Jersey Jazzman takes note of the media hysteria about those NFL referees who replaced the experienced, unionized referees. Even Governor Scott Walker was upset when the inexperienced referees made a call that led to a loss by the Green Bay Packers.
Do we need “Referees for America” to step in when the unionized referees go on strike? Apparently the football lovers of America say no.
Maybe experience and qualifications matter.
And remember how the media piled on teachers in Chicago for their outrageous salaries? Was it $56,000, $74,000?
Well, a reader sent this important information:
The refs make $150,000 for 6 months of part time work. They want $200,000. I haven’t seen those numbers thrown around in the media. Every time they talked about the teachers in Chicago they threw out the bogus $74,000 average salary. Then some pundit would always add they only worked 8 months out of the year as well. Everyone bemoaned the greedy overpaid teachers.
I was watching Morning Joe yesterday and Joe Scarboro, who couldn’t get enough of trashing the teachers in Chicago last week, was up in arms over the greedy NFL owners refusal to pay for experienced refs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve been equating the replacement refs with charter schools. These refs, changed rules, ignored others and made some up as they went along. The only thing they didn’t do was declare themselves as winners.
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E.J. Dionne has an interesting take on the referee strike that may be useful to our teachers.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/replace_this_greed_20120926/
Dionne notes how the NFL owners showed absolute contempt for the referees, quoting Ray Anderson, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations: “You’ve never paid for an NFL ticket to watch somebody officiate a game,” But, as Dionne notes:
“Let’s parse this. What it leaves out is that the game people pay to watch cannot be played well without highly competent and trained referees. The human beings Anderson relegated to insignificance matter after all, especially to the health and well-being of the players fans very much want to watch.” He goes on to quote Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers: “The game is being tarnished by an NFL [that] obviously cares more about saving some money than having the integrity of the game diminished.”
Dionne also notes how the NFL owners now often refer to the game as “the product”, and the response of the Executive Committee of the NFL Players Association: “As players, we see this game as more than the ‘product’ you reference at times. You cannot simply switch to a group of cheaper officials and fulfill your legal, moral and duty obligations to us and our fans.”
The public outrage has been so great that even such stalwart anti-union Randians like Scott Walker and Paul Ryan have taken the side of the referees.
Can we do the same thing for our teachers and public schools? Can we cast the reformers as nothing more than the cold, joyless, greedy NFL team owners, who are so robotic as to destroy an important institution just for a few more bucks? Can the teachers point out that all TFA and charters will produce are teachers who are just like the “lingeree league” incompetent scab referees?
Time to put on those Green Bay Packers jerseys!
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I love football, but I love teachers more!
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Why didn’t the NFL just get the referees to agree to be paid based on the number of successful touchdowns the players make? Maybe they can start a VAM approach on how well the game is played by the players. Everyone needs to be evaluated on their performance. That’s fair, isn’t it?
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Love this comparison.
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As Ted Sizer used to remind us, it’s sometimes hard to figure out whether we invented schools so we could have football or vice versa–or something like that.
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I think the $74,000 figure is about correct. Higher than the median earnings, lower than the mean earnings. Why call it bogus?
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Diane: Thought you should know that the TV commentators at the Seattle/Green Bay game repeatedly referred to the referee issue as the referee lock out, rather than the referee strike. The different is significant, since a lockout is initiated by ownership/management, whereas a strike is initiated by workers/unions.
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that is not the issue in our discussion. the issue is that experience matters and ill-trained people can’t replace the experienced vets
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“You cannot simply switch to a group of cheaper (and less experienced) teachers and fulfill your legal, moral and duty obligations to us and our children.”
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