Posted on 08/05/2020 10:17:41 AM PDT by Kaslin
When 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job in August 1981, President Ronald Reagan had this to say: “Tell them when the strike’s over, they don’t have any jobs.” The media, not yet fully familiar with the seriousness with which Reagan intended to govern, scoffed at the president’s threat. But it was not a bluff. Two days later, when more than 11,000 controllers refused to come back, Reagan fired them all. It was a powerful move, and demonstrated to the entire country that essential public employees serve the public, not union bosses. America’s public school teachers should be reminded of this fact.
With thousands of teachers across the country currently protesting a return to the classroom because of COVID fears, Reagan’s example is particularly relevant. Like air traffic controllers, teachers sign employment contracts. While air traffic controllers contract with the federal government and teachers with local school districts, the principle is the same: perform the duties for which you were hired, or be fired.
Teachers who refuse to teach in the setting for which they were hired – the classroom – need to stop acting like scared bunnies and grow up. If they truly are “essential” workers, as they remind us repeatedly, then they need to start behaving like other essential employees and get back to work.
Many businesses, unfortunately, have been forced by the government to shut down wholly or in part in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, and this is having a devastating effect on our national economy. Amidst this devastation, public schools in virtually every jurisdiction across the country ended the school year early after COVID hit our shores in March.
Unlike commercial businesses, however, the prolonged closure of schools has ramifications far beyond the economic. Moreover, educating children is a process that cannot be switched on and off like a production line; the damage to young minds that are allowed to lie fallow month after month, or which are presented with “virtual” learning in place of human-to-human interface, creates learning voids not easily replenished.
“Teaching” means, if anything, working with students as well as encouraging students to work with other students in a social setting for the purpose of learning essential skills and acquiring essential knowledge. “Virtual” teaching is not teaching at all; it is cinematography – nothing more than an adult (the “teacher”) speaking to a camera, with an audience of one (the “student”) at the end of the electronic transmission watching a screen. Raw information may be thus transmitted, but not true knowledge.
What many public school teachers and their union bosses at the National Education Association appear to be setting as the price for them to return to the classroom, is a guarantee that the environment will be 100% percent COVID-free at all times. Such a condition is, of course, impossible to meet and essentially allows the teachers to avoid a return to their job site for the foreseeable future.
Moreover, demanding a zero-risk premise for classroom teaching sends the message to students (and everyone else for that matter) that risk-avoidance is the highest and most desirable goal for society. This further erodes the principle on which America’s greatness heretofore has been premised – that society advances not by avoiding challenges, but by meeting and overcoming them.
There might perhaps be somewhat more compassion for the our-way-or-the-highway posture being taken by these public school teachers had they and their union not spent decades working to ensure that public education remained the only practical option for millions of families across America. Unionized teachers continue to vilify homeschooling and oppose providing taxpaying parents any meaningful ability to choose where to send their children to be educated.
No teacher should be forced to go into the classroom against their will. However, if local government leaders properly equip them with personal protective equipment and mandate reasonable protocols within the schools to minimize the risk of COVID, and if teachers and their unions then still refuse to teach in school, it is time to “pull a Reagan” and fire them. The money saved from thinning educational bloat of protesting teachers and useless district administrators with nothing to do, can be returned to parents who are struggling to pay for alternatives to ensure their children actually have a productive school year.
They are members of a union chartered by Congress in 1906 under the name The National Teacher's Association NEA
They most certainly are under the jurisdiction of the Federal government. Have you never heard of the federal Department of Education?
FReegards!
Starting in her mid-40s my Mom was a teacher after we all were gone to school so that is to say I have a great deal of respect for the profession at that time which was nearly 30 years ago now.
That said, teachers need to take a clue and get back to work while they can or they will be replaced by something like home schooling or remote instruction. They are not all essential.
Well duh my suggestion here of a month ago!
President Reagan had the authority to fire them. But President Trump cannot fire teachers. Teachers are hired by the individual school systems.
They must comply.
When they, like other public employees, were allowed to unionize, they did, and stopped being professionals. So now, the NEA and AFT juggernauts are running your schools. You are not, and never will be again, on account of not backing them in the time of their need.
In my day, up to and through the 1950s, their classroom professionalism gained from rigorous oversight by state regulations and professionally-minded colleges, and with God still in the schools and religious education still taking place in the classroom, there was no need for home-schooling at all.
its OKAY for people to risk their health and their lives saving people in hospitals, or fighting off rioters or serving the snowflakes up their stinking lattes in the morning...
but they are soo sooo afraid, poor things...actually having to work among the people....
shall we just close the hospitals because they're afraid or old?....lets give them a year off with pay....
idiocy...
Where is the money going?
Where it’s always gone: to insanely generous pensions and cadillac health bennies.
Meanwhile, when was the last time you saw the union raise hell about TB?
I wouldn’t pay them. But we don’t have slavery in this country. If they want to take off a year how do you stop them?
people who are defending teachers getting paid to sit on their large fannies because they're afraid have no problem demanding essential workers get out there and PROVIDE for everyone else....
tax holiday for those who were required to face the public daily and keep this country going....
I have no way to prove this, but my guess is that the most academic progress this country has ever made occurred when most of our teachers were NOT board certified and college educated....they were certified teachers with HS degrees...but their heart and soul was in teaching..
I am planning on calling my local officials to request a refund on my taxes. Think of all the money saved on gas and bus drivers and crossing guards too.
I think that I will call everyday and I am going to tell all my friends to call everyday. Really put the pressure. It may not help but it will irritate the crap out of them.
This has got to stop.
Have any of these goobers ventured outside their homes since this started? I bet they have so why cant they teach? If the grocery store workers can work why cant the teachers. No work, no pay, no unemployment either.
You must be getting senile. The ATC group was Federal. The teachers in the school up the street work for the town.
I am not sure how Trump is going to fire them.
You calls call yourselves Conservatives, and yet you want the Executive branch to rule every aspect of life.
Go read the Constitution.
And somehow in your mind the US Department of Education has no authority whatsoever over your school? Enjoy that happy place in your mind.
Meanwhile you might want to educate yourself with regard to exactly how involved the Federal government is with funding Vermont's Title I elementary and secondary educational outlays.
Pull those funds and watch your "superior" local tax rates rise to support your supposedly "superior" schools. Your school system is more on government welfare that you even realize.
Were you educated at one of those supposedly "superior" schools yourself? I'd write them and ask for a refund, or at least have them pay for a Civics tutorial for you at the local senior center.
I am not sure how Trump is going to fire them.
He won't have to. You will. If Title I $ are pulled from your allegedly "superior" school it will be personally up to you and your community to shell out the bux needed to make up the difference needed to keep your institutions accredited. Just think, you'll be on the hook for ALL of it!
Bet you'll want to see to it that those teachers make it back to the classrooms this fall, eh?
FReegards!
You are delusional.
I see you picked up on the superior part of my description. It isn’t bragging. It’s the truth. And I pay superior taxes to match them.
But our kids can read and write better than any towns within 75 miles.
I am proud of that.
And your district is a welfare queen just like every other US school district is.
I see you picked up on the superior part of my description.
I even wrapped you apparent Civic illiteracy around it too.
And I pay superior taxes to match them.
And I am looking forward to you paying more if your region's Title I funding gets pulled, when your powdered princesses don't show up to class.
But our kids can read and write better than any towns within 75 miles.
I don't happen to believe what you've written, but see if they'll be reading or writing anything of substance, if their teachers on walk-out don't show up while prideful people like you continue to bend over to pay them to do nothing.
FReegards!
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