September 4, 2006
"EDUCATORS" VS. STUDENTS:
Labor Day lesson: Unions still hurt schoolkids (Stanley Crouch, 9/04/06, NY Daily News)
[I]f unions are happy with the impaired condition of business, it's doubly clear that something is wrong. Somebody is getting shafted while a self-righteous tone is set and crocodile tears of empathy are shed in honor of the heroic worker, who has scored a victory through the equally heroic efforts of union leaders ever ready to argue and negotiate all through the night.Ideally, there should be something that parallels the forces in federal government, each fighting to hold the other in its rightful place while asserting its own identity. It should be clear on this Labor Day, and always, that collective bargaining is essential in a society as large and complex as ours, regardless of how unions are often dismissed as the worst reptiles to rise since Satan put on a suit of scales and conned Eve into destroying paradise.
Yet unions can try to pass off wheelbarrows full of dung as something other than potential fertilizer. At this point, we can see that the grand monster and enemy of public education in our fair city has struck again. That monster is the principals union, which almost always seems more concerned with feather beds for its members than quality performance. As we found out last week from Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a union contract requires the city to keep 44 inept assistant principals to the tune of millions of dollars when what is actually needed amounts to more high quality teachers.
In other words, we have another example of the infamous "dance of the lemons," the shuffling of the incapable throughout the system, which the principals of our schools have complained about for years. In fact, keeping the lemons employed has long been considered a policy that forces schools dominated with minorities to hold the bag, since those are the places so many of these insults to public education are assigned.
As long as middle class white kids get decent educations and only inner city kids of color get left behind, neither party will bite the bullet and break this kind of cycle. The piles of dung aren't in our schoolyards. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 4, 2006 9:34 AM
What you miss is that education is the ultimate "quality of life" issue for the party that picks it up. And it's not "quality of the parents' life" -- it's the quality of your life when you spend time having all your groceries scanned in again when you say "You left out the X", trying to be helpful to a young person who doesn't know how to make the register work well enough to make the sale. He can't add something on, he can't make change, and is a little lost when you break a pattern like that.
To give another example of a political issue affected by education: conservation doesn't mean anything when the people who have to do it have easier ways to do it and don't understand why they should prefer something else.
Posted by: Arnold Williams at September 4, 2006 10:03 AMIt was interesting 29 years ago in New York to watch parents of mostly middle-class students team with top officials with the city's teacher's union to torpedo one of the first initiatives by Jimmy Carter's new Department of Education, which was to eliminate the three academic high schools in New York, because the ground rules for admission were deemed to be culturally/racially biased. The reaction -- mostly from adults who were Democrats, and who the Carter people thought would surely be on their side on this matter -- was swift and angry; not only from the parents who didn't want to see their children mixed in with the other inner-city youth and ignored, but from the teachers, who either wanted their kids to have the same acedemic options or who were already teaching at one of those schools, and knew they had the administrative support there from both the Board of Education and from the parents to actually get things done.
To be as fair as possible to the Carterites, their idea was if you spread all those kids around, you would improve the results of the other schools in the city, many of which were just seen as warehouse duming grounds for teens until they turned legal age. But what the parents feared (and what the teachers likely knew would happen) would be those kids would just get sucked into the failed education structure at the district high schools, and all you'd end up with was three more schools and about 10,000 more kids that nobody cared about. That's why in this case, Carter ended up having to back down when UFT President Albert Shanker read him the riot act.
Under-performance is still pretty much the case today at the district school level, though at least Klein is trying to do something about it, and his Democratic Party credentials make it harder for the union to vilify over the principals' issue (once you reach that level, you can coast far more easily in a bad school than if your an actual teacher, who no matter how dedicated they are, has to deal with the students on a face-to-face basis without any decent support system from above).
Posted by: John at September 4, 2006 11:52 AM
At least some Republicans tried to push thru vouchers to starve the bad schools. Their fault is being inept, and are pushed around by the Democrats. The Democrats' goal is to make bad schools a perennial issue to extort more monies for their supporters. The parents of inner cities kids are reponsible for voting the same poverty pimps into office time and time again. They care more about pissing off the Republicans than educating their kids. Pathetic.
Posted by: ic at September 4, 2006 1:31 PMSuburban Republicans are afraid of the white parents who don't want black kids in their schools.
Posted by: oj at September 4, 2006 2:23 PMMandate low income housing in every nook and cranny and you won't have that problem.
Burr Ridge, IL is having that problem. In the local paper 2 weeks ago, a woman was complaining cos they're having "inner city" problems in their grade schools.
The estimated population, in 2003, was 10,781.
Income snapshot
-------------------------------------------------Median household income
Local
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$129,507
National
------------------------------------------------- $41,994
Source: 2000 census, U.S. Census Bureau
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Burr Ridge Real Estate MLS Sales Statistics for 2004
Information from MLSNI
184 Total Sales
Average List Price: 762,905
Average Sale Price: 729,048
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That's only from the Cook County side, not the DuPage side.