The Big Lie about Teacher Unions
So uninformed and so fascist. The writer of the article above firmly thinks that unions are the problem.
They aren’t….
The idea is to put the unionized teachers to work in a infectious wonderland and kill off the firebrands, blame the victims, and for sure do NOTHING for the children: that is what is article says. And once again genocidal plutocrats will win!
Look, any teacher can tell you that fall and winter in a public school is like sending smallpox ridden buffalo robes to the Sioux, what looks like a caring thing is really genocidal deceit.
If any of you ever have taught, or substituted, you know that the fall is flu ridden time, colds, measles, mumps, you need lots of vaccines to teach in a public school. You will be sick from September to January!
I got sick each and every fall for 36 years, sometimes severely. Look at the statistics, teachers and students get very sick every fall, over and over again.
And the damn old union, those leaders of an association of professors not teamsters, keep telling you that fully opening schools will be a super spreader and only perpetuate the pandemic and kill more people, especially teachers. And this article says that is bad old unionism fault?!
Teachers have been second class citizens for a couple reasons: one they were made targets when then joined associations because they were being paid like custodians AND had no social security and a pension system that kept them working until they died.
And then the economy changed, demanding at least high school graduates and even college. Suddenly a system of education that was built for over 50% who did not finish high school but went to work in the robust manual labor economy was suddenly (in historic terms) told to morph in a couple years, into a college prep, high technology school system of high science and math teaching.
And it didn’t happen because it was impossible. All the scientists, mathematicians etc went to Silicon Valley because the starting salary for a teacher in California was raised to $35,000 dollars while a computer scientists starts at $100,000. What would you decide to do? The answer is obvious.
Along with that was the asbestos scare, rightfully demanding that the killer cold weather mitigation, kept kids warm, now had to be retrofitted out of every school in the state.
AND, the schools were made, by court edict, the leading edge of the storm to integrate public schools, whose parents did not want integrated.
So public schools that heretofore were “secondary schools” vocationally oriented with a small percentage college prep; about 10%. The other 90 percent did not finish high school.
In 1965 when I graduated from high school, only about 40% of students finished high school, the rest went to work. In 1995 when I was in a workshop that was about equity in schools; 80 percent were finishing high school. In just 30 years we went from a 40% graduate rate to over 80%.
This is a reality…add to it the cost of living skyrocketing and Prop 13, that turned funding of schools into poverty row, and you have a dysfunctional school system. And that was not labor’s fault!
The educational plants (using industrial terms for what is a human enterprise) have been neglected and not appreciably grown since 1965. That’s right, the infrastructure that runs pubic education in California has not been built up since 1959, when the SCOTUS forbade segregation in schools.
And overcrowding, that many think was the baby boom, was really caused by students staying in school longer because a high school diploma became in one generation a Segway to success; ie., college.
Now, teacher’s unions are to blame? …They aren’t.
California who used to be a leader in basically what were college prep schools for 30% and vocational portals for the rest into non diploma demanding jobs, now fell to 50th in categories like overcrowding and funding per student.
In 1940 California was a leader in public education, it 1980 it was a follower…
Increasing population was the second reason for over crowding in public schools, the real culprit was the economy that no longer needed manual labor, but now needed highly educated people, so kids stayed in school longer.
We went in 20 years from a system that graduated say 30% of freshmen class to 80%. Something had to give in that new reality!
That is a reality that also was trying to integrate all the schools. Reagan took care of that along with Prop 13. Both kneecapped the public school system in California that once was the goal of the nation, now thanks to good ole Conservatism, dropped to the bottom of effective school systems!
How do I know this? I lived it!
So now the school and unions are blamed for a failing system, that was organized in the first place on the standard that teachers should be (and still are) woefully underpaid; considering their new mission, that is to graduate EVERYONE and aim them for “secondary education”; ie., highly technical and demanding higher education JOBS!
The reason for the underpay, most teachers prior to 1950 especially in elementary schools were women, and women could not make the same salary of men; even if the men worked in a factory.. That same double standard is ion practice as we speak!
So the USA fell further behind in education in one generation, because it didn’t have any political clout, and were chosen as the whipping boy for the segregationists who were enraged when black and brown students showed up in their Lilly white schools.
The Pandemic, as usual shows America how its caste society is so bad, that not having socialized education in a recipe for disaster, that selfishness and individualism is useless when facing societal crisis. And Americans are still taught that individualism is supreme: See the Horaio Alger myths!
Witness Texas and its suicidal beliefs against regulation that loves fossil fuel based private enterprise and now are a disaster area because they don’t regulate anything in facing a simple ice storm.
People who hate government make bad governors, as the Texas governer blamed wind turbines for causing the breakdown of the electical grid. And those same government haters have made California state policy about education for fifty years! No wonder the schools are dysfunctional!
Are you kidding me!
Public nothing , anti government everything, is what Republicans love since most of them don’t need public services because they are hopelessly rich.
The middle class, that is getting it from all sides, declines further into poverty because all the money is now in a non regulated privatized economy that only makes the rich, richer!
And this means killing public education and segregation recoverning its evil to become the standard today, with Charter Schools an escape route for segregation. I just did a school that is running like 90% non white, and is touting itself as a way to college for poor kids..and this is in liberal San Francisco; hopelessly segregated. And this is 2021 not 1965!
Now, schools are being bullied by the same gang that killed public education a generation ago, into opening its gates to sick children who will infect teachers.
Why, well fascist genocide of teacher’s unions leaps to mind! Kill the unions and you kill uppity teachers….they need to go back to the good ole days, when teachers were mostly women, and quite ones at that!
So add sexism to the lists of what is wrong with California schools…
Before any person to person education should happen is when everyone, including the children, get vaccinated. And that won’t happen until summer at least.
We tried the to keep schools open with polio, back in the day, keeping the schools open no matter what, and a lot of people caught polio.
That’s because polio was infectious, and schools then as now, were infection machines.
We first need to fund our schools so they can compete with schools in China and finally realize that our country depends on it, and even Republicans are willing to pay for quality education.
It aint going to happen to quote a phrase from Republican Political playbook. They will never support public education not because of teacher unions, but because they hate all public anything! The enemy of a fascist organization is equity and inclusiveness, and pubic schools are organized around those two principles…But the truth is in principle only!
Why do we care. Because the rest of the world is kicking our ass economically and have passed us by; leaving a 30% of Trump supporters holding the economic bag!
The de-schooling of America is alive and well today! And it will result in the inevitable:
A FASCIST STATE!