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On September 3, 2008 I published this article, First We Kill the Teacher Unions, in the Huffington Post. The article reported on some evidence that the first “labor” President of the 21st Century and his “liberal” friend were going to use teachers as public policy piñatas.
So, was I right? Did I understate the assault on public education and its practitioners by the Obama administration?
Feel free to copy links to articles related to this issue in your comments.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Gary,
For an education gadgly who seeks to paint himself as a reformer, and for someone who attacks teacher for not changing with the times, you sure are pretty conservative in your defense of teacher unions. How do you square your critiques of the educational system with your defense of teacher unions? Many would argue that unions are one of the largest obstacles to reform.
Brent
Dr. Stager, I hear you on the democratic notion of unions, and I have been a union man and listened to as many Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger tunes as any man can; however, in light of Washington DC’s abysmal standardized test scores, how can the teacher’s union which has helped keep, at least some, apparently incompetent teachers employed for so long? If ultimately the success of every child lies with the quality of the teachers, aren’t unions harboring low quality teachers? New York’s “rubber rooms” are that union’s solution to firing its own, what has DC’s been?
As a teacher, working in a right to work state, I too feel the need for a teacher union as there are enormous violations of my contract and civil liberties, but I’d rather be alone and watch some of my less than capable brothers and sisters eat the edge of the axe than support the wholesale destruction of minds with low quality teachers.