Jan Resseger reflects on the excitement of seeing teachers standing up for themselves and for their students and schools.
They refuse to be pushed around anymore.
The governor of Oklahoma insulted teachers, saying they were like teenagers who wanted a better car. How much is she paid to defend the interests of the oil and gas industry? She even claimed that the state’s teachers were influenced by outside groups, like “antifa,” the black-clothed anti-fascist agitators. Shades of the civil rights movement, when racist governors refused to believe that “their” blacks wanted change.
Resseger writes:
“If you have been watching the courageous teachers, first in West Virginia, now in Oklahoma and Kentucky, standing up for their right to be paid fairly—to have a pension after long years of working with children and adolescents—to work in schools adequately supplied with enough counselors and social workers, technology and an ample and stimulating curriculum—I wonder if, like me, you find it refreshing to see a large number of teachers out in the open speaking about what they do. In these days of too many guns, teachers are more and more safely locked into schools with the children they teach. They and their contributions are pretty much invisible to the rest of us. We forget about them and we take them for granted.
“We neglect to make any mental connection to what it means for teachers (and children) when politicians promise us we can grow the economy by slashing taxes. Teachers, however, have to pay attention when ballooning class sizes make it harder to address personally the needs of 35 or 40 children. They watch kids grieve when football or instrumental music or a high school newspaper dies. They notice when there are too few counselors to help students whose parents are not college educated put together a good college application. They know the consequences when their rural school lacks access to broadband. Better than anybody else, school teachers understand the meaning of cuts to the state education budget. And this month teachers have been creating opportunities to tell us all what they know.
“Maybe part of our forgetting about teachers comes from gender bias. As we have all noticed in West Virginia last month, and now in Oklahoma and Kentucky, most of these teachers are energetic young women. All the old messages come into play: Teachers do their work because they love our children; the money isn’t so important to them. They’re probably married and have another income to depend on in addition to whatever they can bring in from teaching. These women should be good sports as they do more with less. And the worst: Teaching is really just glorified babysitting.
“Teachers do love to work with our children, but at the same time their work is the job by which they must support their own children. They must pay for food, housing, a car, and childcare. The required contribution to the family’s’ health insurance keeps rising. They have to save for their children’s college, and they need to save for retirement, particularly when the pensions they pay into every month are cut.”
Perhaps POTUS will want to reconsider arming teachers given these wildcat strikes.
Hadn’t thought of it that way!
Nice.
Teaching is difficult challenging work. It is made even more difficult when teachers have to fight for a living wage, benefits and pension. The politicians in Oklahoma have abandoned the common good. They are refusing to invest in their people. In a state in which gas and oil creates huge profits, the state receives a lot less revenue than it should compared to other gas and oil producing states. The people of the state suffer the earthquakes, polluted wells and pay state taxes. They should be able to get a well funded school system in return. I saw the photos of some of the buildings and equipment in the schools. It was like looking at developing nation, not a part of the US. Shameful and disgusting!
The governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, just compared striking teachers to “teenagers that want a better car.” How insulting!https://www.pressherald.com/2018/04/04/oklahomas%E2%80%A8governor-says%E2%80%A8striking-teachers%E2%80%A8are-like-teenagers/
The qovernor of Oklahoma is paid $140,000 a year. Deborah Gist, the Tulsa Superintendent, is paid $241,000, plus $1500 a month for her car and cellphone expenses.
http://ripr.org/post/former-ri-education-commissioner-gist-now-pro-union#stream/0
West Coast… Long time anti-gun Cali expat teacher from Chicago public nightmare….Arming us should scare everyone! Let’s do this!
Just found this…looking for something else
Teachers across the UK vote for industrial action – World Socialist Web …
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/04/ukte-a04.html
15 hours ago – Representing the vast majority of teachers in the UK, the votes are a response to the catastrophic conditions prevailing in primary and secondary schools … Far from flourishing with private sector involvement, eight out of ten academies are in financial deficit, based on findings from the Kreston UK accountancy network.
The fiasco of the “free market” when applied to education is waste, fraud, embezzling, nepotism and other educational negligence.
More generally
The fiasco of the “free market” is waste, fraud, embezzling, nepotism and other negligence.”
“Free market”, also known as the “Friedman market” also known as “Alan Greenspan’s Flaw”, also known as Enrons Endrun, also known as Goldman Sacks, also known as JP’s Money Chase, etc.
The “free market”, otherwise known as a free-floating duende (that’s apparition in English) that only exists in the minds of a few homo supposedly sapiens does nothing in the real physical world and only serves to obfuscate or hide the blame of one human exploiting another. Tis a nothingness!
Arriba, arriba, arriba profesores
Huelga, huelga, huelga, educadores
Viva la lucha, instructores
Perduramos hasta que ganemos, maestros
Basta con los avariciciosos
quienes piensan que sepan toda
pero no saben nada de la enseñanza
Nunca abandonemos la lucha NUNCA
¡Me gusta!
If legislators are expecting us to take a bullet for students because they’re too lily-livered to pass reasonable gun reform, they damn well better pay us well!
