Teaching/ Union rant

There is a big stir going on right now about the pay cut to teachers in Wisconsin.  There was also a huge out cry when “Waiting for Superman” suggested that bad test scores were brought on by bad teachers.  I think if anyone is honest with themselves they know bad test scores are a combination of bad teachers, students not paying attention, and teachers having to teach for a test as opposed to real world applications.  Everyone had teachers growing up throughout the course of their educational journey who were horrible.  They treated everything as black and white (unless the subject is math it doesn’t hold water) and ruled the classroom with an iron fist.  We also had teachers that could care less about anything that went on in their classroom.  They were usually older and tenured treating the class with the same enthusiasm of a bad marriage; going through the motions just enough to get by.

My personal issue with unions of any kind boil down to protecting the weakest members at the expense of the public.  They are also ripe with corruption.  There are always hundreds of stories of corruption, walk outs, picketing, etc from every labor, police, or teaching union every year.  Its basely politics with a pyramid scheme in play.  The closest thing I’ve ever come to being involved in a union type job was when I was in the military, so I don’t have direct firsthand knowledge.  From the research I’ve done unions aren’t beneficial in today’s modern society.  In the public sector you don’t get a blanket raise every year regardless of performance, you can be fired at any time for any reason, and you climb the promotion ladder based on your talent level, not seniority.  I manage a good number of people now and I filter out and fire (I know management would rather I say release) whoever doesn’t make the cut.  I don’t care if they have been with the company for years, if they don’t perform then I let them go.  Now I do try to see if their skill set is better put to use in another department before I fire them and I give them an opportunity to improve their performance.  More often than not though they go the way of the word processor.  This isn’t so in Unions, you have to show just cause for firing someone and you have to put in multiple corrective action forms along with continuing education training before showing a panel someone should be released.  That’s ridiculous!  It constantly allows people to perform at a certain base level instead of achieving a bell curve like result that a normal company has in its employees.  If the employee performance is flat it shows collusion between employees not to beat certain levels of performance and production.  The standard theory is if you can make x widgets x hours then that is your base, some people will do x+5 and some x-2 widgets but you have a base.  The whole theory in unions is everyone always makes X widgets. Period.  If you make X+5 widgets then management expects the base to increase to X+5 and you should only increase your base when it’s time to negotiate a new contract.

In teaching it’s a lot different, but their some best practices that need to be put in place.  I strongly feel education as a whole needs to be overhauled.  The same basic education system hasn’t been touched in 15 years.  The subjects taught need to be re-vamped and updated from Kindergarten through high school.  I think cursive writing should be taken out, foreign languages should be installed way earlier than junior high, mathematics should be applied and budgeting along with computer courses that teach excel should be mandatory.  History in general needs to be updated.  There are huge portions of world and US history that are routinely left out or given a small paragraph on.  Teaching for a test doesn’t impress upon a student the need for continuing education throughout their life time.  All it does is reinforce to students they are only learning this portion of information to score well on a test.  It’s a short term goal that doesn’t continue to long term learning. 

Teachers that provoke our thoughts and challenge our minds are the ones we remember.  Those are the teachers that should be getting paid a lot more.  Yet they are usually the ones that are ostracized by the masses.  I do think as a whole teacher’s should be paid more, a lot more.  If you job is to train societies next batch of humans to contribute to society the goal should be to get the best and brightest people in there.  Private Schools act this way and make a large profit doing so, public schooling should take a clue from the public sector and start operating under this notion.  They can’t though; the union wouldn’t allow hiring the best person for the job because they are available.  They wouldn’t allow replacing someone who has constantly let down the students and treated teaching with indifference.  They can’t truly gauge how a teacher interacts with his or her students because they have to give adequate notice on reviews.  Is it any wonder the profitable companies become so by their actions and governments at every level are going broke due to their operating procedures?  Would Warren Buffett, Gordan Bethune, or Michael Dell even consider operating their companies in the way a union or government does?