Who is sticking up for teachers there? The NEA, which supports age over talent? Or the charter, which is focused on attracting and retaining good teachers?
I said that, in black and white, right there on the page. Or gray, because it's being downmodded because people who don't like the implications of it.
Anyways, yeah. Charter schools. Whole other bag of worms. I like them in theory, in practice the way they're funded usually tends to be crooked -- quick example, in the town I was a Selectman in, a charter school started up. It cost us about 7k/year to educate a student, round numbers. Cost the charter school, say, 9k. Every student that left us for the charter school, 9k was taken from our budget and assigned to theirs. To add insult to injury, we actually had to pay to bus the kids there on top of it, plus additional unitemized strains on the police budget, etc. That's not exactly kosher.
Not defending, just explaining. I'd love to throw the NEA under the bus - the problem is, nobody else stands up for teachers.
Argue with straw men much?
It's not a straw man. State and local budgets have been strapped since 2002-2003 or so, all the way through the supposed "boom", and it got worse after the collapse.
The stimulus bill, for example -- it was like 40% tax cuts, had a bunch of earmarks, but the local aid that would've helped teachers was what got stripped out in order to get the last couple votes. Congress can reduce the deficit by cutting state aid. States can balance their budgets by cutting local aid. School districts get stuck with the lack of funding from their congressman's admirable devotion to balanced budgets. In between voting for putting 2 wars and a $50 million senior center for his district on the credit card.
I'm just giving you the truth - you can accept it or not.
I dispute the term "everyone else" - most people who criticize teachers for being overpaid and underworked (which is uncommon) also criticize pork barrel spending.
Regarding my original point, that nobody stands up for teachers.. I mean look at that stimulus bill. Teacher pay makes up a huge portion and often an outright majority of local budgets. When local budgets are crunched, and it's either lay off teachers or raise taxes, guess which way the local populace usually goes?
Everyone wants something for nothing.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
They are also overpaid, particularly if you account for the value of all their fringe benefits, including summer vacation, tenure, defined benefit pensions, early retirement and gold-plated medical care (all of which are very expensive). In fact, they are usually paid right on the money if you look at salary alone - a 45 year old teacher with 20 years experience in NYC gets $83-95k/year (equivalent to $99-114k/year if they worked all year). That's not bad even for NYC.
http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro...
It gets even worse when you realize teachers tend to be low human capital individuals, at least compared to other college grads. Most likely they would be below average if they pursued other professions: http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...
You're proving my point: everyone wants something for nothing, and nobody stands up for teachers.
Is this surprising to you?
Look at many of the discussions about piracy. Many people feel it is their "right" to download and use software that would otherwise cost them money. It doesn't surprise me that people would have this same mindset for other things in their lives.
Anyways as long as they're the only one that actually sticks up for teachers then they'll have a place in the world. You just have to smack them around once in a while when they're totally wrong about something, like their resistance to the Obama admin's effort's at merit pay.
EDIT: From the article, kindergarten being the most predictive grade is fascinating.