Reality is beginning to set in on all parties.
The headline is: Educators Find Themselves Vilified by the States They Serve
The opening paragraphs are:
Teachers and education support professionals recently started a new semester that brought with it new students and ideas, lesson plans, schedules and all the other pieces that go into making a school year. Added to their plates, however, will be a serious and growing concern: the vilification in state after state of teachers and other school employees, as critics seek to silence their voices in the debate on how to improve America’s public schools.
Everyone it seems, whether or not they have teaching experience or an education background, knows how teachers should do their jobs, be evaluated and paid. Some proposals are based on valid research, but increasingly governors and state elected officials are pushing legislation and policies that paint teachers as obstacles that should be removed from decisions involving what goes on in the classroom.
Cast by some politicians as the enemy standing in the way of improving schools, teachers have become the target of choice. These politicians are using the current budget crises as an opportunity to turn public opinion against teachers and other school employees — all in the name of education reform.
The sense of triumph from Fall 2008 has turned into a real sense of fear, following fall 2010. The headline news was the recapture of the US House, fueled by the Tea Party. More significantly, there was a sea change in the state legislatures of the US, toward the conservative end of the Republican Party. These are the people who make the real decisions on where a state will and won't spend money, and very few of that new majority in any state will have the interests of the teachers' union held dear to heart. Many of them ran on the promise to reign the public sector unions in.
As appalled as he is about the situation in our schools, OS doesn't think that it's good to beat teachers up. It's a tough job, and those who do it well are part of the glue that holds a county or city together. However, the US as a culture has done an abysmal job of educating its young for forty years, and we are really feeling the effects of that failure. The militancy of the teachers' unions during that same period has not proven wise. The message has been perceived to be: 'Give us more, and we'll deliver more.' The taxpayer delivered massively more money, a huge bureaucracy was built, and the schools deteriorated.
Very easy to direct one's ire at a convenient target, in this case, the teachers' unions. Very easy to simply vilify, use that broad tar brush. The unions, without a doubt, are part of the problem, and their protests of innocence are aggravating. But they are only a part of the problem.
In the meantime, for those with kids in school: You likely have some good teachers in the building, spitting in the wind of a hostile culture. Offer to help, and offer words of good cheer as you can. Make as sure as you can that your family and your kids are not part of the problems they face every day.
Your state is out of money, and jobs and pensions are going to be reduced. The jobs may come back, but those pension and bennies packages won't. That's just math. Vilifying your local teacher won't solve the math problem.
As members of the union, they'll have to soon sort out what to do about a leadership that has led them over the cliff. Vitriol directed at your local teacher will only harden and strengthen the hand of the hard-core statists now at the helm.
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