Mike Luckovich for May 09, 2010

Finally! They actually learned something useful.

IF we don’t want to pay teachers then we need to stop producing children.

Home schooling…or will it be homeless schooling. Adds new meaning to “Street Smarts.”

Of course, a teacher who’s great with a class of 25 is still going to struggle when s/he’s got to manage 50 at once. Or if s/he’s a Science teacher and is told to teach English as well.

Another great success of union.

I keep asking:

Why is there a need for a union for teachers and/or any public workers?

Furthermore, what’s with the tenure for teachers?

Tenure at the college level is supposed to ensure academic freedom. Tenure at the public school level has to do with preventing experienced teachers from being fired and replaced with younger cheaper teachers. The unfortunate trade- off is that you get some burnouts or incompetents that slipped through that you can’t remove.

I favor local control – being a good leftie, I’m wary of too much control of curriculum from the center. But some standardization of resources could be a good thing, so that all students get roughly the same level of support. It’s shameful that some schools get billions per student and others get pennies.

Much has been said about the separation of church and state, but a much bigger issue ought to be the desired separation of school and State.

State apparatchiks only create more ignoramuses, to depend on apparatchiks …

On the issue of tenure:

It was indeed born out of the need to establish and maintain academic freedom.

Over the decades however, its utilization and expansion serves to create and to protect ‘academic inbreeding’, and consequently, a birth of ‘academic fascism’, which all but eliminates ‘thinking out of the box’, as it were, not to mention any outright disagreement with the ‘prevailing science’, which in many instances is no science at all. As in ‘man-made-climate change’ demagoguery.

petergrt, have you been anywhere near a university? Even Henry Kissinger said “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” You can say whatever you want without fear of firing - exactly the opposite of what you say. And as for your comment on climate change, perhaps you should read this, signed by a host of eminent scientists: http://tinyurl.com/23vnjcm Contrary to what you think, scientists love battling each other. There is no faster way to get a reputation in science than by disproving the prevailing theory, as indeed some of the most famous scientists did: Galileo, Darwin, Einstein. I speak as a scientist here, and I know of none of my colleagues who are afraid to disagree with “prevailing science,” because, frankly, if they can make their point it will get them published! Now do you need tenure at the high-school level, which is the point of the cartoon? Not sure. But your point went well beyond that, and is disproven (as we scientists like to say) by available data.

^ Heck, I disagreed with one of my dissertation advisors. He was great – he thought it was entertaining. And then I went on to a prolonged public debate with one of my cohort – we both published our disagreements extensively – and we became good friends in the process. And I think we learned from each other. I can’t testify about other fields, but in my field there’s lots of debate, and things can change pretty rapidly when a good new idea comes forward.

Well, I am glad that if nothing else, I have provoked a bit of spirited debate …

I agree that in most basic sciences, as physics, chemistry, mathematics and such, the traditional academic freedom reigns.

In liberal arts however, not so much.

With respect to awarding tenure to teachers, in some cases after as little 2 years, that is irrational in the extreme

But my basic point was that the teachers’ unions have no other purpose than to extort the system of most $$$ and to protect its members, however incompetent or dangerous, all at the expanse of education.

motivemagus said: Now do you need tenure at the high-school level, which is the point of the cartoon?

I didn’t think that was the point of the cartoon. I thought it was related to the news I hear every day about the Atlanta area closing down schools and laying off teachers.

Akenta,

Bingo, as they say around here..

lonecat, It varies. I’ve come across both good and bad experiences. I know some people that have been run out of a program for having the “wrong” take on something. In history, there a number of departments that disapprove of the study of military history. That has been slowly changing over the last decade but the prejudice existed for a while.On the other hand, I’ve heard from people like you who have been able to disagree openly. I, personally, have a had a mixed experience.

Laying off teachers and allowing bigger class sizes is absurd, so is tenure after 3 years, so is firing a teacher in order to hire a cheaper inexperienced one, so is not hiring a teacher because he/she has a Master’s degree and therefore more expensive… all depressing problems that are not even being addressed. With all the federal funding being allocated to education, these problems would not be insurmountable if they were simply identified as areas where public education could be improved, rather than throwing money at ineffective assessments and federal programs.

Voucher system is the only real answer to our decraped public education, particularly in the economicly depressed urban areas.

DC had an incredibly successful and popular program, but the unions didn’t like it, so 0bama killed it.

petergrt,

President Obama has nothing to do with DC’s political decisions. The U.S. congress does.

That said, we DC citizens are perfectly capable of screwing things up on our own.

^^Voucher systems?!?!? You mean taking public money and giving it to private organizations? Works real well, doesn’t it? We had one here in Florida. We shut down public schools so rich kid’s parents could send their kids to a $6,000 a semester school at a discount.

For the poor kids, there was Christian Academies. And you wonder why our kids are such lemmings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FS5B-CynM

The question is whether you think public schools are worth having, which I do. Vouchers are a way to remove funding from public schools and reduce costs for the wealthy, generally, since voucher money won’t cover the costs of a good private school.

Motive, you are a well educated, smart person who can think, analyze and reason, so why must you always regurgitate the DNC demagoguery that is based upon union produced lies?

Think!!!

^Because vouchers don’t work buttwipe! Get your head out of your keester and join the human race.

Food for thought Motive. Private schools are allowed to select which students attend their schools. If they get all the smart kids to attend during a State evaluation of all schools they tend to outperform public schools. If it was a leveled playing field private schools and public schools basically perform about the same.

I do think, petergrt. I know exactly how much schools cost. I am proud to support public schools even though my children do not go there. (They go to Catholic schools, for reasons having nothing to do with my support of public education.) I’m not the one regurgitating politicians’ talking points; my wife and I spent significant time investigating different schools and costs, as well as the voucher systems proposed. To take the argument farther, and in support of WarBush’s comment, vouchers also mean that public schools will be the “school of last resort” - all the rich kids with strong family support will go elsewhere, leaving the poor problem children behind, in a school with less funding for resources like good teachers and educational equipment. Again, the rich get richer (and better educated), and the poor get poorer. Either we are committed to public education as a country, or we are not. But vouchers are a dishonest way to pretend to support public education while ultimately destroying it.