Sunday, March 6, 2011

Teachers aren't greedy, but that doesn't mean they don't suck.

I acutely understand the need to balance budgets, both on the state and federal levels, because, as we all know, the country is in massive debt. 

When I first heard that Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin wanted to alleviate his state's debt by decreasing state employees' salaries and benefits, I had no problems... at least not initially. I quickly switched directions, though, because his real intentions became apparent rather quickly. 

Governor Walker was more concerned about wrecking the unions than actually helping his state out of financial trouble. How do I know this? Well, its quite obvious if you pay attention! The state workers AGREED to ALL of the cuts he wanted to make... but Walker was not content with that. Nooo! He also wanted to strip the unions of what make them unions... collective bargaining.

It makes me laugh when the pundits on TV claim that the unions were being greedy. Really? They were the ones who accepted cuts in their pay and benefits to help the State of Wisconsin, and it was the governor who refused to implement these, potentially very beneficial, measures, because he was so focused on his personal goal of destroying the unions... something that really wouldn't do much, if anything, to help the debt. 

Some would also like to claim that state employees - Teachers are often bought up - are so greedy with their $50,000 salaries! I, not surprisingly, have a number of things to say on this point.

1. $50,000 isn't that much. Have you ever been to a public school? Have you seen the parking lots? OMG! Look at all those 1989 Volkswagon Jettas! Damn those teachers! Living large!

2. Why do people get so mad at teachers for making this amount of money, but don't blink an eye at Wall Street execs taking $5 million bonuses? Seems pretty hypocritical to me...

3. Some would claim that the aforementioned execs need high salaries to attract talent. Really? We just had the largest recession since the Great Depression. 

Clearly, the talent is pouring in. 

4. Are people saying we don't want to attract talent to the teaching profession? Seems to me that the people who we entrust with the important task of educating the next generation should be highly talented people. But that could just be me being stupid!

5. Wisconsin's average teacher salary is about $10k higher than the national average, so the teachers of Wisconsin aren't even a good examples of the profession's "greed" at large. 

6. A lot of people would like to claim that since teachers only work 9 months a year, they can't be deserving of a decent salary. The fact is, though, that most teachers take on extra work, like coaching a school team or teaching summer school. This shows how little their pay is, because even with this extra work, most teachers are still drivin' around in that Jetta built before I was born.

7. I heard an anchor on TV try to claim that teachers don't work very hard - After all, they finish work at 3 PM! Fair enough, but imagine if you're a 10th grade World History teacher and all 5 of your classes aka 150 kids each just turned in 8 page essays. Your day is DEFINITELY not gonna stop at 3 PM... not for a long while. If you're really lucky, though, it will... just in time for the next round of tests!

Any conservatives reading this may say that I'm just some left-wing socialist nut, but that is really not true. Why? Well, I actually really dislike the teachers union (I'll tell ya why in a second.). I also like my guns, thank you very much, but most importantly, 

I DON'T think Reagan was a bad president. 

There. I said it. Liberal friends, please don't kill me! If you're really lucky, I'll explain why I feel this way some day. 

Anyway, like I just said, I dislike the teachers unions. You may be confused since I championed the teachers' cause and may be wondering if I am bi-polar (I might be.). I actually have a legitimate argument, though. Teaching may be an exceptionally important profession, teachers may not get paid enough, and teaching may be harder than most people think, but, unlike what most teachers union people would like you to think, the fact of the matter is, 

There are A LOT of SHIT teachers out there. 

I, for instance, attended school in award winning, well-thought-of school district, and I still had more crap teachers than good ones. The reason for this is the abominable institution known as 

-play dramatic music-

Tenure. 

Why is this so awful? Well, it's because tenure makes it damned near impossible to fire a teacher. Some would like to tout the importance of job security, but tenure take this WAY to far. The very idea that my favorite teacher - the one I'd learned the most from and had the most fun in class with - could be fired before 2 of the WORST teachers I've ever had is RIDICULOUS. Luckily, she was not let go (Maybe the administration knew there would have been pillaging if she were?), but there was another teacher who I also really liked... that was fired... while the 2 AWFUL teachers kept their jobs, simply because they'd been teaching at the school longer. 

That, my friends, is royally fucked up. 

Society, or more specifically the school systems of America, need to take a pointer from the Free Market Playbook and encourage, though I hesitate to use the word, competition. Young, talented teachers should be rewarded, and old, used up (or simply just bad) ones should not be kept around simply out of some misplaced sense of loyalty. It's about the STUDENTS, not Mrs. ImCompletelyBatshitButIHaveBeenHereForTenYearsSoTheyCantFireMe. 

A teacher I highly respect once brought up an interesting point about teachers and their salaries. People may claim that collective bargaining for teachers is a good thing, but is that really the case? This teacher seemed to think not. He, in well-deserved arrogance, asked the class if we thought he was capable of arguing for his salary (We said yes.). This makes sense if you think about it. Good teachers are smart people who are not only capable of bargaining, but also have good records to support their claims of deserving a higher salary. Not only will bad teachers not have that record, but they also probably won't be intellectually or creatively capable of debating an administration for a higher salary. I don't exactly know how ending collective bargaining for teachers would work, of if it's even possible, but it seems like something to consider, because the fact of the matter is that collective bargaining, at least in the case of teachers, makes it so that the difference between the salaries of the best and worst performing teachers is much smaller than the difference in the talent, ability, and intellect of the two groups. This isn't to advocate destruction of collective bargaining for all professions, though, cause if you think about it, the very best teacher versus the very worst teacher can have profoundly different effects on society when compared to the very best garbage worker versus the very worst. 

Teaching is a profession that requires great creativity and knowledge; frankly, it should not be lumped in with a lot of other state jobs. Someone tasked with the job of passing on knowledge to a group of 150 teenagers - who, while they may be whiny and acne-infested, are our future leaders - has a far tougher and more important mission than the ordinary paper-pusher state employee. I don't think you can compare a truck driver to a teacher, because while both jobs are important, teaching is vital to the long-term stability of the entire country, and even the entire world. 

People need to realize how important teachers are and acknowledge that fact by paying them more money. Then again... maybe people don't realize this, because the great teachers are obscured by the plethora of shitty teachers who are impossible to fire. It really is a sort of a dark-clouds-blotting-out-the-sun kind of situation, so not only do we need to figure out a way to more easily rid the system of bad teachers, but we also need to attract better ones... Oh!! Maybe we should pay them more money! Personally, I know that, while I have no particular aversion to teaching, I would NEVER do it because I'd rather be a lawyer or doctor and actually be able to afford to drive around in, at the very least, a current model Jetta (coughAudicough). 

If I were to bet on it, though, the pundits would probably, in some convoluted and obscure way, say that the Attracting Talent Through Good Salaries theory applies to Wall Street but not teachers... because they're corporate whores. 

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