By Joe Jarvis via The Daily Bell
Teachers plan to go on strike in the Los Angelos school district on January 10th.
They have plenty of complaints. But what they don’t have is accomplishments.
Only 22% of fourth graders in the district scored proficient in math. Even a typical terrible inner-city school district has a 30% proficient rate.
Since 2003, 245,000 students have left the district in favor of better districts, or charter schools.
As I’ve discussed previously, school funding is based on enrollment. So removing yourself or taking your kids out of a school system actually does help defund them–even if you, unfortunately, don’t get to keep the money for alternatives.
One school actually sent their resource officer out to drag a student back to school away from a job she was working. That’s one way to stay funded… simply kidnap hardworking students, trap them with a bunch of miscreants, and force them to listen to your horrible school lessons.
And now $350 million of each year’s funding is going to pay retirement benefits in the district. That’s a 50% increase from 2013, “which would be enough to award each teacher a $10,000 raise.”
So in LA they have a terrible school which is performing even worse than expected. They are losing “customers” (if you can even call people forced to attend and forced to pay “customers”). And a disproportionate amount of their funding goes towards retired teachers.
That sounds like a pretty bad deal for any kid left attending the school. But these students are not the concern. They don’t have a union representing them.
Teachers do. So they are striking.
Enter Alex Caputo-Pearl, the teachers union president, who is pushing the district to increase spending by hundreds of millions of dollars annually in a new collective-bargaining agreement with teachers. Topping the union’s many demands are a 6.5% raise, reduced class sizes, and additional support staff. The union also wants the district to lobby state lawmakers to limit charter-school growth.
There is currently a waitlist for students to get into charter schools… and the teachers’ union’s main concern is stopping the growth of charter schools.
As Mel Brooks would say, they have to protect their phony baloney jobs.
And that includes the union President.
Mr. Caputo-Pearl also faces pressure from within his own ranks. In 2016, he championed a 33% increase in union dues, to nearly $1,000 annually, to compensate for a 25% decline in membership since 2008. But he needs to show members something concrete in return or, in the post-Janus environment, they might quit the union.
Janus was a Supreme Court decision that said unions can’t force non-union members to pay dues.
It’s true. Schooling has absolutely nothing to do with the students. They are the last concern, an afterthought if anything. And the school districts, teachers, unions, and unfortunately often the parents don’t really care how bad the education is at the public schools they send their kids to. It’s all about money, convenience, and political power.
You can understand why so many parents there are trying to get their kids into charter schools.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-05/why-school-has-nothing-do-students
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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