Teach for America: Union Buster

Outfits like Teach for America claimed to be filling a shortage of teachers. Now they’re arguing that teaching should be a short-term career.
If there was ever any doubt, it is now gone: these groups are much less interested in teaching America’s inner-city schoolchildren than they are in busting teachers unions. There is no other logical explanation for the laughable assertion that a teacher can become a great teacher in one or two years, as Wendy Kopp argues. Everyone knows that good teaching requires lots of experience. Unfortunately, from the standpoint of antiunion, cheap employers, experienced teachers have to be paid for. It’s so depressing to watch professionals be replaced by amateurs.

10 Comments.

  • Couldn’t agree more with the idea of busting these unions. All of them. Teachers, cops, etc … all of those unions must be busted. Period. Ted thinks of these things with reflexive emotion, but that’s tiresome. These teachers hide behind the union to protect their poor performance and that needs to stop. Too many teachers burn out quickly because teaching is not the fulfilling job they thought it would be, so they turn into crappy teachers hiding behind the union. No more. That needs to end.

    Cops are even worse. Their union does everything it can to preserve existing drug laws because it not only preserves many of their jobs, it provides a career path in law enforcement — a concept that shouldn’t even exist. Law enforcement should be a job, not a career. To that end, bust up their union too. They should have zero influence in the crafting of legislation in this nation, zero. Talk about a conflict of interest.

    Unions are totally unnecessary today. The items they fought for are standard now. The only thing they provide now is bloated bureaucracy, protection of poor performance, and legislative influence. Bust up all unions, now.

  • What union goals are you talking about ex? Two of the main goals of unions have always been (1) good wages, (2) job security. Number #2 they’re holding in government but lost it everywhere else. #1 the cops have but teachers don’t. In any case I can’t imagine how you can claim they accomplished all their goals and aren’t needed anymore

  • @exkiodexian:

    Well I’ll save the argument on Unions for another time as I am short on time right now and you have some interesting points in relation to the two unions that you singled out which would thus require a while to address.

    But what I will focus on is amateurism which is at the heart of the matter. I listen through a lot of the Bloomberg.edu pod casts while I work and they interview a lot of teachers, a lot of completely uninvested third party analysts, and anyone in between. There is a lot of disagreement between them all on many things, but there are a few areas where they all agree.

    1) There are indeed a ton of teachers who find the carrier not as fulfilling as they imagined, or not what they hoped, as well as people simply not cut out for the job. These people overwhelmingly tend to leave at the end of the first or second year of teaching and do so under their own volition. No need to union bust to fix this problem as the vast majority the worst sort themselves out and purge themselves from the system about as quickly as even harsh management could. The way the job is set up in America right now it is so stressful and intense that for the most part, if you don’t love it and are passionate about it, you end up hating it and moving onto greener pastures almost immediately. Indeed voluntary attrition rates for new teachers is as high as 50% in the first two years in many areas of the states.

    2) People who eventually become good to excellent teachers still spend roughly their first five years failing miserably at it. Even in the interviews with teachers who have been nominated for multiple teaching awards by parents, students, and other teachers alike, there is an open admission by these teachers themselves that it took them about half a decade to stop being a miserable failure, get their feet, and actually figure out what the hell they are and need to be doing and start doing it well. Almost everyone is an abominably awful teacher the first year or two no mater how great they end up being.

    This is Ted’s main complaint, amateurism. Lets leave the whole union thing aside for now, Teach for America seems to want teaching to be a short-term carrier now union or no. But that basically means that Teach for America wants to maximize the amount of teachers who are in their abominably awful phase of their carrier. Even mediocre teachers who took over a decade to get to that mediocre point are far better to have and keep in the system then fresh first or second year teachers who have the potential to one day be phenomenal, but who currently suck and will in turn be churned out of the system and replaced with fresh crappy teachers before they have a chance to become good.

    In conclusion, teaching is a difficult job with a steep learning curve and the only thing that can prepare you for it, is teaching with teachers self selecting for passion and effectiveness almost as well as management could. Thus, whatever you want to do about unions, fast churn and its inevitable result of amateurism in teaching would represent a critical failure for the educational system that would be a huge step back. Yes horrible teachers can and do get stuck in the system for decades and something should be done about this. But the endurant horrible teachers are a decided minority, the majority of them, the competent to good ones, needed teaching to be a carrier to get competent or good. This is the crux of Teds complaint, favoring amateurism over wisdom and practice in a carrier where wisdom and practice really matters and amateurism is really toxic to the results.

    As for your arguments about police not being a long term carrier, those are interesting and have some compelling aspects to them. I will have to think more about them, but either way teachers are a totally different story from cops.

