Unintended Consequences, the Teacher Edition

Regardless of intentions, when “benefits” harm more than they help, they lose the status of being “beneficial.”

For example, have you ever given thought to QUOTAS?  I don’t mean production quotas, or sales quotas, I mean hiring quotas or admission quotas.  Have you ever had any interaction with an organization that had to meet a personnel or admission quota? The stated intention of quotas is to “level the playing field.”  The resulting implication is that the intended beneficiaries under the quota are sub-standard, that they otherwise could not have gained entry to that playing field. They just aren’t good enough, so we had to make sure they could be good enough by changing what constitutes “good enough,” by lowering the standard. How did you feel when you met someone who qualified for the quota? Did you wonder if that person was there only because of the quota, that maybe they just weren’t otherwise “good enough?”

That’s what teachers’ unions are doing to the teaching profession.

In my whole life, I have met maybe three “bad” teachers. They probably weren’t always “bad.” They were probably burned out on having to deal with things that should have been dealt with by others.  There are teachers teaching who should not be. We all know there are; every profession has members who should be doing something else. But the stranglehold that the teachers’ unions have over the boards of education prevents those boards from relieving the school system of a bad teacher and replacing him/her with one that is worthy of the title. If we knew that the school board had the authority to fire bad teachers, and that the board didn’t need to be afraid to USE that authority, we could be assured that ALL our teachers excel at their craft, that they all demonstrate excellence, and that every teacher at our children’s schools are worthy of our admiration.

Because we know that even bad teachers can’t be fired for just being bad teachers, we also know that there must be bad teachers somewhere in our schools—there must be, because our school board can’t risk firing them. And also because we do know that there are bad teachers in our schools, unfortunately, the entire profession falls under quota ambiguity.  Every year I have to wonder if this is the year that my child gets a teacher who should be doing something else but hasn’t yet committed the nearly only offense for which they could be justifiably dismissed (sexual misconduct with a student).

Yelling and screaming at kids evidently is not a signal that a teacher might be in the wrong profession. Passing kids who can’t do grade-level work, evidently, is also not reason enough. Day after day of worksheets instead of interactive educational activities, movies instead of lessons, busywork homework instead of assignments that genuinely measure a student’s grasp on the material, these also apparently don’t indicate that a teacher may be inappropriately employed. Or maybe they do, but it doesn’t matter; the union says it’s not grounds for dismissal. If the board of education chooses to fight that fight, the union makes sure it sucks the school system dry of funds to use for such luxuries as—oh, I don’t know, education maybe? It’s a threat that need not be spoken aloud: You can fight this, but you know that we can make it so expensive that you don’t want to.

Teachers, this is not fair to you, and I can’t understand why you stand for it. The esteem rendered to the entire profession becomes reduced to the lowest common denominator. There are a lot of things that the boards of education need to do to render to your profession the respect it deserves, but until YOUR UNIONS release their death grip over the presiding authorities, you will have no better than you have now. They are not protecting you from us, they are controlling YOU by telling you that they are acting in your best interest. You need to examine fully their actions and their words to see that they are inconsistent with your best interest. Take whatever money your union can squeeze out of us for you, and fully understand that because the money is not the real issue, as long as YOUR UNIONS make it the primary issue, the focus will stay diverted from the things that communities can do to provide the kinds of experiences you got into teaching for.