Waiting for Superman

KittyFX

Have you seen this movie?

How can it be ok to not be able to fire bad teachers and to not be able to reward $ good teachers?

How can we be spending twice as much per student yet it seems like schools are doing with less and less? Where is the money going?

Just wondering if any of the teachers on the board can help me undestand. I thought the movie was good but it makes me very sad/mad at the same time.

fjaril

from what i understand, it's the union that won't allow the 'bad' teachers to be fired or the 'good' teacher to be rewarded.

i could be wrong.

 

KittyFX

Yes it is the union, but plenty of people support the union and think it is a good thing. The movie suggests it is a big part of the big problem.

Nessia

I haven't watched the movie but I'm a big union supporter. FIL works for a union and ex has been in a union for 10 years. Unions make sure workers can't be fired "just because" they want to fire them. Unions force companies to have valid reasons for getting fired. Unions also make sure that if the company has layoffs the best effort is made by the company to find another place within the company. Yes, bad seeds are saved when they clearly did something wrong but I think the most part the good out weighs the bad. Like I said I don't know what the issues where in this movie but I'm curious as to what makes a "bad" teacher. I'm assuming the union make the school meet certain standards of proof before they can fire a teacher. This saves teachers from being fired when it's "just" school politics.

 

ETA: I only have knowledge of unions in Texas. I'm sure they could be much different up north. 

Temp13436125005166

I'm not a teacher but DH is and FIL is a retired teacher/librarian and MIL taught for awhile before she had kids... so I hear a lot about it :-)

My understanding of the good vs bad teacher thing is that in theory it sounds like a really good idea but the problem and concerns lie in how to do it.  The problem is that there isn't a good metric to determine good vs bad teachers.  There is concern that they would use standardized testing as a metric, or that administrators would make decisions based on who they think is best (and that creates all sorts of problems since there are a lot of good teachers that disagree with their school's administrators over the course of the year and without that I'd be concerned about the power the administrators would have).   I always hear DH saying that its the teachers and the student who really know which teachers are "good" but I'm not sure how they would in practice set up a system where their input counted. 

I hope that helps a little.  I'm guessing unions have a similar concern about "how" such a program would be implemented and how it could be abused... but since we don't have teacher's unions in TX I don't really know.

carlinlp

I don't have much to add but I really want to see this movie. And the new movie called race to nowhere. Both look intriguing.