Sunday, September 27, 2015

THEY HATE TEACHERS AND ARE OUT TO DESTROY THEM AND THEIR UNION

It's the teachers they scream and their goddamn unions that are causing so much trouble in our underachieving schools.  Now I have knowN what the problem is for a very long time but somehow the MSM  school adminstrator's don't get it.

It all started in Chicago by our current Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan brought forth his magic wand to fix Chicago's schools.  His target of course was teachers and their Unions.  His first act was to pick a school fire the entire staff, from teachers to janitors and replace a majority of them with privately (trained?) teachers who of course are paid less have no unions and very few rights.

They did a lot of bragging of how great this was going to make our schools.  Closing many schools creating dangerous treks to schools no longer in their neighborhood.  Today they are still tinkering with the system with huge budget cuts to further complicate the problem.

Finally there is a study that says they were full of it and performance is more a function of the economic status of children.  Poverty stricken neighborhoods are the cause of poor performance , gee what a surprise.  There have been many pilot programs but the one I will now site was done in Baltimore where they rehabbed 5 schools fixed them up bought lots of computers.   At the time I thought gee this might actually work.  Sadly after a period they proved to be no more effective than the old schools what was obvious is that what did not change was the economic status of the neighborhood.

Now I'm sure there were some shinning stars that the system produce but nothing like they were promising.

Parents nationwide are in open rebellion they don't like what this is doing to their children and believe it causes teaching the test in stead of teaching the subject.  At a hefty cost of 1.7 billion they are not producing the desired result.  Under the threat of loosing their federal money if there is not 95%  participation  in the tests some school districts are not meeting the standard , none have lost their funding.

For my money this is a lightly veiled attach on teachers pay and benefits and against their unions who fight for them.  Who will be next in this attack, nurses , government workers .  They have destroyed and made ineffective a lot of unions and I'm sure they are not done.

The testing in the  schools is trying to be used to evaluate teachers just from  their test scores.  Trouble is they don't have any idea how to do that.  Using test scores as the primary tool for evaluation just don't cut it in my book.

The fury of trying all kinds of crazy stuff to fix the schools when the real problem is poverty have destroyed a few generation of kids.  I believe this all started in the 70's with the introduction of the new math and the new reading program. My kids were in the system in those days and some of us fought valiantly to stall the implementation of both of those.  Reducing math to 1's and 0's  didn't make sense to me as I didn't see how that would apply to the average lifestyle unless you were a computer geek.  Checkbooks aren't digital and neither are the prices in the grocery store.

It got worse from there, four hours a night of homework was torture plain and simple and deprived the kids of sleep, causing them to sleep in class or at least not pay attention.  On top of that they forced the kids to pack all their stuff in backpacks and lug them to school in the guise of making the schools safer. These programs effectively destroyed childhood as they left them with no time for play.

Needless to say none of this worked because they didn't fix the main cause POVERTY.  Until they address that nothing will change.  I would like to suggest that a good course in COMMON SENSE is in order to bring some sanity back into the system.

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