4 ms·

I think you touched on a key component to this and I'm curious if you agree with me or not. The level of effort expended by teachers in instructing their class

• mrguyorama 1y ago
  Ah yes the famous "If only unions didn't prevent administration from firing bad workers everything would be peachy" excuse. 1) Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. All you have to do to fire someone in a union is take notes that they failed in their job duties, email them about it, take notes that they didn't improve. Unions cannot prevent you from firing workers for cause. The vast majority of "benefits" teachers unions in the US provide is a phone number for a lawyer. If you can't convince a judge someone should have been fired, why are you paid anything at all? 2) The fact that the administration does not do the above is because there are zero teachers to replace them with, because nobody wants to be a teacher. They also don't do the above because they are woefully incompetent and utterly incapable of telling you which teachers are good teachers. Note that, no, students aren't good at telling you who are good teachers either. Administration and students alike often love teachers who are wildly incompetent and don't do their job, and just as often hate very competent teachers who aren't willing to jump when they say so. 3) The administration is incompetent and unable to fire teachers based on merit because they are politicians, not educators. They weren't hired for their competency as an educator, or skills as a manager, or experience dealing with children, but because they have enough clout in the small community to parlay that into a $250k a year job where he wastes taxpayer dollars on absurd projects. Property taxes are less than half one school district over, and their system isn't any more competent. If an administrator is unwilling to do the paperwork necessary to do their job, like fire someone who has union backing, means they should not be in administration, a job defined by paperwork. They get paid that insane sum of money to administrate a school district that has 500 kids in 3 schools which already all have their own administration staff. Meanwhile, they utterly refuse to support teachers trying to keep problem students (you know, that thing everyone always hates for holding their kids back and wasting everyone's classroom time) out of the way, and consistently bow to parental pressure to not punish misbehaving students because their job is political. Teachers want to get rid of misbehaving assholes, but the administration does not put in any effort to do so. This is all because every rural small town in America is dying. Anyone with any financial literacy, capability, or valuable skill ran away. All that's left are the people who had no life plan, who flunked out, who wasted their youth, and have not grown up emotionally from their highschool days. They coalesce and form your local "good ol boy" network, and tend to take over local politics. This superintendent had the job for decades despite continuing decline in outcomes. Hows that for not firing underperformers?
  • HDThoreaun 1y ago
    > Any union employee can still be terminated with minimal documentation demonstrating incompetency or any other issue. The leader of my cities police union had a relationship with a 17 year old at the high school he was stationed at. He was at jan 6. Hes been suspended 9 times and has 50 civilian complaints against him. 10 complaints were sustained. The city still could not fire him, though they certainly tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Catanzara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Catanzara
    • mrguyorama 1y ago
      >Catanzara resigned from the CPD in November 2021, as his firing from the CPD appeared imminent, and announced his intention to run for mayor of Chicago. It takes a lot of paperwork to fire cops because they have zero accountability, so showing "they didn't do their job" is actually hard. You can thank the supreme court for that. More importantly, the person who SHOULD be the one firing them, the Sheriff or Chief of police, is a fellow member of the "Fraternal order of Police" and that violates the usual "labor"/"management" split of unions in other roles. Those roles are often either appointed, in which the city should be hiring someone willing to fire bad cops, or voted in, in which case that's a general problem in the US that cops and judges who get voted on tend to be extremely horrifyingly authoritarian and tyrannical and the voters LOVE it. Nowhere in that link does it explain or document how they "tried to fire" the police officer at any point before 2021. Unions have no legal authority or power. Their entire "power" is in getting your job specified in a contract, and suing the employer for violating that contract when someone gets fired and has enough pull with union management. More importantly, for teachers, especially in Maine, the norm is single year contracts. There is no "tenure" or similar. You are only employed for a single year and the school districts have complete authority to just not hire you for the next year, which is their typical way to fire someone and happens often enough. IE, the entire worry of pc86 was invalid from the get go.