This article explains the beauty of Democrat Run Progressive Government.
1. New York City has a bunch of teachers in their Government schools who are utterly incompetent, and even potentially dangerous.
2. They cannot fire them because of the powerful Teacher’s Union, so they pay them $150 Million a year to do nothing.
3. But now, to save money, they are planning on putting these incompetent and potentially dangerous people back into classrooms, and now the very, very best part
4. They are going to place them in poor and minority schools.
And, of course, the problem could be “solved” if the teachers union just got their hands on another nine-figure sum of taxpayer money.
Just wait until these people are running Health Care.
The one gov’t reform that should be given top priority is the elimination of gov’t employee unions.
Unlike private-sector unions, there is no one on the other side of the negotiating table. Pols buy union votes with other people’s money (current and future); the taxpayers (current and future) have no part in the negotiations.
Aside from ridiculous work rules (e.g. the inability to fire for cause), the promises that come due at some future date are a financial neutron bomb just about to go off.
Here is the down and dirty truth.
The school “system” does actually “triage” students. Those who can-and-will are divided from those who-might-but-likely-might-not from those who are all-but-hopeless.
Those who are all-but-hopeless have mental deficiencies, pathologies and abnormalities which do not lend themselves to either success or rehabilitation. Their later life incarceration rate is stupendous.
The BIG LIE is that Charles Murray’s data are “racist” and every child can be Einstein or at least a Professor of Philosophy.
Do you know those dolls which have weighed eyelids so that when you lay them down, their eyelids slam shut? That is what the last triage level of kids are like: Can’t be saved.
Are some of them misplaced and do some of them defy the odds? Yep. But a great school of education at some place like Harvard should be able to comb through them and pull those special types out for special educational olympics treatment and have a success rate of 80% or higher. Show me the program.
So, good on NYC for dragging the trash out of the teacher corps. But jamming them in which kids who are going to sink anyway is not exactly an injustice. It is more an admission of the truth.
We have bred a public housing and food stamp cohort of the population which Darwin would shake his head at. The malnourished brain is permanently stunted and the mind in that brain can not utilize what was permanently stunted in the early development years. So feed the kids sodas and chips and prop him in front of TV and shut him up when he bothers you and just wait and see what kind of kid you send to kindergarten. It won’t be a critter that understands the nuances of ethics and morality.
Yep, I think this is a serious mess–tenure needs to be reformed. I know that complaining about unions is all in good fun–don’t get me wrong, its an easy target. But then, one can look at Government at its ABSOLUTE finest–with the current circus being run by Republicans in Washington. The sh*t-show going on with the Federal Government and President Trump is just too breath-taking to ignore–though, you are doing a good job, V the K. Everyone knows that it is those leftists who have no real political power that are the real problem with this country. Those other people with their hands currently on the levers of power–no real problems there… Though some of them like Senator Corker (I am no fan of his by the way) do point out the obvious. Even Secretary Tillerson. But keep stoking the outrage at the leftists, V the K!
@Helio – those are hate facts.
We’re supposed to swallow the “blank slate” idea – that anyone, given a chance and enough school funding, can be a Ben Carson-like neurosurgeon, Sally Ride-like astrophysicist, or a Steve Jobs visionary.
This despite the evidence that a lot of people just aren’t all that bright – the people we encounter every day.
Accepting the Bell Curve and learning to adapt to its realities would probably do more to help the disadvantaged than all the malpractice of the last 100 years.
@Cas – Republican or Democrat, DC is a sh**show.
The permanent bureaucracy and “private-sector” leeches just grow and grow (the so-called Deep State).
The ructions in DC aren’t abnormal – it’s been this way for decades. The difference with Trump is that the deep state is making itself known and the media hostility to Trump borders on hysterical.
Trump certainly has his faults but he’s been exceptionally good at pissing off all the right people. We’re seeing DC as it really is.
The NYC “rubber rooms” are a reality:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room
I think LA has a similar arrangement and I’d bet money that many other districts also retain useless and/or dangerous teachers.
ever wonder how these people graduated from teacher’s college?
@#3 cas you do know they don’t have unions in communist countries don’t you?
The Left doesn’t want thinkers. It wants big government to make sure there are unthinking minorities to fill the voting booths. It’s their way. The Democrat Plantation politics is more than just bringing them in or breeding the minorities for poverty. It’s about the total sphere of an unthinking electorate filled with fear about people that don’t like them or the horror of a day where they have to be responsible for their own destinies.
