It isn't just in Indiana that teachers unions are fighting off challenges from the governor and legislators. It's happening in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Nevada, Florida.
The events point to a convergence that is remaking the politics of education. Teachers unions, historically one of the most powerful interest groups in American politics, are being besieged like never before
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Gievn the amount of classroom "power" that's been wrested from our educators, and the growing union problem (be better if teachers spoke up for THEMSELVES), and the fact that educators have to wear a LOT more hats these days instead of just being able to perfom the function they went to school for, got certified in, and were eventually hired for (that would be TEACHING) seem insurmountable.
It's the UNIONS that give a "bad rep" for teachers...and the legislators that believe those unions.
Anyone who KNOWS a teacher can back that up.
I oughta know...I MARRIED one.
Spend some time in a classroom 5 days a week, all day with a few "problem" children from dysfunctional homes who have been erroneously "maintreamed" with all the REGULAR students while you worry about those damn ISTEP scores, and the future of YOUR CAREER that cost you tens of thousands of dollars to achieve...
And convince me otherwise.
The educators are the MOST solid side of the "educational triangle" these days...and they get treated as bad as they do...not fair at all...nor warranted.
It must be snowing in hell. Bob and I actually agree on this one. My wife's a teacher, too, and she has to worry about her job because she works in a poor neighborhood where the kids (and their parents) don't give a damn whether they graduate. Half her girls (she actually counted) have babies or are pregnant.
But her future depends the standardized test scores of those kids. Lots of them just leave the answer sheet blank when they take the test.
The union has nothing to do with that situation.
I've always liked the idea of charter schools for the idea that some of the extra burdens and rules can be lifted so that education experimentation can better take place. But a fair question is: If it's a good idea to remove those burdens from some public schools, why shouldn't we remove them from all public schools?
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"What we need to do is to precisely define objectives for each class, and if a student has learned what he needs to learn, he
"I have not seen a computer program yet that can actually test the ability of a K-12 student. in addition, I have seen what the computer age has done for hand writing, its attrocious."
The SAT and ACT tests are given to high school students, and appear to be widely accepted; I don't know of a college that doesn't consider them to be useful in determining whether to admit a student, and yet they are scored by computer. As far as generating a test, all you're talking about is randomly selecting from a supply of questions (and in the case of ones involving math, generating numbers to plug in) so that kids don't know what the answers are from talking to someone else who took the test yesterday. That has to be better than teachers who have been giving the same tests, year after year, for twenty years.
In order to pass the Eighth Grade Test, I had to answer questions like "How many pounds of ear corn will fit on a wagon bed 6' wide, 10' long, 16" high?" and "What is the square root of 1651, to two decimal places?" with nothing but a pencil and paper.
Could YOU solve those problems? I can't remember the number of cubic inches in a quart, and while I think I remember the number of pounds in a bushel of ear corn, I'm not sure. And I tried, back in the 1980s, to teach someone how to calculate a square root with pencil and paper, and not only could I not remember how, I couldn't find a book that explained how, either.
The kids entering college these days have never taken a class in cursive penmanship, and I don't see any reason why they should. Nor should they be routinely be taught to carve a feather into a quill and form Uncial letters from a bottle of india ink, nor should they routinely be taught Gregg shorthand. Touch-typing is important. The ability to capitalize the first word of a sentence is nice. The ability to spell atrocious is nice. Cursive penmanship isn't even nice, it's a waste of time. Cursive isn't used for anything.