Madison WI Lefty/Union ProtestsFollow

Gov. Scott Walker is a massive douche. The unions have ALREADY conceded every single budget item, but Walker stands firm behind removing the collective bargaining rights of the unions, hence the protests. The reason the Democratic legislature in Wisconsin is AWOL is because as soon as they show up, the bill will be passed.



Link & LOL at Walker & his staff for "screening" this call.

I never thought I'd say this, but if you want to really know whats going on listen to Shep Smith on Fox.

Edited, Feb 24th 2011 2:42am by Omegavegeta

Teachers are underpaid. But that doesn't mean simple scaling is the way to pay them correctly. And no, bad teachers are not easy to fire once they get tenure.

And 7 hours was typical for what my school days were like. And being involved in many after school activities, I saw the bulk of the teachers gone within an hour of the school day ending.

Edited, Feb 24th 2011 9:07am by Uglysasquatch

My district got rid of 2 tenured, under-performing teachers in the past two years. It isn't hard if your school actually has proof to back it up.

Both were underperforming, but no other charges were brought up against them. The class test scores weren't up to par--I think the class average for these teachers was somewhere in the C/D range. The students in similar classes (topic/level) were averaging mid-Bs. Administrative reviews of the tests showed them to be on about an equal level of difficulty.

I know they were put on parole--the time frame and what that consisted of, I have no clue. But I assume it means "turn this the f*ck around or get out." They didn't, they lost their jobs.

As far as I know, the union didn't even make trouble, because the school had hard data.

Now, I'll grant that it's possible that there were other issues deliberately kept out of the public eye so that they could get jobs elsewhere. But I doubt the teachers would even get put on parole if that was the case.

Both were tenured--one had been there 4 years, the other for 5 (started at the same time, when the school opened).

And neither was the type of teacher readily available after school for help and such--one coached and the other stayed after like 1 day a week, max, for all her classes.

Maybe my district is just far more rigorous with tracking such things--I honestly have no clue how other districts work. I just know that we've never had a tenure issue, in as long as I can remember. The previous firing before that was several years earlier, when a teacher hit a student. But we've also always had generally good standardized test scores, and didn't have our own a high school until 7 years ago. So the legacy isn't super long. Most teachers in the school are tenured though, and nearly all are for the lower schools (1 middle school, 3 or 4 elementary schools).

[EDIT]

Damn, I didn't realize I was about to ding. >:(

I'm assuming it would have been harder to remove them had they been in a unique field, like the art teacher or something. But I don't really see any way around that, mostly because I have no clue how to even rate their teaching effectiveness.

Edited, Feb 24th 2011 10:43am by idiggory

Fine, fire the fucking administrators for being too lazy to work hard enough to ensure only quality teachers are employed.

Administrators are managers and any good manager knows that your own workload decreases significantly when you surround yourself with good staff.

Please tell me that you're going to school for a career that's government run.

Well, that's true. It's about whether they should be largely stripped of their ability to collectively bargain under a false pretense of balancing the budget.

Nah, the problem is the budget. There's lots of contributing factors to why their budget is fucked, & sure the wages, pensions, & benefits agreed upon between the state & the unions are some of those contributing factors, but the fact remains that these unions & their workers:

-DID NOTHING WRONG
-CONCEDED EVERY SINGLE BUDGET ISSUE

-And Walker jumped the proverbial Shark by one upping his *** raping of them by attempting to remove their collective bargaining rights.

As Shep said in my link, 7 of the 10 top donors to political campaigns donate to Republicans while those other 3, that donate to Dem's, are Unions. Sure, I get that Walker needs to solve his budget crisis, but he could do so without being a vindictive little piece of shit to the people who didn't vote for him. He was elected to serve all the people of Wisonsin, not just those that gave him $.

Also, he's kind of a cnut.

That, or I took the opportunity to take a light-hearted shot and you got a little butt-hurt.

Wait, do confused people get butthurt?