Ask any old hippy if that’s what they had in mind during their flower power confabs or sticking it to the man festivals of imagine the world as one fantasy epics. They’re so confused that even they go into blanko mode & just vote Democrat. No need to think. Just vote in the teachers union mentality & social justice liars. That’s all that’s needed.
Devos is doing her best to deconstruct the teachers union fascists. Choice is something the Left doesn’t really want to return. That’s too bad, Libs! You hit like babies & grabbing political signs off people’s lawns is your only resort. As if that matters.
It’s so, so very easy to blast a Leftie. Robots & empty heads are easy targets. Every. Single. Time.
Cas, tell your employer to f*** off. Putin bet on the wrong horse.
Heliotrope : You are too long absent. You explicated what occurred to me when I read the post: this is actual social justice, albeit recursive.
Former teacher, some spent in blue cities. One, it’s easy to get rid of teachers. When an administrator doesn’t like you, they spring ambush meetings on you, where you can’t prepare, and you walk in and there are parents and administration there who have all been talking for an hour before your walked in….
They give you the worst classes. They stick little notes in your box every other day — See me tomorrow morning. They come sit in your classroom. They micromanage. They write up evals that lie. (I did a lesson on SCOTUS, landmark cases — the admin hated that I disciplined — she sat through whole lesson and then wrote “There were several students behind a partition in the back, in timeout.” That was the Supreme Court, deciding how to vote!) Too mean and too stupid to bear.
They love just out of school, PC, young, malleable teachers and harass older, traditional ones till they leave. However:
The worst teachers should be in those schools. Ever been in one? I’ve been in classes where you could not give consequences and parents would just accuse you of racism. I watched a teacher teach math to 5 kids in front, while the rest of the class gathered in back, dancing, playing cards, while listening to vulgar rap.
SO…schools are a mess. Only hope is to privatize.
Want to effective reform “teaching”?
Give any retiring mid-grade or senior NCO a teacher’s certificate and preference in hiring upon honorable discharge. You don’t have a successful NCO career without learning how to teach and handle teenagers. Many of their military specialties have real-world educational counterparts; languages, maths and sciences, physical education. Plus, with computer-aided learning it’s the interpersonal interactions between student and teacher that critical, …the technical can learned on-screen and in small seminar settings. And the military populations are rich in successful male, female and minority role-models…something most schools lack today.
The NEA unions will howl “…fascism!” and point to Starship Troopers, but they’ve already demonstrably-failed, so the NEA’s “opinions” don’t carry much weigh at this point…
Ted B.:
Concur, with the provision that rational people engage in the sort of social Judo you advocate: turn the Left upon itself.
When even a leftist admits that one of the systems over which they have had decades of complete control is an unmitigated disaster, do they do so of genuine concern or because the system is so deeply entrenched that there is simply no risk in denying what has been obvious to the right for all those same decades?
So. In effect, the school system is threatening the bad teachers with physical violence to get them to quit. Sending white teachers to black schools is a 100% chance of being robbed, raped, or just plain beaten. The white teachers are certainly smart enough to see it that way. Good plan. Shame they can’t say that out loud because it’s racist.
Speaking of big government. Check out this fantastic clip of an interview with a woman from China who grew up under communism and who now lives in the United States. She is awesome!
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/30670-Celebrate-100-years-of-communism-with-John-Stossel.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MaggiesFarm+%28Maggie%27s+Farm%29
Cas @ #3:
And within the top ten would be:
(Tell us about just one. But you won’t. Because you can’t get past the superior librarian prissed lips schtick and deal with just facts.)
Hi KCRob,
Thank you for the reply. Thank you for the link–it was illuminating. Yes, there are rubber rooms. Some people there are clearly bad news. The process they use to adjudicate the cases is clearly awful. What do you make of the reporting in the article you cited that there are people who are there because their administrators do not like them–for other than “being harmful to children”? Or where there is reasonable doubt therein? That they are good teachers but unfairly or unjustly maligned; that the rubber rooms are designed to break teachers and get rid of them? Some is deserved; some is not. Or do you disagree with that? That is what I got from the article. Here is an article right back at you from the same source concerning Diane Ravitch who was a champion concerning accountability and who has subsequently changed her mind. Interesting reading