Miami teacher speaks out https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Lyc8rPwS8&feature=youtu.be
“A strong, vibrant Florida starts in the classrooms across the state. If we want a robust economy today, and one that lasts beyond this generation, it will continue to take a large investment by the legislature and our governor. Both branches are searching for a solution to a dwindling amount of highly qualified, energetic, best and brightest teachers – the people who are in the classroom giving their heart and soul, and many times their own money, to make a better life for their students. When asked, your local teachers have the answers. If we want to attract high quality businesses into the state, and retain those that are here, it is a vital to the business community that the public education system be the best it can be – this is the breeding ground of the CEO’s, CFO’s, managers and workers for the future of the state.
Below are solutions from both sides of the aisle, and do not come from another place than the classroom teachers who are asking for the following to be done during this session to enhance, encourage and create an environment that will retain, and help recruit, the best teachers to Florida.
1. Salary. Many teachers were negatively affected by the economic downturn 10 years ago. At the time we understood why a salary freeze was necessitated. That period of time is over. It is now time to solve the issue by having a one-time salary increase that equates to years of service and the re-implementation of the step scale. It is suggested that the step scale be replaced by a statewide scale, beginning at $50,000 and increasing by $2,000 each year to a maximum of 25 years, along with a cost of living addition for the urban district where housing is a major issue.
2. Performance enhancements. We believe that the Best and Brightest teacher program funding should be shifted to a pay for performance plan, where teacher evaluations of Effective would receive a one time bonus of $800 and Highly Effective would receive a one time bonus of $1200. The existing Best and Brightest program funding that includes college entrance exams as part of the equation would be shifted to assist in paying for across the board salary increases included in part one above.
3. Retirement benefits. The Florida Retirement System has been one of the most solvent in the country for decades, even during overall economic downturns. With the addition of teachers 3% contribution, we believe it only makes sense to restructure the retirement benefit for teachers to a change of full retirement from 30 years to 25 years, and that within this change, the retirement modifier to be restructured as follows: 0-5 years of service, no retirement benefit (existing law). 6-10 years of service, 1.0% modifier; 11-15 years of service, 1.5% modifier; 16-20 years of service, 2.0% modifier; 21 and beyond years of service, 2.5% modifier. The average of the best 5 years would remain as in existing law. Included in this is a permanent 2% COLA modifier to retired educators.
4. Restoration of professional contracts for teachers. The growing crisis of the revolving door of the classroom is negatively impacting our students. Part of that can be attributed to the loss of stability many teachers are looking for – we believe the former period of three years, on an annual contract was an adequate probationary time for administrators to judge the effectiveness of teachers hired within a school or district. After the three years, a professional contract should be granted to provide stability and due process rights for the teachers. This would also include teachers who move from district to district.” Eric Garner
This proposal while great is a pipe dream. Florida is the most hostile State in regards to the teaching profession. They have cut National Board pay. They removed Professional Service Contracts and if they could, they would remove credential pay although that wouldn’t make much of a difference because in Miami Dade the credential pay has remained practically the same since the 1970’s. $3100 for a Masters, $2000 for a Specialist and $2000 for a Doctorate are peanuts when compared with the costs required to obtain such degrees. You would be basically taking a paycut when obtaining these degrees because your student loan payment will be larger than the measly bump in pay. Add to this a Union run by inept morons who care about preserving their cushy jobs and exorbitant salaries than they do about standing up for their teachers and you have the perfect shitstorm that is the profession of teaching in Florida today. After thirteen years on the job, I didn’t even make enough to rent a one bedroom apartment on my own. They do not call it Floriduh for nothing.
I’ve been reading countless articles about the wildcat strikes teachers are launching in “right-to-work” states across the country, starting in West Virginia and spreading now to Oklahoma and Kentucky… and I’ve reached the conclusion that these strikes are a teachable moment… and the lesson teachers could be offering is: The “Right to Work” is really a “Right to Offer as Little as Possible” to employees so that shareholders can earn as much as possible. If that lesson is learned by voters in these “right to work” states, they would oppose the practices the legislature is trying to impose on teachers and follow their lead: unite to seek a living wage, decent benefits, safe working conditions, and an assured pension. Most of the workers had these assurances at one time and they could have it again IF they supported each other.
In KY the lesson should be: “The coal mining companies should not have gotten away with stealing your pensions; making you work as at-will employees, and compromising your safety to reward shareholders.”
In OK the lesson should be: “Look at how much revenue the state is losing to provide tax breaks to oil companies who already receive government subsidies.”
If teachers don’t use this opportunity to teach voters that all workers are in this together, the voters will only learn the lessons the legislature wants to teach: “…teachers are greedy moochers who want us to raise your taxes to pay them.” And one lesson I believe voters all learned from 2016: the politics of resentment can be a potent force. I hope that politics of support for each other can overcome the politics of resentment.
If I may make a small but important correction, wgerson:
“The “Right to Work” is really a “Right to Offer as Little as Possible” to employees so that shareholders can STEAL as much as possible.”
Those shareholders haven’t “earned” a damn bit of what they steal off the backs of those who actually do the work.