We have some addendums:
1) Students' attitudes to learning are responsible for their success or failure in school.
2) Parents are responsible for their children's success or failure in school.
3) Societal conditions are responsible for children's success or failure in school.
4) Teachers apparently have no responsibility for children's success or failure in school.
According to many teachers, they are beating their highly educated and professional heads against a Biden-literal wall. And no one respects their efforts, either.
What are their demands? Higher pay and continuing control over every aspect of a public education system they admit they are powerless to improve.
If they are admittedly powerless to teach a subset of children, let someone else try. Let the private sector have a chance. Or let's try vouchers or start more charters. What would Chicago have to lose other than some teaching positions which would be made up with the new positions from the new enterprises?
But we all know this is not what the strikers and their sycophants want. They do not want to give up one single child to any outside organization, no matter how badly they themselves are doing, no matter if the parents want more choices, no matter if it means defending an anachronistic status quo against all real attempts to innovate. It's not about educating for a new era. It's about defending yesterday's moribund educational establishment. It's not about finding what will educate those children in less than optimum situations. It's about using them to leverage money from the tax payer. It's about the power of the monolithic teacher unions.
As I usually end my arguments against the current rigid state of our public education, I can only warn that change is coming. Parents and students are the bosses and not those we employ as area specialists. Teaching is not nearly as difficult to pull off as many would like us to think. Wait until we see how well some people manage to teach the unteachable. Wait until the clever children who were trapped in bad schools become parents. We're slowly dismantling the bureaucratic and legal obstacles that have been erected to prevent real parental involvement.
Comments