| >You must understand, high school kids are kids. Okay, I agree with that, but... >Teachers are adults and professional educators. Where did you teach? I'll move there to raise my kids. Seriously - I grew up in a reasonably good school district (Livingston, NJ) and while there were some good teachers, many (I want to say most, but don't trust my memory to be undistorted) were atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston_Public_Schools >I'm telling you that it's a metric ton of grading work -- and it's not fun like programming or problem-solving; it's grinding slow repetitive work that makes you miserable. To be clear, when I say a proof class, I mean that I was grading 30 problem sets (8 TAs, 240 students - this was CS103) of 13-15 problems, around 10 of which were proofs, every week. And many of the students were learning how to write proofs in this class. Trust me, there's nothing as painful to grade as that. >If it weren't for teacher's unions, then any time that administration wanted a teacher gone, they would be gone. It wouldn't be perfect. But I prefer a situation with some false negatives to a situation with zero true negatives. That is, I'd rather have most bad teachers and a few good teachers get fired than have no teachers get fired. May be less fair to the teachers (if you're of the school of thought that would rather let 100 guilty men free than punish 1 innocent - depends how you define fair) but it would be far better for the students. >Teaching any controversial subject that a parent decides to complain about? Gone. It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions. >I've got no idea what you mean by "rubber rooms". Do you have no idea what I mean by "Google" either? http://www.google.com/search?q=rubber+rooms |
> It's not clear to me why this would follow from a lack of teachers' unions.
The union sets up fairly strict protocols that the administration must follow if they want to fire a tenured teacher (the administration can, of course, let go a non-tenured teacher at any time).
The school administration is led by the superintendent of schools -- an elected position. The superintendent gets paid a lot of money and wants to get reelected. If parents complain to the super -- and they do -- then the super wants to placate them to ensure reelection.
Kids are kids, and they exaggerate (and often lie) to their parents about school. Parents want to believe that their child is telling the truth about mean Mr. Teacher picking on them, being too tough on them, grading them too harshly, or assigning too much homework. So parents quite often complain to the principal (who works directly for the super and is not part of the teacher's union), or even directly to the super.