The Seattle Times editorial board says “Congress should be ashamed” of a bill that sends $10 billion to states to avert nationwide teacher layoffs, because it diverts money from food stamps and child nutrition programs. But you don’t need to read between the lines to see that the Times’ ed board really just views this bill as yet another opportunity to attack organized labor.
Teachers unions single-mindedly urged lawmakers to save their members’ jobs even as many Americans lose theirs. … Union leaders may see this as a victory and testament of their clout and influence. But children’s advocates are right to be disgusted.
[…] Congress also failed to use the money to exact reform. For example, advocates for poor and minority children failed to persuade lawmakers to make school districts shed a long-standing practice of teacher layoffs that prioritize seniority over other factors, such as effectiveness.
Education is the best investment of public dollars, but only if spending drives improvements, rather than rewarding a powerful interest group.
In other words, education is a good investment of public dollars, but only if spending is used to break the evil teachers unions.
Honestly, you didn’t have to read any further than the lede — which describes the bill as a “misguided bailout for teachers” — to figure out where the Times was going. A bailout…? Really? And for teachers?
Calling this bill a “bailout for teachers” is like calling the GM takeover a “bailout for autoworkers,” or the Wall Street rescue a “bailout for homeowners.” It implies and confers blame on the teachers for their own precarious situation. According to the Times, Congress isn’t bailing out school districts or the families they serve, but the teachers… because, you know, they’re the ones responsible for fucking up state and district budgets, I guess.
I mean, hell… why not just fire them all and start over from scratch, like President Reagan did with the air traffic controllers? Forget about teaching children; what we really need to do is teach those uppity, union bastards a lesson they’ll never forget.
Oh, and by the way, if you can trust the Times’ numbers, the bill saves 3,000 teaching jobs right here in Washington state, more than 5% of our state’s roughly 59,000 classroom teachers. Lose those teachers, and you pretty much increase class size by another one or two students each. And apparently, the Times is okay with that.
A well educated citizenry is the single biggest danger to oligarchical corporatist rule.
Any way that education can be demonized benefits the agenda.
One need look no further to the benefits of an under educated electorate than our
TEARepublican party voters.Perhaps the major tax break the state recently gave to newspapers in the midst of a budget crisis was a “bailout for the newspaper workers” driven by their powerful self-interested unions!
Oh, wait. Hardly any newspapers are unionized, so that can’t be right.
Of course, the SEATTLE TIMES is unionized, though. That pretty much explains its dog-shootin’ publisher Frank Blethen’s rabid hatred of unions. I guess he can’t stand that his employees have the right to stick together to advocate for their rights and decent wages/benefits.
Plus, he’s still smarting from the last time they dared to walk out on him. Blethen had barbed-wire fences erected around the building and parking lot, and he hired security thugs to stand on the rooftop videotaping the striking employees on the picket lines below in a failed attempt to intimidate them. What an ass.
The Seattle Times is 100% right on.
All this is is another bailout…increasing the National Debt…to help States with their unsustainable Budgets and to pay-off the Unions.
This is merely a flow-thru from Taxpayers==>Teachers==>Union Dues==>Democrats
Follow the money.
It’s not about Teachers or Children…it’s about Union Power and the failure of States like Washington to negotiate with Unions.
Period!
I found this link at Crosscut.com:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/.....-math.html
Except teacher contracts are not negotiated by state government in WA, nor any other state.
Negotiation with teacher’s unions happens with very locally elected school boards.
Follow the uninformed idiocy. Period!
Gee, let’s see….
We could spend money keeping teachers employed and working, helping to educate our children with lower class sizes….
Or we could follow the Seattle Time’s preference (and that of the Republican Party in general), putting the teachers out of work where they would collect unemployment benefits and classroom sizes would increase, tutoring programs would be cuts, etc.
Why do the Republicans and the Seattle Times support policies which would pay people not to work?
Why does the Seattle Times hate children?
Why do we keep bailing out roadbuilders by building and maintaining roads??
What is the effect of laying off a teacher compared to say, laying off an aerospace machinist or cutting USDA price supports to commodities brokers?
What becomes of a laid off teacher over the long term? They cease to be a teacher. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of excellent undergrads are diverted from the field. The pool of qualified and willing applicants shrinks. Inexperienced young college grads with provisional teaching certificates move into other fields when school districts lay them off. And they do not return. As taxpayers we pour millions into preparing them for careers in teaching only to see them depart for careers in other fields.
The Times doesn’t just hate unions.
They hate the idea of high quality public education for all.
Did anybody read the link above?
Hey, a 50:1 student:teacher ratio is perfectly acceptable; well in all areas where the students are not white and rich.
No Luigi, and we won’t!
@7 Well, look at it this way: Frank Blethen is a little like W. C. Fields, only nowhere near as funny.
It’s good to see Cynical against bailouts and bankrupting our children. So that’s why he’ll be voting for Patty Murray, since she co-sponsored legislation that prevents Wall Street from getting any more taxpayer money. He would never vote for Dino Rossi, since Dino thinks that government is there to bail out Wall Street’s risky schemes, otherwise why would he fly to the east coast to raise campaign funds?
I’d sure like to know how you folks are going to begin to put a dent in a 13.3 Trillion dollar deficit, and running a 1.5 Trillion dollar 2010 deficit. Can you spell Greece?
The whole class size thing is a bit of a canard. The research only supports the (modest at best) impact of small class sizes in grades K-3, and only if class size is below 20. In fact, the studies only saw difference in achievement when they compared 15 student classrooms to 25 student classrooms. Lowering class size by one or two students did not produce an impact. So a substantial investment in, say, 15 student classrooms at the K-3 levels is the only thing the research would support.
This is a pretty old summary of the research, but it’s pretty good: Dept of Ed article . You have to really read the whole thing, not just the initial paragraphs, to get the details on what works.