Michael Atherton wrote:
Great corporate leaders are adept at eliminating obstaclesIn today's climate I'm not sure that "great corporate leaders" is anything other that a contradiction in terms. But to paint teachers, custodians, etc. as "standing in the way of student success" is truly unfair. Teachers, good, bad, and indifferent have the right to be represented. They need to have a union to protect, not only their wages and working conditions, but, every bit as important, they need protection from those who would stifle teaching. The most recent book ban request was for a little tale called Captain Underpants, which seems to appeal mostly to boys between 8 and 10. But Judy Bloom's books have been put up for banning, or Heather Has Two Mommies, or Nappy Hair as has Huckleberry Finn, one of the great works of American literature and far the best of S. Clemens' fiction. Remember the Scopes monkey trial? A science controversy which still rages as more and more fundamentalist Christians want to insist that the schools adhere to the allegories of the Bible. Now that'll prepare kids to get jobs--not.
and successfully implementing a new vision and successful
strategies. ... I don't give a damn about her
"responsibility" to employees who stand in the way of
student success and achievement. The ultimate purpose of the public school system is not to provide employment for teachers and administrators. Too much loyalty to the labor unions has long hindered reform in Minneapolis.
The controversy over what constitutes sex education is another case in point. We rail against young women who become pregnant, refusing to hold the boys accountable, but decline to educate them so that they can take care of themselves. (My own version of sex ed includes teaching children to value themselves as part of sex ed and teaching them what they will be giving up in their young lives by giving over to entreaties from their peers and the media to be sexually active whether they're ready or not or whether they want to or not.)
Those are the reasons teachers need protection through unions. Since so few of us have any clear notion of what constitutes great teaching or good teaching, I doubt we could produce a paragraph on what constitutes poor teaching either. You yourself, Michael, want some sort of empirical proof that the arts help children to learn. Of course, once there is some bogus "proof," it is no longer the arts. The arts do not lend themselves to empirical proofs, nor should they. Involvement in making art does give kids something interesting to do rather than hanging out getting into mischief, or slogging through months of science, math, punctuation, grammer, civics, etc. without any relief.
In the kind of atmosphere we all live in, teachers need the protection of unions. That the unions also protect those who are not good teachers may be unfortunate, but it certainly is no reason to withdraw that protection from teachers.
WizardMarks, Central
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