Replies

Salaries:

Aevery_Freeman: I'll bet you could find replacements for far less than what they currently earn.

cripplecreek: Here in Michigan we have teachers choosing to take 5 figure salary cuts to work in better equipped, cleaner, and safer, charter and private schools. (post 27)

Professionalism:

Aevery_Freeman: Other professions seem to allow for credentialing without unionization (doctors, lawyers, etc.).

cripplecreek: Combine it with right to work and the unions will collapse over time whether the school is private or not. (post 27)

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I don't know whether to laugh (wryly) or to cry (for lack of historical depth) over these postulated benefits.

I don't know what your time in history was, but in the late fifties I was training to be a science teacher. Public education was based entirely on well-trained teachers who considered themselves professionals. In my state, high school teachers with a bachelor's degree could obtain a temporary license, but permanent certification could be obtained if the required master's degree in education was attained in no more than five years.

In the communities throughout the country, teachers were held in some awe for their professionalism and commitment to excellence. No unionism was on the horizon.

In my state, the State Board of Regents kept the teachers' qualifications and professionalism on course, as well as uniformizing a high level of the performance of the students. Not to have a Regents Diploma was equivalent to "no college for you, pal."

Also, any teacher new to a different school had no security of tenure until his fourth year contract was signed. Until then, your employment could be terminated without explanation, and you would have to find work somewhere else. But after that, you could work there as long as you desired. So the School Board and administrators watched your first three years very carefully, because their final commitment was non-negotiable thereafter. This helped to ensure teacher stability, reliability, and schoolroom product.

However, there was a proverbial "fly in the ointment", so to speak, and that was an almost uniformly nationwide poor regard for teachers regarding compensation. Where school budgets were presented every year, voters simply would not agree to pay teachers according to common standards prevailing in other equivalent professions. Here is the thought imbedded in the community conscience:

"Them than can, do; them that can't, teach."

That is, the farmer or auto salesman or bank clerk did not see teachers as providing a visible product; and as a further insult, they didn't see the teacher as working a full year when school was out for the summer.

In fact, in the day when most families depended on one bread-winner, the teacher often had to moonlight at a second job during the school year just to keep his family afloat; and a summer job to get them through until fall. And this got worse when more and more homes trended toward having both husband and wife working, making it more competitve for the one-job teacher to survive.

Well, finally the unionists heard the teachers' cries, and got a foothold in the cities, thus the AFT made rapid advances. NEA, originally a professional society in my time, and well-organized, saw the things to come, and kept that organization alive by following suit into unionism.

Very frankly, it's interesting to see the argument that privatizing will get better teachers at less salary. Well, the problem has come full circle. The local communities have gotten just what they deserve, for neglecting the art of teaching as a profession (which isolates and minimizes the bargaining power of the individual teacher), and forcing teachers to assemble as a union (to get the power through numbers for a decent wage). Of course, their union leaders have way, way overdone it; but the administrators have worsened the issue through poor negotiating.

I know there are other factors in play, but the refusal to pay teachers a living wage in the first half of the 20th century has left us where we are now. And--No--privatizing is too simple a solution. It won't work. It is not going to result in better teachers at lower pay.

(And retired "boomer" business men, engineers, etc. have not as a group cultivated the art and skill sets needed for teaching. They are already marked as poor achievers in downsizing of their own specialties; that is, if they are still young enough to keep up with the energy of teenagers.)

This is not a criticism, just an observation. To get a better picture, you need to find someone who looks at this with the eyes of a teacher from the past.