This comment is ignorant beyond belief! Have you ever been to Newark? It's a huge, bustling city - actually, New Jersey's largest city. When you make absurd claims like "[schools] serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole town" how can anyone take anything you say seriously?
I go by what I see. I should probably have said "neighborhood" not city.
Do you see how people cling to those fucking administrative jobs, while screwing over kids, like those jobs are the last life preserver on a sinking ship.
Every school district has teacher's unions that are a pain in the ass ... but only in Newark do you see an utterly corrupt organization defended tooth and nail by entire neighborhoods, without regard for how the children are effected.
Its ridiculous. People treat the firing of clerks like its a genocide of a colonized people.
Not every state in the union has teachers' union. (In the traditional sense. Some have "unions" but participation is completely voluntary so they more like professional organizations.)
My kids' time in a public school without these unions have had mixed results. The teachers seem good, but the administration seems utterly incompetent. Which is kind of the failure mode I would expect. Bad teachers cannot continue to hide, but what can I do about an administration that takes 3 years to conduct an IEP?
(The answer to that last question is one of "fight to fix the system" or "use legal recourse." Option 1 is incredibly irrational: these insiders know the game better than me and have a lot more invested in it than me. Option 2 is what my spouse and I are doing now, but it doesn't feel at all like it's improving the situation for anyone but our immediate child for the immediate time frame.)
The objectionable part is that it's not a regional issue. Vampires chasing money are everywhere and will relocate to follow the cash teat. This would've happened anywhere in the USA.
If graduation rates truly are only 67%, I can't help but question how many generations it'll take before the town becomes a "shithole" (if you don't consider it one already like the OP).
I'll never suggest that teachers are overpaid, but hyperbole doesn't help. The starting salary for the lowliest teacher in the Newark Unified School District is $54,300/year.
It depends on what that teacher's other opportunities were.
Based on how some of these teachers taught school some twenty years ago, when I was a student, I'm willing to bet some of them would never be employed in any other career, if they were to lose their jobs.
Teaching is a tough job, but if you see how teaching is done, you can see its not actually being done in the "difficult" way. People are just warming their seat cushions.
Don't muddy the waters with your romantic notions of some hard working hero toiling against the system.
I'm happy to pay more taxes to give new teachers $100,000 a year in pay ... but not these low-quality morons that they stuffed in my school when I was growing up. And certainly not for these armies of unnecessary administrative drones.
Tenure is a stupid f'in concept. I'm not guarded for life in my job. I don't see why a teacher should be.
"I'm not guarded for life in my job. I don't see why a teacher should be."
I'm willing to bet that your job isn't at the mercy and whim of whatever political viewpoint is in vogue at the moment, overly vocal minority groups (meaning small in size, not minority in the ethnicity sense), or just random pissed off parents with access to the school board. Some amount of protection is necessary when one loud person can ruin your career.
Remember that people get very, very irrational when it comes to their children.
Its not like people get fired every year based on whims, in places without unions.
Administrators still want good people even if there isn't a union backing them.
Public sector unions have no constraints against them until system collapse. At least private sector unions have some constraints in the sense that their place of work will go out of business if they are completely ridiculous. Public sector unions do whatever they want till the taxpayer base literally flees to another place.
