There are a lot of people on “welfare” who work. The government subsidizes companies who don’t offer a living wage. This report is from 2020. I suppose you could argue that the data is old and irrelevant. My take? It’s 2025 and we haven’t fixed the problem identified over five years ago.
Some things to consider:
Approximately 70 percent of adult wage earners in both programs worked full-time hours (i.e., 35 hours or more) on a weekly basis and about one-half of them worked full-time hours annually
90 percent of wage-earning adults participating in each program worked in the private sector
I would say that the single greatest determinant of a public school’s success is the involvement of the parents. This is feed back from teachers I know that work in both the best and poorest schools. It’s self-fulfilling loop in many ways. Parents that care about education move to public school districts with better performance. You then have teachers that are accountable to active parents and children accountable to those parents. The loop is broken in poorer schools where single parent households are higher and or parents have to work more hours outside the home and can’t supervise their child as much in terms of education. In those areas, the failings of educators and the lack of accountability to students rises to the surface.
The question at the heart of all this is can you have a successful public school district where parents are indifferent to their child’s education or view the school as the babysitter? The only solution may be to close the worst performing schools and intersperse in small numbers those kids into other high quality public schools.
It’s not really an indictment of all unions or even teacher’s unions. It is an indictment of where unions, particularly in the public sector, engage in collective bargaining with decision makers that are not stakeholders. In those situations, the student is taking a backseat.
I would agree and the hardest thing is to get parents to do their job. You can have a wonderful teacher with a room full of kids who parents work the night shift or worse, stay out partying all the time, and Maybe a few kids will do good but the majority will fail.
I think back to our original discussion. The success of some public schools is not an indication that unions and the current education model is working. It is an indication that involved parents are making the difference. There is also another important factor to consider. As children become teenagers it has been proven that the greatest proximate influence becomes not parents but peers. When you put students in an environment where other students are highly focused on excelling, it becomes contagious. So, I think to some degree the answer may lie in not only an overhaul of the education system but in sprinkling kids at an early age from poorer school districts into better public or private institutions.
They aren’t meant to participate “in school” mostly, they take those parts that need to be done outside of school. When kids are little, read to them profusely. When kids are young, review their language and math lessons with them. When they are growing up, make sure they do their homework and really understand the material. And when they are in high school, make sure they take classes that actually challenge them. And when they apply to college, help them choose something that is actually worth something (to employers, to the world, etc).
Not fer nuthin’, but I think your need to reexamine your biases.
Harvard has a union for faculty. So does Dartmouth. Also Columbia, Brown, Rutgers, U of California, U of Michigan, and a host of others. In fact the NEA says it has 813 union contracts from which to draw for ideas. That’s a lot.
And while secondary private schools aren’t so well known as, say, Harvard, Google tells me there are lots of them - both public and private - with unions for faculty.
I don’t think we know that at all. There are a range of issues that unions work at. Obviously pay is one, but “working conditions” is another, and “adequate teaching resources” a third. Why would they bother if they’re only interested in ‘protecting teachers”?
The reality is that “teaching” has been a historically undervalued profession. Of course they have tried to find ways to re-value their work, and unions seems to be one of the few ways that has worked. Are they perfect? Obviously not. Do they have flaws, sometimes big ones? Sure. If you know of another way to improve the situation, have at it - but try for more than airy words like “we need to do better” and similar, built that’s no answer at all.
Likewise, the failure of some public schools is not an indication that unions and the current education model is failing.
I’m not advocating for the status quo, just pointing out that this argument is lame.
If only we had a department that researched what works, how to fund it, and how to execute it consistently across the US. A federal department, if you will, focused on education.
The US lacks a comprehensive education system that serves all students, aimed at meeting societal needs.
Education is perhaps the most difficult of all infrastructural (long long term investment in utterly vital stuff) investments, and it is difficult because you need to do it WELL for years upon years, and be ready and willing to FIX SCREW-UPS that are inevitable, and it always costs more than most think sensible, especially as in USAian experience it sucked for themselves and mostly never works.
