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Teacher bashing escapes reality
(by Dave Lange - December 03, 2010)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Teacher bashing escapes reality
On Nov. 2, voters approved 21 of the 47 school tax issues on local ballots in Ohio, including a 1-mill permanent-improvement levy for the Newbury School District. Given the anti-tax mood that has been sweeping the country in the wake of the Great Recession, including the rejection of modest municipal income-tax increase for two of this area's most affluent communities, Pepper Pike and South Russell, that wasn't too bad.
Actually, that proportion of school-tax approvals, even during times when voters weren't tossing Democrats out of office like lobbyists toss money around for corporate influence, would be considered pretty good. But you wouldn't know that from the Cleveland newspaper, which doesn't let facts get in the way of beating up the teachers unions.
According to the daily paper's official editorial position, last month's totally ordinary rejection rate of school taxes was a "grim reminder from voters" that things must change, especially "educators whose entrenched attitudes of entitlement are impeding" it.
The targets this time are the "last-hired, first-fired" rules that protect seniority and the step increases in wages that respect loyalty and experience. In this post-union era, the corporatists wish American workers would just forget about such traditional values that once protected them from the grudges and greed of profiteers.
President Barack Obama's so-called "Race to the Top," just like his predecessor's "No Child Left Behind" hoax, seeks to reward school districts that devalue educators with such anti-union gimmicks as school vouchers, charter schools and the delusional "merit pay."
While 500 school districts and charter schools reportedly rejoiced over Ohio's selection to receive $400 billion in federal money in late August, the Solon School District, which had just been ranked as the best district in the state in the race to the top of the Ohio Department of Education's report cards, just said no thanks. "The cost wasn't worth the benefit," School Superintendent Joseph V. Regano said recently. Not to mention that Solon never did need the state or federal government telling it how to educate children.
The Newbury School District, which initially went for the trivial $100,000 federal come-on over four years, is among the growing number of districts to withdraw. School Superintendent Richard Wagner told the daily paper the "Race to the Top" would have necessitated the hiring of a lead teacher to guide the program at a four-year cost of $212,000.
That's generally the way the charter-school bait-and-switch has worked since the anti-union forces foisted it upon a gullible public. Not only have credible studies, including an exhaustive one by Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, found that charter schools deliver significantly lower educational outcomes than traditional public schools, but many of the private contractors operating them have been caught with their hands in the public till.
"Merit pay," supposedly based on teacher performance, is another fallacy being pushed by Mr. Obama's "Race to the Top" and the corporate media. Research has shown that teachers found to be excellent or effective one year often falter in their presumed performance the next year, and vice versa. Rational observers would figure out that it's the students assigned to those teachers' classrooms who change from year to year.
But when you've predetermined that teachers unions must be blamed for student performance, you don't want to be rational.
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