WI Union-busting provisions added in budget committee

[Cannon Shell]

Originally Posted by horseofcourse

I should have read this post first!!

Where is the happy medium?? You can't put ZERO money into the education system can you?? What public schools are expected to do is unfathomable. They must take every single child no questions asked which charter/private schools don't have to do. It's nearly impossible to get perfect public schools. If you look at some of the kids in the system, it's a tough task. Yes, it can get better, but using standardized test as the only measure of success as is currently being done, it makes it very, very tough.

LOL
Who suggested putting zero into education? The amount of money keeps increasing yet the quality of education keeps decreasing. I guess we should just blame the kids?

One of the big problems with teachers unions like ACT and NEA is they derive clout from delivering their members votes and from the massive amounts of money they collect in dues. They block reform which obviously is much needed. The NEA employs more political organizers than the Democratic and Republican parties combined. Yeah they are interested in the kids.

In NYC in 2006-2007 there were 10 teachers fired out of over 55000 tenured. The average cost to fire an tenured teacher in NY is in excess of $128,000 due to the legal challenges from the teachers unions regardless of the much the teacher in question deserved to lose their job.

In Chicago where only 28.5% of 11th graders met or exceeded expectations on state standardized tests less than .01% of teachers between 2005 and 2008 were fired for poor performance.

In NYC the city spends more than $100 million a year paying teachers that arent currently teaching. The union contract requires that any teacher with tenure be paid their full salary and benefits if they are sent to the “Absent Teacher Reserve pool. The average pay of a teacher in that pool? $82,000 a year. Some of the teachers have been in the pool since 2006.

In a 2007 report, the nonprofit Education Sector found that nearly 19 percent of all public education spending in America goes towards things like seniority-based pay increases and outsized benefits. If these provisions were done away with, the report found, $77 billion in education money would be freed up for initiatives that could actually improve learning, like paying high-performing teachers more money.