Maybe there's a language gap? The "symptom" is a budget that you can't balance without making significant cuts. You get that a bloated budget is the result of other things, right? The relevant question is: Why are those expenses going up? And the collective bargaining power of the state union organization is one of the key reasons. As long as they have it, it's almost impossible for the legislature to prevent budget bloat most of the time.

What happens is the same thing that happened in California. In the good times, the spending goes up because there's tons of money. But spending for many things in government isn't year to year. You allocated it and are stuck continuing to pay that much for various things *forever*. Then lean years hit and you get a budget crisis. The short term solution is to cut back on the things you can cut back on right then. That'll work, but once the lean times end, the problem will simply happen again.

Fix the cause and you might be able to avoid that problem the next time. Maybe when the next boom period hits, instead of state government ballooning and consuming all that extra money, the people of the state will get to keep more of it instead? Wouldn't that be nice?




No they didn't. They retained their collective bargaining power. Which means that as soon as this crisis passes, they'll just use that power to force a reversal of the concessions they gave up right now. It doesn't take long watching how unions operate to see this pattern btw. It happens constantly. They "give up" concessions, but a few years later, those very concessions are used to argue for new stuff.

Do you honestly not realize that in 3 or 5 years, when things have died down that the unions will organize for more pay and benefits and you'll hear arguments like "We took a pay cut back in 2010!" as the argument for a much bigger pay increase? Of course they will! It's what unions do all the time. What they give up today they take back tomorrow.



Do you know what collective bargaining means in this context? You quote the phrase "collective bargaining rights", but I suspect you don't actually know what that means. I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with "rights".



He ran on a platform of opposing the corrupt cycle of public money from legislature to unions to soft money campaign ads. I'd fully agree with you if he'd said nothing about unions, or had never made his position clear, nor had any of the other Republicans who won office in the last round of elections. But the reality is that the voters of WI specifically elected Republicans to a majority in that state on the issues of less spending for public workers, and opposition to teachers unions and their undue and corrupt influence on politics.


Whether you like what he's doing or not, it can't be argued that he's somehow opposing the will of the people, or that he was elected on the promise of doing one thing, and is now turning around and doing something completely different. He and his party is doing exactly what the majority of the voters in his state put them into office to do. And honestly, that's the biggest problem for the Dems. They're on the downside of the popularity of this issue. They're pulling out every stop to try to win support, but so far it doesn't look like anyone, from the legislators to the people of WI are buying it.

Edited, Feb 24th 2011 7:09pm by gbaji

Huh!? It was in the link in the sentence which immediately preceded the quote. Maybe you missed it?



/shrug

Do you know this? Or are you guessing? The wiki page says that's the typical length of a school day for both grade and secondary schools in the US (K-12). If you have an actual source and not just some gut instinct telling you that a school day must be longer, by all means provide it.



I didn't. I've provided a general link to said wiki page (yeah, take it for what it's worth), and another to a department of education page. I could probably sit here all day long and post links to various sources all saying that the typical public school day is about 6 hours, and the typical year is about 180 days. I'll note that the link you just provided confirms the same 180 day figure I provided btw.

Um... And in the scale between 6 and 8, 6.75 is closer to 6, isn't it? I'll also point out for purely anecdotal reasons that private schools often include things like morning prayer in their school day. In the Catholic school I attended for 7th and 8th grade (it was a K-8 school), every single morning included about a 30 minute assembly around the flag pole during which the entire school said prayers and the pledge. Contrast to the public school I'd attended the year before in which you simply showed up to your classroom in the morning and attendance and the pledge were part of the first period (not that we had defined periods in that school, but whatever).

You could argue that's equivalent to a homeroom period, but most K-6 grade public schools don't include homeroom periods. At least none that I ever attended did.

Obviously, there's variation, but the class day is definitely closer to 6 hours in length than 8.



But they don't work 25% longer on any given work day. You keep repeating this, but even the source you provided still shows a class day that's an hour and 15 minutes short of a full 8 hour day.

