Well the teachers Unions in Los Angeles voted to sacrifice 10 days worth of pay, and saved almost 5000 jobs of certified teachers. This is the 5th year in a row that we've had to do this. The first year, however, there were no furlough days, in part because the unions managed to find millions of dollars in govt. waste and redundancy that was cut out to save jobs. That was waste that would still be part of the system if not for the teachers' union. The rest of the time teachers have volunteered to give up part of their already small salary in order to save jobs. They've done it again. The problem is lack of funding for education. If the schools were funded this wouldn't have to happen. The bad part of it is how the layoffs are by seniority only, which is the fault of the union as well. I know teachers that quite their old higher paying jobs because they believed in teaching. They sacrificed went back to school to get their teaching degree and put a lot of effort and care into their job every day. Sadly after giving all of that up, they were still laid off because of the lack of education funding. Meanwhile some other teachers who have lost their passion but are just holding on to their jobs because they are only a couple years from retirement still have their job security because of firing being based on seniority alone. There are teachers who have been employed for more than 10 years and were still initially laid off. The rough part is that I'm not sure of an objective way to see who should be let go and who shouldn't, but I can see the unfair result of hard working passionate qualified teachers who don't have a job now, while others who do much less work, and put in less effort for their students still have their jobs. What a shame. All in all I'm glad that almost 5000 teachers still have their job, thanks to the union. The union doing this helps everyone out, because all of those teachers would have been on unemployment, flooding an already over crowded job search, and put further drain on the economy. This was only in Los Angeles and there are layoffs all over the state. It isn't perfect but this is a case where the oft maligned teachers' union did teachers and the economy in general a favor.
Every time you hear politicians talk about the importance of education, just imagine a load of diarrhea pouring out of their mouth as they say it. We give a lot of lip service in this country to the importance of education, but back up that lip service very little with actual funding. This extends all the way from the public schools up through the universities.
I feel for teachers, in a way They're not paid a lot, however, compared to high paying jobs, teaching has a fairly low "barrier to entry" for those wanting to get into the field, so you have more people wanting to teach than there are spots. Which keeps the wage down. could stricter competency-based hiring and firing be the answer? Unions would pitch a fit on that...
The other thing that was partially saved and partially cut because of this were the adult schools (aka vocational schools) where adults could get a high school diploma as well as learn a marketable trade. They were initially cut out completely but have been saved at 48% of they were. A reduced pre-school program was also saved even though studies show that preschool is one of the leading indicators of success in education. Those are the kinds of programs that are really needed.
There have been school districts that have done some pretty innovative experiments regarding hiring and firing with good success. The lesson learned from some districts is that you can't just mass fire bad teachers. The unions will protect them and in many cases it was hard to hire replacements that were actually any better. There have been plenty of schools that have beaten the union, fired bad staff and then hired new teachers only to see the same problems. What does work is identifying the good teachers and putting them in a position to mentor other teachers. The best schools are the ones with strong support systems that provide the resources to help teachers create agendas, materials for class, and provide them daily guidance and feedback on how to teach. If you look at the lowest performing schools, administrations tend to only be concerned with the failure rate of its children but do next to nothing to provide teacher support. Now there are teachers that are just bad and they should be fired. But providing strong support to teachers has been proven to take below average teachers and make them above average. Schools and school districts need to start investing in their teachers and I guarantee you they will see results. Plus it will go over well with unions since you're training existing teachers rather than doing something reactionary like firing a bunch of them.
Pretty sure our population growth in and of itself would require higher funding of students. Not to mention we had a long era where minorities were purposely given terrible schools that were grossly underfunded. So when you can get away with only having to properly fund half the country, you can get away with saving some cash on education
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But it's obviously not enough, and not being spent wisely in education. The fact that highly qualified teachers are being laid off and class sizes being increased is the result. How the money being spent is being spent is part of the problem, and not spending enough is another part. Of course if we had nationalized health care, that would eliminate a ton of the money being spent on benefits for employees and would save money, but in a screwed up system where we don't have universal health care this is what happens.
Actually our union has been doing a ton of work on coming up with objective ways to accomplish competency based firing and merit pay, and not getting layoffs. The union would pitch a fit over unfair competency hiring and firing, but is currently working a fair way to accomplish that.
You can see what they accomplished with him, thus why he feels that way. I'd hate them too if I had ended up like that.
Don't be silly... politicians care about education, but only when it related to their children, which attend private schools.
well considering that a dollar in 1970 would be worth about 5.50 today it looks like funding of education has gone down. Almost cut in half actually. . . . . see what you can do with statistics.
Not enough and not being spent wisely are two different sides of the same coin. I don't want to become part of this debate, but I did want to note that not spending money wisely and not having enough money sort of go hand in hand -- if money was spent more wisely, would you need more? Or would you merit more, based on wiser spending? I think it's an interesting issue.
