It is not the corporate lobbies that are listed as the top contributors to the candidates - it is the unions. If the teachers, who control the unions through votes, wanted a change for the better of the students, it would happen - nationwide.
Describe to me what else is in play - because I have worked for lobbyists, I have sat there while they allocated contributions, I have watched laws being written and formulated - crap one of our brochures said that if we cannot get around a law, we will change it. The teachers unions, all unions for that matter are the most powerful forces around - they can command a volume of contributions that is unmatched by any corporation. They can have a contribution made on behalf of every member of the union to each individual candidate that hits the federal max contribution limit - corporations cannot do that for every employee.
The teachers unions are destroying the future, one child at a time. And the teachers, just like Nazi soldiers, are complicit in this destruction. A s long as they get theirs, they look the other way.
I hear you. It's hard to appreciate system dynamics until you've been on the inside.
School boards are the boss at the local level, where shit actually happens. They hire and fire, they decide on curriculum, divvy out monies from the budget, etc.
If a school has an inspiring principal who leads teachers well and a board member butts heads with them, the board member can launch a devil whisper in the ear campaign among other board members. Bye bye principal, bye bye leadership, and the teachers' inspiration drops a couple notches. And unlike teachers unions do not always fight, and if they do they don't always win when it comes to principals and other admin types.
Something to consider regarding teacher's unions: States have varying trial periods where the teacher's contract is non-renewing. One year, that's it, we don't like you then you're done. Some it's two years, some three, I think some are five years. If a teacher's contract is not renewed, no union is going to bat for them. They're done. If the district signs them to a renewing contract after the specified number of years, the union is g9oing to go to bat for them because the district has signaled that the teacher is competent.
Now of course - of course - people change, they get lazy, start drinking mouthwash, etc. I've seen two teachers get fired and in both cases the thing that made it happen was the amount of documentation that the principal and admins had gathered on these people. The unions didn't have a case, but more importantly, the admins actually gave a shit to get them out. And that's the point - a good amount of the timeteachers aren't fired because the people who would got those balls rolling don't want to draw attention to their own shitty administrative and managerial work. And I absolutely include parents in that that role of 'administrative and managerial work'. Your kids, your tax dollars, but all you do is bitch? Stop cursing the darkness and light a candle. Get in there and do something. (Not you, parents in general)
Many, many principals would rather have a bunch of lazy, shitty teachers who don't think for themselves and do whatever the principal says because it makes their job easy. It's an intrinsic problem with government - it takes vigilant participation from the public to hold people accountable and make it work. So in that absence of that are they going to hire innovators? No. Are they going to recommend their shitty teachers hang up their spurs? No.
That's another common thread between teachers and sales: sales people often get promoted into management because they're number one in sales, but that does not necessarily mean they have the management skills required of their new positions. So it is with teachers and principals.
And on the flip side is the very real possibility that a good principal can stock a school with good teachers, then get fired or leave, and a new principal comes in and tries to clean house. Been there. And it's pretty fucking cool having someone in your corner at that point because it can destroy decades of good work that other leaders have put into strengthening an educational community.
You are absolutely right that teachers are a lot like a sales team. It's something that good teachers undertstand implicitly. Teachers are in sales. We hawk information. And if students aren't buying it we're not doing our jobs. And just like a powerful sales team, there is almost always a talented sales manager behind the scenes leading the team. That to me is one of the biggest problems, just like so much of government these days. Important positions of leadership and authority are clogged with douchebags because people stopped participating and paying attention to anything but national elections. They don't even know the names of the principals of their schools, let alone the super/assistant super.
In my experience the best school districts, where kids really learn and exercise their minds, have two things in common: money and an active school board, who reads the latest in educational theory, is active in the community, etc. And believe me those two things are a fucking rarity these days.
And you mention global warming, shitty teaching skills, teaching shit that doesn't matter. You're right. And some of that definitely is because there are shitty teachers teaching right now. But a lot of it comes from uphill and lands on teachers' shoulders and there's not much they can do about it.
I have literally been told not to use specific teaching methods which were more effective than those in the suggested lesson plans because the methods were outdated and ineffective. How do you explain to your students that they can't keep learning a body of knowledge with the amount of success they've been enjoying.
And it's important to understand how that comes to be: corporate/government/ivory tower think tank hacks -> DC policy -> State/local curriculum design and graduate school teacher indoctrination -> teachers pooping on the minds of their students
Not to mention trophy parents - and it's not just isolated families now, it's becoming more and more of an accepted norm about school in general - who refuse to accept that their child is a spoiled little shit or a disruptive bully or a dishonest cheat or bla bla bla. It's not the parents, not the admin, not their friends, not pop culture, no no no, it's the teacher's fault.
One of the best teachers I have worked with had to defend her assessments because she caught a student cheating - twice - and the parents said their little snowflake was so smart that if she needed to cheat then the tests were too hard.
A district I worked in literally did not fail students. Literally. Think about that shit for a second.
Not to mention curriculum designers and educational 'consultants'. I don't usually make generalizations but these people for the most part are worthless and suck at life, they leech from school districts, don't do anything productive, and literally dictate corrupt theory to school boards, hawking the latest text books showing a plane laying a chemtrail with a caption telling students that Obama is spraying everyone to cool down the earth and seed more unicorn eggs into the fertile lands of America. Fucking rodents.
I'm solution oriented, I don't like bitching about what's wrong, and a lot of this stuff is easy to fix with lesislation. But a good amount of this stuff simply will not change until parents start showing up to school board meetings by the hundreds with lists of grievances in their hands.
A last thing to consider about publc/private school, unio0ns, etc. I've read enough elite memoirs and think tank white papers to conclude that the powers that be would just love to privatize school in their selectively regulated fake free market, set up a bunch of retarded rules that make no sense to 90% of parents, and then price it out into intergalactic space until education returns to the way it was for however many hundreds or thousands of years you want to go back into history. i.e. inaccessible. You think people are fucking dumb now. Get rid of a mandate for public education and feed it to 'the market'. You ain't seen nothin yet.
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