Stacks of paperwork. Lesson plans. Parents who blame you for all their little darling’s bad behavior. And you never really know if your charges have retained a little something from their time in your class.
Who needs all that?
Actually, those strange birds called public school teachers need it. They’ll work for decades in the hope they’ll see that light come on at just the right time in a kid’s development and—Bingo!—they’ve made a difference.
But then there are the others.
If you’ve been in school—any school, public, private, kindergarten or college—you know about the others. You may have known even more of them than you did the real teachers. The others are just sleepwalking to retirement. They long ago decided they could make the same money with minimal effort, so what th’ heck?
The others’ interest in teaching seems to end with pay and benefits. Why not just pass the time in class showing movies to the kids, or maybe just handing out ditto sheets? (Do they still make ditto sheets?) The others know they can afford to slack off. They’re backed by a union, and it takes an Act of Congress to fire them. So why bother teaching?
That’s why so many folks who’d like to see education reformed in this country are agin teachers’ unions. Consider this: Historically, teachers’ unions have been against merit pay, which is based on a simple enough principle: The better the teacher teaches, the more she—or he—gets paid. As in any other occupation. But the teachers’ unions have been against it! When teachers’ unions begin to put the interests of their paying members—all paying members, whether good, bad or inbetween—ahead of the welfare of the kids sitting at the desks . . . something is terribly wrong.
Consider what happened at a meeting of Pulaski County’s school board last Monday night. Teachers stood up for hours on end to tell the board that its decision to nix their contract was wrong, wrong, wrong. They wanted the board to start negotiations all over again. With the current union. And they gave their reasons why. Good for them. The right to peaceably assemble to petition for redress of grievances is one of our favorite parts of the First Amendment. Right behind that freedomof-the-press thing you might have heard about. But then we came across something in the news that caught our eye. Like a wasp.
The existing contract that the teachers currently operate under (until next month, at least) is 152 pages long.
One hundred and fifty-two pages.
Who has a 152-page contract? Outside of government and hedge funds, that is.
One teacher at Monday’s meeting with the school board explained that teachers have to do so many things without pay—like grading papers and taking students’ phone calls at home.
Can the teacher think that taking students’ calls at home is some kind of unjustified burden? Contrast that attitude with that at the KIPP school in Helena, where teachers have cell phones and are on call 24/7—whenever their students need them, for whatever reason, academic or probably not.
No matter what you might hear at a meeting of a teachers’ union, the world won’t stop spinning if Pulaski County’s school district chooses not to recognize this union any longer. There are a lot of school districts that have plenty of happy teachers who aren’t represented by a union or have 152-page contracts. Deciding to assure teachers’ rights—and students’ rights to a decent education—through some simpler, fairer system would be a big improvement. Many a school district does it that way.
At the least, choosing not to recognize the union as the teachers’ bargaining agent could help correct any impression that grading papers and taking phone calls from students is some kind of unfair labor practice. Instead of part of The Calling.