  • The last thing we need to do as far as education is to treat teachers even shittier than we treat them now.
    Despite all the high and lofty rhetoric about how important education is in the USA, especially considering readiness for jobs and global competition, most teachers, in reality, are considered fairly low down on the ladder as far as respect goes. Union? Unions have their place in representing professions like teaching that garner little respect, have fairly low wages, and employees that have little power to effect much change within the profession or job. As far a higher-level education like colleges and universities, how in the heck did we end up with the most expensive schools in the world while many other countries provide the opportunities for these levels at low or little cost to the students? Our higher-level educational system looks like our healthcare system in terms of costs and availability.

  • alex_the_tired
    August 28, 2013 5:59 AM

    Ted,

    It’s interesting that you focus on teaching. The amateurishness affects almost all fields though. But I would argue that the groups like Teach for America aren’t interested in busting unions. That’s incidental.

    America, for the most part, hates — I mean really, really loathes and despises — poor people. And by poor people, I mean brown people too. Do you know the most effective way to keep a poor person poor? Give them crummy schools. Fill those schools with the newest, rawest teachers. By newest teachers, I mean youngest, because the youngest have nothing to offer and have almost no experiences to fall back on that would allow them to improvise. The one thing missing? A bloated, inefficient infrastructure that doesn’t do anything because it’s a political animal filled with cronies.

    You could fix the schools in 30 seconds:

    1. No one is required to attend. You don’t want to be here? Fine. We don’t want you here.
    2. The teacher retains absolute dictatorial control of his or her classroom. Teach wants a student out of there? Student’s gone. Try another classroom kid with another teacher.
    3. All students are allowed to attend ANY school they wish to attend. (You want to see standards shape up? Watch what happens when six kids from the Bronx show up at the Upper East Side public school where there’s state-of-the-art equipment in every classroom and the “junior” member of staff is the one who only has a degree from Vassar. “Why don’t you go to school nearer to your home?” “Our classroom doesn’t have computers. We don’t even have chalk. Is that your white daughter over there?”)

    And after that, you could fix the problems with curriculum and how none of what you learn in high school prepares you for either college or life.

  • Oppositional unions are key to opposing state power, while corporate shops and captured unions are extensions of the state. Anyone happy to bust unions is a worthless, pro-state fuck, and that’s not just dislike, that’s historical tribalism. Anti-state, pro-worker unions are the only reason why we have rights left to lose at this point.

    What’s hilarious here is that rightwingers, especially “libertarian” rightwingers, spew bullshit about the importance of the individual to do as he pleases, and use this to justify corporate lawlessness. After all, anyone can form a corporation. That said, as soon as that individual organizes in a way they don’t like, sneers and slurs come out. Organize a corporation? Get your ass kissed. Organize a union? Get accused of communism. Freedom of assembly is only for People We Like, and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.

    In the case of teachers, what we’re seeing here is a massive campaign of theft led by legislatures, schoolboards, and financial interests, with a bit of backup from the judiciary: don’t go proving systemic racism in the funding process through empirical, objective means or Scalia will claim you “prove too much!” That way you can have a bit of word salad with your shit sandwich.

    Keeping the workers inexperienced and unprofessional is essential for ripping off the system. It’s the natural next step after you have destroyed accountability. Some of you may have noted that “accountability” is all everyone talks about in education — but that only applies to teachers (and, by extension, some principals). And they’re the group with the least leverage on student success. There is ZERO accountability for the leg. and the schoolboard, and that’s how they like it. Zero. Fucking none. And they managed to achieve that by giving teachers non-empirical, Warner Bros. cartoon quality “standards” that may as well measure a teacher’s effect on Mercury’s rotation. Once the teacher is responsible for the schoolboard and legislature’s decisions, the latter two groups are free to do as they please.

    And once teachers are basically unable to meet the anti-meritocratic methods being spewed by statist, corporate interests, they have no way of protecting their position. (Hell, buy out a union and the union will help make that happen!) The next step is to simply get rid of teachers as an academic profession altogether.

    We’re talking about something the ONION gets right, effortlessly:

    http://www.theonion.com/articles/my-year-volunteering-as-a-teacher-helped-educate-a,28803/

    Reactionaries think with their gut, and your gut is good for one thing: making shit. Having wallowed in their own emotions, they come up with boogeymen that have nothing to do with real-world threats. This is why they scream bloody murder about the threat of a grade-school teacher, but are mum when it comes to schoolboards (who have 95% of school spending power in many places). But that’s not inconsistent! Oh no, they’ll happily back the police unions and the prison guard unions because those guys keep the darkies down. At the end of the day, all this “freedom” talk is banal bullshit: the defining characteristic of the authoritarian is, rhetoric aside, he’ll be a good little bitch and kiss the whip.

