Teachers and Teachers Unions: Essential to Recovering Equity After Years of Funding Cuts and Privatization
The annual Phi Delta Kappa poll came out earlier this week, and not surprisingly, writes the Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler, “The poll found widespread teacher complaints about low pay and poor funding for their schools, and nearly half said they felt unvalued by their communities. Most said they would not want one of their own children to follow them into teaching.” She continues: “The annual survey was conducted by PDK International, an association of teachers, administrators and other professionals, which has measured public attitudes toward schools for 51 years.”
Meckler quotes Joshua Starr, chief executive of PDK international and formerly the Superintendent of Schools in Montgomery County, Maryland: “It’s shocking in some ways, but anybody who’s been following public education in the last 20 years and the demonization of teachers, the continued low pay, the working conditions, the relentless focus on standardized testing as the only measure of success, would naturally conclude we would reap what we sowed.”
In a book published last year, the Rutgers University school finance expert, Bruce Baker presents the stark fiscal realities that partly explain why teachers are so discouraged: “Consider, for example, the trade-off between spending to pay teachers more competitive salaries to improve teacher quality versus spending to provide smaller class sizes. In many cases, schools and districts serving high-need student populations are faced with both noncompetitive salaries and larger class sizes, as compared to more advantaged surrounding districts. Trading one for the other is not an option, or, in the best case, is a very constrained choice. It is unhelpful at best for public policy and is harmful to the children subjected to those policies to pretend without any compelling evidence that somewhere there exists a far cheaper way to achieve the same or better outcomes…. A common false-choice argument is that good teachers matter more than money. In this view, we simply need good teachers and recruitment and retention (and dismissal) policies to achieve this goal, regardless of money. This argument falsely assumes that there is no connection whatsoever between the amount of available funding for salaries and benefits and the ability of schools and districts to recruit CONTINUE READING: Teachers and Teachers Unions: Essential to Recovering Equity After Years of Funding Cuts and Privatization | janresseger
