Now remember, to hear the teachers union airbags tell it, all they’re interested in is the welfare of our kids. So get this opening paragraph from a front-page story in today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal:
“Rather than cut teacher salaries, the state’s largest school districts will make cuts elsewhere, possibly resulting in larger classes and elimination of school programs. Teacher union officials said Wednesday that they fought too hard for current salary levels to relinquish them, even if it means cuts to the classroom.”
So despite getting 8+ percent salary increases less than a year ago, teachers in Nevada are choosing to screw students over rather than take a small 4 percent rollback.
And before any of you teachers out there complain that you ain’t gettin’ paid enough already, I’ll point out that you guys only work 9 months out of the year, enjoy a Cadillac health care and pension benefit programs, and just got a $232 million tax hike approved to boost your salaries even HIGHER in two years. So go sell your B.S. somewhere else. Geez, Joan of Arc did less whining on the stake.
And before you start with this crud about having to teach kids who are disruptive in the classroom and “not ready to learn,” go tell it to your union rep. If a kid is acting up in your classroom and you’re prohibited by law or school regulations from kicking him out, then maybe your union should be focusing more time on fixing THAT problem and less time on “diversity education” mandates and “self-esteem classes.” If you have disciplinary problems in your classroom which you can’t handle, don’t come bitchin’ to me; tell your shop steward.
Oh, and by the way, just what kind of results are we getting from these greedy teachers who want to take money out of the classroom and put it into their own pockets instead? Well, here’s one example…..
According to another report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal this morning, the graduation rate in Clark County stands at around 63 percent. Pretty pathetic.
But get this: At “schools of choice,” such as “magnet schools, vocational academies and high school campuses at the College of Southern Nevada,” the graduation rates range from 90 to 100 percent. So it appears that choice works.
And yet, a bill to extend universal school choice to ALL of Nevada’s families didn’t even merit a hearing in the Democrat-controlled Assembly – which is actually controlled by the teachers union – this session. Go figure.
And just one more item about the government schools while I’m on this rant-and-roll, also from the RJ’s front page this morning:
“Colleen is so hygienic she insists her ‘smelly’ teenage boys take a shower before sitting on the living room sofa. The mother was flabbergasted to learn Wednesday morning that a student at Findley Middle School, her son’s school, had been sick with the swine flu. School officials had not notified parents.”
OK, let’s concede that the public school brass had the “right” to withhold this critical information from parents.
No, let’s not concede that.
The school, once the situation became known, had the right to decide whether or not to close the school. However, it did NOT have the right to keep that information from parents so that parents could have made the decision whether or not they wanted to risk having their kids contract the disease.
Private schools are much more answerable to parents than the government schools. Knowing that parents would have the option of taking their kids out of the private school and sending them to another private school if they endangered the lives and health of their students, a private school would most likely have handled this situation MUCH differently. At the very least, they would have the informed parents.
But hey, in the public schools parents can’t simply take their kids out of the school and put them in another when administrators pull a boner such as this one…..and the school bureaucrats know it. Their priority lies in protecting the school and the teachers union, not the students.
What’s the union have to do with this one? Glad you asked.
Let’ say Findley had closed down for a week just to be safe. That means the school would have had to stay open a week longer to make up for the lost days. And you don’t think the union would have had a conniption over this additional week cutting into their summer vacations? Puh-lease.
The teachers union SUCKS! It cares only about their dues-paying members. The kids and their parents can just go to hell. Maybe more parents are starting to wake up to this reality thanks to the budget battle. A silver lining, to be sure.
