visagrunt wrote:
There is no inconsistency CoMF.
Because teachers have insisted on being treated as salaried, unionized workers, they have foregone the ability to govern their own profession and build fences around their working conditions. Those issues have become collective bargaining issues which always fall away to the larger issue of salaries and benefits.
When you put things into that context, I'd have to agree that there's no inconsistency.
visagrunt wrote:
Meanwhile, on the other side of the negotiating table, managers of the education service are stuck in the middle, with increasing demand for services on one side, and ever decreasing resources on the other. Even when class size limits are the subject of collective agreements or education laws, they are routinely ignored. Public schools have no choice--they must enrol all eligible students and they must provide classroom space for them.
This isn't about how many dollars are in teachers pockets, it's about how many teachers there are in a give school to cope with the demand for services. It's about how many classrooms there are in schools to accommodate students. Just throwing money at the problem won't help, to be sure. But when school districts are starved of resources, they are compelled to cut optional things--like small classrooms, extra counsellors and special needs teachers, arts and music education, and streaming--in favour of delivering the services that they are legally compelled to provide, in ever larger, more crowded classrooms, in which one teacher must teach the entire of spectrum of students assembled there.
You say all this, and yet the student to teacher ratio in, say, New York City is not necessarily the same as the student to teacher ratio in Schenectady. Again, it's something that needs to be evaluated and addressed on a case-by-case basis rather than attempting to apply a blanket solution nationwide.
This is but one example, but the school in my locale has such a budget surplus that they've resorted to spending their funding on frivolous things, and I dare say that the teachers are pampered in the context of pay, benefits, and work load/teacher to student ratio when compared to others in their field working in other areas. Now, we can blame this on the unionized/tenured system for this if we wish, but frankly, I'm a little indignant over the fact that people who live in my area with a comparable or, in some cases,
better education have to settle for jobs that pay from less than half to a third of what these teachers are making and are working twice as hard for it. When these teachers have to choose between paying their rent/mortgage, paying their student loans, paying their utilities, or putting food on the table, then maybe I'll be inclined to feel more sympathy for them. As it stands, I regard them as little more than a pack of spoiled brats, and their true colors become painfully apparent every time their collective bargaining agreement is up for renewal.
Anyway, I'm not trying to demonize all teachers. I do know that some really do struggle because of the circumstances you've pointed out. The point I am trying to make is that I do not believe that all teachers everywhere in the United States have a patent on suffering, and I get really irritated when I perceive that someone is implying such.
26 Apr 2012, 1:18 pm
