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<p>While I can recognize just about every conversation on this board as having a basis in reality where I taught, Tom1944’s posting jumped out at me as “Smart.”
As Deep Throat said (in the Watergate movie, it was actually a screenwritten line not from the book): “Follow the Money…” Then you’ll understand.</p>
<p>That, and sex…or as the professors say, “gender.”</p>
<p>Historically, teachers and nurses were the jobs available to women whose position in society did not enable them to argue well for higher wages. In the l9th century, the degree of personal control by school boards was extraordinary to our ears: they couldn’t be married or pregnant. (Why? Less devoted to their work? Is it a priesthood? To ensure they’d always be young and without spokespersons in the form of trheir husbands to advocate for better salaries? I don’t know but I wonder.) So enter the spinster schoolmarm in the one-room schoolhouse.</p>
<p>Job conditions that upset people on the board here should not be resented.
Whether it’s a half hour or 50 minute lunch, it was all hard-won by collective bargaining by a union for one group contract, with other things given up in return. Most people understand that having 30 minutes to eat and hit the bathroom improves one’s ability to work well. When you see teachers walk into a faculty room for their 30 minute brown bag lunch, recognize that at some point their right to a “duty-free lunch period” was won at the cost of some other thing they might have also wanted but was deemed less important to them by the teacher membership. It’s all hammered out in collective bargaining, but anything decent or humane in the teacher’s day probably came from a union lawyer arm-wrestling the school board lawyer at contract negotiation time (“collective bargaining”).</p>
<p>The push for tenure by teachers unions was largely in reponse to the habits of school board members to oust a teacher so that his relative could assume her job.That, plus persecution for political views held, as described in the current article about tenured science teachers having the nerve to defy the board over how to teach Creationism. To achieve tenure, other rewards went by the wayside.
It’s arm-wrestling, again.</p>
<p>For trends re: whether we should all get off of “tenure” as a sacred cow, I’d be watching the Charter School Movement. One of the first things they did was eliminate tenure and hire non-union teachers, in NY State anyway. They are free to hire and fire at will. WHile some can produce creative results, I’ll be watching to see whether in fact they have a revolving door of newbie teachers. As soon as someone gets five years of experrience, she’s too experienced to afford to keep. So then begins the squeeze-play to get them to resign; if they won’t, harass them during performance evaluations and find reasons to fire good teachers with five years’ experience at the Charter School. So choose your poison: a tearful new teacher who cannot handle the innately stressful world that is Children, or a wizzened and burned out tenured veteraqn. Neither is a very good teacher. One system costs less than the other, however. Many new teachers begin at Charter Schools where the salary is almost comparable to publics, but there is no tenure. At that moment in their nascent career, they don’t care about tenure.</p>
<p>Maybe if we’d internalize what we already know, that we’re leaving behind a manufacturing society and entering something else (information age?), we’ll understand that a muscled-but-illiterate h.s. graduate can produce NOTHING for our country. That was not true in the l9th century when the public school teaching profession was established. </p>
<p>Free market is an interesting lens to look at all of this. “Tom1944” should go to the head of the class…but wait, we’re teaching at centers, so I guess, “Go to the middle of the room!” :)</p>
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