And did you miss the point I made about class units and pay? In any school with subject specific classes, (which is basically any public school past grade 6 I believe), the teachers teach 4 periods a day in a standard 6 period schedule to meet the base pay requirements for their position. Obviously, this changes based on what the specific schedule is, but that's the standard. They have what are called "prep periods". These are full class periods during which instruction would normally be taught, but during which a specific teacher isn't actually teaching anything. Depending on the specific schedule the school is on, and how many classes they're teaching, they will have typically one or two prep periods a day. That means that either 1/6th or 1/3rd of the day they are not actually teaching.


Different schools have different policies on this, but a teacher is generally "free" during that time. If said teacher wants to drive home and watch TV for that 45-50 minute period of time he could. I know lots of teachers who use their prep periods to run errands they need to do during the school day. In theory, the idea is for the teacher to use this to prepare for his upcoming class periods. And if he's behind on grading and whatnot, that's exactly what it's used for. But if he's caught up, it's literally free time.

The point being that if the base pay is calculated for 4 periods out of 6, that means that 2/3rds of the day isn't really being worked. Now, teachers have lots of work they have to do outside of class time. But that extra work is being used multiple times by those arguing this point. It can't possibly account for the extra time they get for prep *and* the extra time they get due to a natively shorter work day *and* the extra time they get for a natively shorter work year.

What I constantly run into is an argument that teachers days are long because even though the school day is less than 8 hours, they have to come in early and stay late in order to grade papers and what not. And they also argue that even though teachers only work 180 days a year, they have to grade papers and whatnot. And even though they get prep periods throughout the day during which they aren't actually teaching, they have to use that time grading papers and whatnot.

At some point, doesn't the same thing use up the time we're talking about? I get it. Teachers have to use time outside the classroom to prepare lesson plans and grade papers. But that's not so much time relative to the time in class that it accounts for 50% of the total time they are teaching, plus another 20% of the total hours required to fill a full 8 hour work day, plus yet another 20% of the total days required to fill a normal full time work year.

When does that stop being a good justification and start just becoming an excuse?




Wrong. They get prep periods.



Yup. Got that. It still doesn't come even close to the total number of hours a normal full time person works. I know that this flies in the face of what you've been told, but what you've been told is wrong. I can't say this more clearly. The numbers just don't add up.



Yes. But so do all the other people in professional careers. But public school teachers are the only ones with a union that uses this fact to make it appear like they are so massively overworked that they deserve more pay. Private school teachers work just as hard as public school teachers, right?



/shrug. Like I said, I can't speak for all districts. The one my friend works at the only thing they are required to do is chaparone two school dances a year. I suppose it's possible that some districts might mandate something with regard to clubs, but that's what? An extra hour or so once a week, maybe two?



Really? Sorry. I'm just laughing at the construction of that response. I'm assuming your "no" had to do with the "falsely" part and you aren't actually trying to insist that believing teachers are underpaid isn't the same as believing that teachers should be paid more. Cause that's just... Hmmm.


Why should public school teachers be paid more than private school teachers? Shouldn't the private market set the price for something? I mean if the store you go to prices milk at $3/gallon, isn't that how much it's worth? If the government thinks milk ought to be worth $4/gallon, isn't the government wrong?

I guess this goes back to the larger question about how we determine relative value. To me, if you have a free market process that determines this absent intervention, then that's your best "real" estimate of value. And as I said before, it's not really about the wages, they're higher for public school teachers, but not astronomically so. It's really about the "everyone gets the same pay" process the unions use that is problematic IMO.


And btw, that's really kinda the same idea as the collective bargaining thing. Everyone gets put in the same pot, and gets the same outcome. While that's great for the group that gets to do the bargaining, the only workers who actually benefit are the under performing workers. Everyone else gets kinda screwed.




Then why are you such a strong advocate for teachers unions? Sounds like you're already in good shape in that regard. How does your area do in terms of economic rankings?