It’s All About The Kids!

This could be the most boneheaded idea since, well at least since this one. There are obviously some challenges around teachers’ contracts and dealing with persistent low-performers, but stunts like this hardly help address them and are actually counterproductive. This is more about de-legitimizing unions overall on a bunch of other issues (for instance taxes, wages, etc…) than it is about what’s good for kids.

5 Replies to “It’s All About The Kids!”

  1. Apparently no one has looked at this from a supply issue. Suppose you kick out all the bad teachers. Where will all these high quality replacements come from?

    No. The real answer is to prepare to teachers to teach. Policymakers and others need to stop thinking about solutions that are outside the work of teaching and start working on the core of education–which is the quality of teaching.

    You can offer incentives, start charters, buy out bad teachers, lower class sizes. None of these will directly improve what teachers do to teach students in classrooms. It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It looks like something different, but nothing has really changed.

  2. Well, what are fat old white guys supposed to be doing?

    Here’s the problem–they’re not offering nearly enough. Now if they offered a million bucks, teachers would be fighting one another to show how terrible they were, even if they weren’t.

    I’ll bet people would become teachers just so they could quit and collect. Haven’t these fat white guys got any real money to toss around?

  3. Does anyone really think the timing of this three-pronged anti-union attack in the New York Times (Andy & Co, the “Center for Union Facts”) is actually coincidental?

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