They have trouble with spelling, grammar and showing up to class on time—and we’re not talking about the students.
The city tried to expel 26 teachers from the classroom last year for gross incompetence—such as English teachers who couldn’t write or speak the language properly.
But officials maintain that stringent union rules prohibited them from succeeding in just half those cases—even when hearing officers actually agreed with the principals’ assessments.
That’s because the city has to prove not only that the teachers can’t do their jobs but also that they have no shot of ever improving.
To put this into perspective, public sector teacher’s unions in NY have managed to dictate that, before you can fire a grossly incompetent teacher, you have first to prove — as an employer — that you cannot possibly turn that grossly incompetent teacher into a good teacher, because you yourself, as employer, have proven grossly incompetent at teaching your teachers how to learn to teach. You’ve failed them!
This, recall, is precisely the kind of nonsense the left took to the streets and the State House in Madison, eg., to protect — and used as a measure of gaining public support to their cause the cry that the GOP wanted to destroy quality education by taking away the collective bargaining rights of teachers.
Madness, all. I mean, the left has not only managed to completely dumb down the society — but they have simultaneously, through a pernicious self-esteem movement coupled with the carefully managed demonization of many forms of competition, convinced the newly dumbed down that their opinions, devoid as they are of rigorous analysis and fueled entirely on emotion, regurgitated agitprop, and rote repetition, are not only valid, but must also be accepted. Anything else is intolerance.
It’s the perfect storm of surreality: we’ve gone from “there are no bad students, only bad teachers” to “there are no bad teachers, either. Only bad people who employ teachers and who don’t make them good teachers so that they don’t produce bad students, which of course, there aren’t any of those.”
But don’t worry. This is the kind of cultural decline that Mitt Romney was born to manage efficiently and with perfect hair.
(h/t TerryH)
Separation of school and state: an idea long overdue.
McG, I keep looking for national control of education in those archaic “enumerated rights”. Can’t seem to find them. Maybe I’m missing a page?
Those who can’t teach gym, teach teachers.
Heh.
And, McG, given that the States have fucked it up to a fare-the-well, I’m expecting a refund check on my education purchase. In the mail.
Seems relevant:
From an excellent Walter Russel Mead essay.
The second half is of particular interest to the PW community:
In case anyone wonders, I was using “state” in the manner of the old frog king who said, “L’etat, c’est moi.”
National state and State state. The first is doing, and it isn’t its job to do. The second, whose job it conceivably is under the 10th, isn’t cutting it.
Whichever l’etat, I want a refund.
Seen recently on an Atlanta bumper sticker: “We don’t care how you did it up north.”
This sort of crystallizes my fears: Having fouled their nest, blue staters will migrate to red states and then demand things be done their way, and into tar pits we go…
“His hair was perfect” always gets me humming Warren Zevon.
Something happens when a union goes so far that parody becomes impossible. The teachers’ union may want to take a look at Detroit and re-think their current trajectory.
And yet, I have even less optimism that Gingrich would do any better (in fact, I’m almost certain he would be decidedly worst that Romney in the education realm). My sister is on her local school board in slightly upstate NY, and she has some mind-numbing war stories – she fights the good fight, but at 6 to 1, she can only influence at the margins.
Caucuses next Tuesday Jeff – unless the Paulistas are out in force, I’ll probably throw down with Santorum…
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach form teachers’ unions.
The most ludicrous part of this is, there is no apparatus in a school system to MAKE good teachers. Do they think every school system has a department of teach development or some such nonsense ? They don’t. The only thing schools do for teachers is require them to go to continuing education seminars or one stripe or another. And those are certainly not going to turn a bad teacher into a good one.
The idea is the school is HIRING good teachers. Sometimes you make bad decisions.
The fact is that “making good teachers out of bad teachers” is not a function of the taxpayer funded school system. School systems do not have the money to waste on improving teacher performance. That’s the TEACHER’s job. If teachers are put on notice that they suck and could be fired if they don’t get with the program, they have only themselves to blame when they don’t.
deadrody, there aren’t a lot of good teachers to be hired. In AL about 25 years ago, the state decided to institute a “competency exam”. To fail it, you would have to be basically illiterate, innumerate, and in serious need of a keeper.
When it was administered, most of the local colleges had a passing rate of 90%+. Our “historically black” institutions couldn’t break 50%; one could only get 1 of 6 education graduates through. These percentages obtained no matter the actual race of the student: 90% of the blacks at most of the local colleges passed too.
Instead of being allowed to act on the obvious truth that these so called “historically black institutions” could only be improved with bulldozers, they sued claiming the test was RAAAAACIST, got a black Federal judge appointed by Carter to agree, and got the state restrained from keeping their teachers out of classrooms.
There are a great many GOOD civil servants out there– my late father was one of them. But there are a great many BAD ones, too, and I suspect they tend to dominate the system over the course of years and decades as the good ones get fed up and leave. Why stick around and put up with turkeys when you can go someplace else and work with eagles?
I will never forget a story my father told me about the Federal civil service. Back around 1970, in the days when a civil servant just about had to kill somebody before he could get fired (and maybe not even then), my father’s supervisor (and chief of the office) was a middle-aged man named Black. My father said that his supervisor’s name was appropriate, as his skin was about as dark as the ace of spades. He was a gentlemen of the old school– he was definitely MISTER Black, until he decided he liked you, in which case you could call him “Blackie”.
Also working in the office was a young black man– let us call him “Smith”. He was a poor worker, always making time with the secretaries, drinking coffee, reading the paper– in short, doing everything except his job. He had been counseled repeatedly by Mr. Black about his poor work habits, and Mr. Black was pushing hard to get him fired (or at least transferred someplace else), but not much could be done, thanks to civil-service work rules.
One day, Smith was spotted doing his usual shucking and jiving, and Mr. Black “lost it” in front of God and everybody in the office:
“God damn it, Smith! It’s n*****s like you that make the rest of us blacks look bad!”
The point of the story? A few come to mind:
1) Maybe it’s because I live close to Baltimore, but it doesn’t seem like there are many role models like Mr. Black for young black men nowadays. We could definitely use more men like him.
2) We bash civil servants for their incompetencies, but it’s really nothing new. The wonder of it is that we have known abount these incompetencies for decades, if not generations, yet we continue to trust them with so much power over our lives. What will it take for the majority of us to wake up to the absurdity of the situation?
3) Use of the “n-word” is not confined to Klansmen or Klansmen-wannabes. (Off-topic, I know.)
(I thought I had a fourth point, but I forget now what it was.)
My two cents’ worth.
Personal story: When I was a freshman in college, studying for a Chem mid-term, a friend/education major came to me in tears because her bottle cap sculpture wouldn’t stay glued together. That was 45 years ago.
el shaddai el shaddai el elyon na adonai
Idiocracy, Madge? You’re soaking in it!
What it is is a perfect example of how competition vs. socialism works.
Before you had local school districts. Some of them good, some bad. Successful people, people who cared about their kids education, these people tended to build good local schools or move to where good local schools already existed. People who didn’t care let there schools suck, and blamed it on a lack resources.
So the feds decide to get into the act, redistribute the resources, standardize the systems so that everyone all sucks equally now.
Grandma Suzie – Non sequitor, I know but I can’t stop wondering what on earth she had sculpted and why. Also I’m guessing someone ate up all the paste…on purpose.
I home-schooled my kid – I would say I found the glue credential superfluous.
[…] like someone wants to be governor, eh? Look, when you’ve got skeezy teachers or just plain incompetent teachers that are unfireable, while racking up pensions that are higher than many people’s […]