Parents are less important if you keep kids in schools longer, feed and exerise and recreate them well, and have teachers and administation empowered to intercede when home life is failing. It can be done, and to an ever increasing degree it MUST be done.
This can be done. The USA invented ostensible universal education, transformed its immigrant populations well into the 1950’s, and then went stooopid with a vengeance.
Finland and most of Scandanavia, Japan, and Singapore. Even France.
I think we understand that teacher unions strongly favor lower student teacher ratios. 30:1 is too high. But I think 1:1 goes too far.
We also hear of classes where disruptive students make teaching difficult. We should do better.
And there are burned out teachers trying to hang on until they can retire. Unions protect them.
We can do better. If unions truly are working to improve education.
Amazing all those teachers getting advanced degrees and do theses on how to do it better. Yet few suggestions get implemented it seems. How can we not know how to teach? Resources to reach the difficult seems to be the heart of the problem. No doubt there are many dedicated teachers who take pride in their achievements. But too many seem to drop out in mid career maybe due to frustrations and low pay.
It’s a top down Bureacracy. The Superintendent decides on how and what they will teach. So lets imagine you are a Teacher and you have to teach In Oklahoma. You have to teach that Darwin is a quack and that intelligent design is true, then you have to teach the 2020 election was stolen. Now tell me how a teacher, with a masters degree, if they want to keep their jobs, can override that?
Teachers have very little input on what they teach and how they teach it because the District is changing the method and procedures constantly. In Nevada all teachers in public education have to keep their licenses up to date and they have to take classes to keep current. Yet they have no input. What is even Stranger is that Charter schools only have to have 80 percent of the teachers licensed, the other 20 percent can be total fools.
In New York City, the largest Department of Education in the country, it’s not just burned out teachers, ANY teacher that isn’t fit to be in a classroom goes to a “rubber room” where they are paid their full salary without doing any teaching. They remain there until they are fired (extremely difficult to do in NYC), they quit, or they retire.
The federal government has clearly failed at this task. However, it’s a typical argument and maybe the lamest of all. We just didn’t go big enough with Federal oversight and spending.
We do need to decouple the interests of students from those of unions, particularly the administrative bloat. I see competition for student dollars as a good first step. Having said that, it’s a long and difficult process that will require both public and private solutions.
Further, if you read my full comments, it’s clear that the most important single influence on the academic growth of children and the success of the school is the involvement of parents in overseeing that development.
Again, it’s not really a question of whether Unions are good or bad. The larger issue is the collective bargaining involves decision makers elected largely by unions, which means the public taxpayer and students are not necessarily equally represented in the process. California is perfect example where union support is almost always a requirement to even run and win public office. Yet, you have many public schools where less than 20% of students are proficient in basic subjects.
I’m not sure why you’re referencing colleges when we are discussing public primary schooling. Most if not all private schools have no unions but teacher associations with few bargaining powers afforded to them.
Education will always be influenced by politics. In public schools, we see that now in Oklahoma, with enforced Christianity and 2020 election skepticism. In my day, it was indoctrination against Communism. In private schools, the owner’s biases are reflected in the curriculum.
Thanks for the reply. My comment isn’t directed so much at the current flustercuck, but rather at our country’s long-term failure to provide a comprehensive education system that meets our society’s needs. We could throw more oversight and money at the problem, but without a clear, organized, and consistent plan, we’re just whizzing into the wind.
Where is this coming from? Are you saying that Superintendents are elected by unions?
So let’s see if I understand you. Unions bad Companies good. Unions should not be allowed into the political process but Business’s and people can throw as much money in as they want.
No, I’m saying public unions enjoy a special status not afforded to private unions. Management on behalf of shareholders negotiates terms with unions. Presumably, they try to strike a balance between making employees happy but maintaining their obligations to shareholders and ultimately customers. In addition, they must be mindful of the bottom line.
This separation is blurred with public sector unions where elected officials may
Be most interested in keeping teachers voting blocks happy and an important source of campaign funds. Is this really new information for anyone familiar with the pros and cons of collective bargaining?
In the end, the problem is not unions it is the extent to which legislatures are making decisions on behalf of them that are adverse to student interests.
