (in the form of the union shills at the Education Department) to protect us.

Honestly, I do think it’s racist that white Leftists have trapped Black innercity families in a cycle of dependence with a half-education system. And teachers, across this country who’ve bought into the mediocre performance of their so-called profession, are at fault. Generally, teachers are on the bottom performance rung of college graduates, they love those long vacations and those four-hour workdays. Please, don’t bother boring me with that “all the work I have to do at home grading papers, blah-blah-blah”. Everyone works more hours than they’re paid – that’s life when you call yourself a “professional”. But teachers don’t know about life, do they? They’re so sheltered from real life, they even marry each other.

And they think that getting a student to put a condom on a banana is fulfilling work. If teachers really cared about children, children would be better educated. There’d be no excuses, there’d be productive citizens and I wouldn’t have anything to write about today.

Category: Society