    Keep that in mind when you read the NYT piece. How can “teacher accountability” be important if you’re doing your best to get the least qualified people into teaching? That makes no fucking sense — you’re encouraging the WORST teachers to make up the bulk of the profession while trying to “thin the herd” of the worst ones — which is pointless even in and of itself since the turnover rate is so high you won’t be able to make any progress there. But does the NYT note this blatantly obvious problem? Nope. Because being a good little toady means bending over without complaint.

  • Thanks for your wing-nut comment Ex; it has brought out the best in others who would have had much less to say without your bit of “sand in the oyster that makes a pearl.”

    I once “sided” with a bunch of Confederate Flag wavers, commiserating with them in their discomfort in having to share space with the “lesser races.” I asked them to empathize with me in my condition of being one of the “master race”, on having to share space with them, they being genetically lessers to me.

    All in good fun, you know.

  • “Anyone happy to bust unions is a worthless, pro-state fuck”.

    What a pile of shit. Total ignorant shit. That said, you also have no idea what you’re talking about.

    For some odd reason people on the left reflexively side with unions, and here’s the irony: 99.9% of the left (the Ted Rall left, that is) have NEVER been in a union. Never! If Ted were forced into a union, a REAL union, he’d be crying and bitching about it relentlessly. Why? Because he’d find out that the union picks his pocket for very little in return, that unions are corrupt power structures of their own, that unions are bloated bureaucracies that serve their powerful members career goals more than its rank and file.

    You want to strip corporate power? State power? And you think what exactly, that unions are the way to do that? Dream on pal. You’re delusional.

  • Cute choice of words. “A pile of shit” is the term used to refer to the factory-town owners. “A pile of shit” is what we’d call the employers who’d work their employees seven days a week. “A pile of shit” is what we called the Lochner decision which invented a bullshit “liberty of contract” theory that let our rich aristocracy shred the Constitution and dictate employee conditions and negate the express will of the people, also called by the legal community The Worst Ruling In U.S. History (before Bush v. Gore and Citizens United) — yes, worse than Dredd Scott.

    Unions fought these piles of shit and the piles of shit lost. In the real world. Pro-state union-busting fucks lost because of union action. Again, that’s not some pie-in-the-sky idealistic dribble, that’s real-world effects. There are millions alive today, who wouldn’t be, because of the labor movement. The lives of my family members are better because of the labor movement. This is measurable, empirical improvement.

    “You want to strip corporate power? State power? And you think what exactly, that unions are the way to do that? Dream on pal. You’re delusional.”

    I live in the real world while you indulge in masturbatory fantasies. Clean unions got us the weekend. What do you have besides bullshit and incoherent rhetoric?

    The first thing — the first thing — that fascists in our corporate structure did once they got the presidency with Nixon was target unions relentlessly. They knew their enemy. Every major goddamn economic policy we’ve had in the last forty years has been directed to smash labor. This was never merely about money; it was always about power. Unions that aren’t corrupted are crushed, no matter the cost. Wal-Mart will simply close down the whole store the moment one unionizes.

    That’s reality. If unions weren’t a threat, then we wouldn’t have seen the leadership of corporate America call them the biggest threat to their hegemony. Several times.

    You can’t back your shit up with facts. You can’t address the labor movement or its gains. You can’t explain how union pressures led to the creation of the middle class in the first place.

    But, hey, don’t let that stop you. Feel free to wallow in your own bullshit. Just don’t expect to convince anyone else that workplace safety regs and time-and-a-half and the weekend were delivered by the fucking stork. Those of us in the empirical realm, as opposed to your own ethereal paradise, don’t have the luxury.

  • @ ex – Where do you get your “fakts”? Where do you have the temerity to bark out generalizations and assumptions that are just plainly wrong in so many ways? 99.9% people here never been in unions? I have been in a union twice, and in both jobs the pay was fairly good because of it. The union rules guaranteed me a job back when I left it to go serve in the military, and it also provided for incremental pay raises to follow the economy. Look at al the poor-paying service jobs that are now replacing the jobs lost during the recession/depression, and how poorly people are being treated by McDonalds, Wal-Mart, etc. If anything, we need unions to come back, not eliminate them. Do you know you sound like a T-bagger? Just look at the reactions you have got from others here, and instead of simply reacting more angrey, stop and think for a moment. Suspend your anger for a bit and look around at what has happened to our middle class and how so many earn a living now.

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