KNEE JERK SOLUTION TO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS

The controversy over teachers tenure rages on against a background of the social move to destroy labor unions of all kinds—‘labor unions’ meaning workers uniting to balance power between those hired verses those doing the hiring; thus, by its very nature it is adversarial. Unions are the only counter force to employer dictatorial policy. Humankind, not just workers, has made great advances over time in this regard. We have benefited in terms of increased worker safety, stopped child labor, increased environmental protection, and raised wage levels, among many other things. In light of all these advances, the success of the Republican Party in organizing the anti labor movement is puzzling. If nothing else, their persistence seems rewarded, even if it goes against the best interested of the vast majority of people affected. For me, it is one more of those illogical things that we can only explain by attributing it to some thing inborn or innate.

Joe Scarborough, on his @#MSNBC show this morning, made it clear how illogical the anti labor union movement is especially when applied to public education. He often claims to be a small government conservative who wants the government out of our lives; in fact, it is the theme of his show. This morning his simplistic solution was, we ought to pay our teachers more, which means we would have better teachers; hence, our children would receive a better education. In the context of the discussion on teacher tenure, he righteously, and simplistically, takes the position that we should fire bad teachers and hire better ones. Typical of the conservative mindset, like a Texas cowboy knee jerk response, he isolates a problem and comes up with a simple straightforward logical solution, without regard to what it takes to interlace those facts with the proposed solutions. Our educational system what it is because of the difficulties of interlacing wants and needs. Joe’s simplistic solutions ignore the conflicts.

We want small government so we can cut taxes.

We want government out of the classroom.

We want to protect state sovereignty in education.

We cannot get rid of bad teachers because of tenure.

We cannot get rid of tenure unless we get rid of teachers’ unions.

We cannot get rid of unions unless we privatize schools.

We want private schools so we do not have to pay taxes to support them.

We can afford privates schools only if we support them.

We do not want to pay the cost to educate other peoples’ children.

Private schools can hire better teachers because there are no unions.

We want all children in school.

We do not want to close the door to families who cannot pay.

We want to hire better teachers, which costs more money.

We can afford to pay for good privates schoolteachers with increased tuition.

We cannot know how teachers are performing unless we “stick our nose in their business”.

I remember one time when +Anne Coulter, a paragon of conservative logic, said the solution for people who are sleeping on grates in Washington D.C. is simple; all they have to do is to do what she did; get up, to Harvard, get and education and go to work. Joe’s solution for the education problem is that the best way to solve it is to fire bad teachers and hire good one and the way we do that is pay them more—OMG.

As I said before, unions are the only counter force to bad employer behavior. Two unique things about public education are that “we the people” are the employer and the complicated definition of profit in education verses the simplistic bottom line in the business world. Privatizing education would destroy these vital relationships. We should encourage teacher union formation to deal with well-informed parents, and that can only happen if parents become more concerned about the quality of their children’s education and less about taxes.  That can only happen if we shed ourselves of the knee jerk response to problems and think out solutions and that can only happen if we educate our children—obviously Joe missed something while in school or, as I hinted before, maybe his ignorance is in his genes.  

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