Tag Archives: Parent

News

How teacher unions protect teachers from being fired

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This is from the New York Post.

Excerpt:

At age 75, Roland Pierre is the granddaddy of the rubber room — 13 years in the purgatory of teachers yanked from the classroom for alleged wrongdoing.

But the Department of Education can’t fire Pierre, and he’s stuck around long past the minimum retirement age.

Pierre was permanently removed from the classroom in 1997 after he was accused of sexually molesting a sixth-grade girl at PS 138 in Brooklyn.

But since then, Pierre has continued to receive full pay and fringe benefits, including health, pension and vacation, officials said. He pulls down $97,101 a year.

He’s one of six tenured teachers that Chancellor Joel Klein has refused to return to the classroom, even though any criminal charges were dropped and DOE hearing officers let them off the hook.

Pierre has been “permanently reassigned” the longest of all.

On June 26, 1997, Pierre, then 62, was arrested on felony sex-abuse charges after he allegedly called one of his students into an empty classroom where he taught English as a second language, closed the door and molested her.

[…]Officials would not explain what happened since, but sources said the criminal charges were apparently dismissed, and a DOE disciplinary case was “dropped on a technicality.”

Even if dropped, the arrest and disciplinary case would almost certainly prevent Pierre from ever getting another teaching job, said lawyer Joy Hochstadt, who has represented other teachers.

“Every application asks, ‘Have you ever been brought up on charges?’ ” she said.

The DOE has no required retirement age. Hired in 1986, Pierre could have retired at age 62. At his age, he can collect Social Security as well as his full salary, so his income may be close to $125,000 a year, sources said.

Here’s a worse story.

Excerpt:

The Alabama Department of Education has stopped the pay of a Washington County teacher who was still getting her salary while locked up in federal prison serving a 10-year sentence for child enticement.

Charlene Schmitz was suspended from Leroy High School in August 2007 for inappropriate behavior with a 14-year-old student and was terminated after her February 2008 conviction.

She was the first teacher in Alabama to continue getting paid under the state’s reworked tenure law after being convicted and put behind bars.

Washington County Schools CFO Larry Moss told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Schmitz received her last paycheck on Nov. 30 after a license revocation hearing. He said she had been paid more than $158,000 in salary and retirement benefits since she was first suspended.

If teachers had any concern for students at all, they would support vouchers and a national right to work law. Let the parents have the money, and let them choose their school. We can’t be paying for teachers like this.

This is why teacher unions exist. They want to extract money from taxpayers without having to care whether children learn anything or not. They oppose any alternative to forced attendance in public schools – be it vouchers, homeschooling, private schools. They are in this job for one reason: MONEY. At least this is the way it is in the United States and Canada.

News

New study finds that fathers should play with children and mothers should care for them

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Found here in the Courier and Mail.

Excerpt:

A study suggests that couples have a stronger relationship when the father spends more time playing with their child.

But when he participates in care-giving such as giving baths, parents undermine each other.

The study in the Journal of Developmental Psychology involved 112 couples with four-year-olds.

They were asked how often they played with their children and were involved in care-giving.

The US researchers looked for signs of supportive co-parenting, and for evidence of couples criticising or trying to “outdo” each other.

A year later the couples took part in a similar activity and results showed when fathers played more with their child at the beginning of the study, the couple showed more supportive co-parenting in the second session.

But when fathers took part more in care-giving, the couples showed lower levels of supportive co-parenting a year later.

It’s a small study, so I would like to see another one that is bigger.

 

News

The best short article on the state of marriage

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

One of the things that bothers me most about many women is that they think that planning for marriage means getting a degree in liberal arts, reading romance novels, looking at their friend’s wedding photos and holding other people’s babies. I am not convinced that many women understand anything about why a man would want to marry, what he’ll need in the marriage, and how children should be raised so that they will be effective, public Christians.

But then I read articles like this one in the National Post and I realize that some people do get it. (H/T Andrea)

Excerpt:

But, paradoxically, for those who do go through with a real marriage, the introduction of no-fault divorce in 1968 means it is easy to end the commitment. No-fault divorce made it simple for one spouse to give up on their vows when the going gets tough (or a better-looking/higher-earning/ less-nagging partner appears on the scene).

The result has been a fivefold spike in the divorce rate. The courts are now filled with family-law cases, helping ex-spouses and lawyers sort through the minutiae of domestic life. Courts pick through the unsavoury business of marital breakdown, deciding who gets what, including the children themselves.

Speaking of children, when it comes to their safety, there isn’t much the government won’t regulate. From secondhand smoke in cars, to the plastics in toys, to the design of playground equipment, no sandbox is left unturned in a quest to protect our kids.

Yet at the same time, high tax rates make it nearly impossible for one parent to stay home and care for their families. But children don’t raise themselves. This has led some to call for national state-run daycare programs — adding a new, more literal meaning to the words “nanny state.”

Since successive federal governments have failed to implement national daycare, the push for institutional care for toddlers has gone provincial. In Ontario, draft plans given to Premier Dalton McGuinty in June 2009 included a recommendation for the Ministry of Education to establish an “Early Years Division” to create programs for kids age “zero through eight.” The vision? A seamless day of state-provided care, including care before and after work. Under the proposal, some three-yearolds would log longer hours in school than many grown-ups do at work, healthy lunch and snacks included. All at taxpayer expense, of course.

[…]Often, when it comes to raising kids, daycare and schooling, we hear talk from qualified experts and smart people with degrees — as if parents aren’t quite up to snuff. Today’s smaller families mean we seldom learn from parents or grandparents who successfully raised large broods, so it’s easy to assume the experts have a better handle on our kids.

But it’s gone too far. The public school curriculum is now devised largely without parental input, yet attempts to usurp some of the most important family responsibilities, including teaching ethics, values and sex education. On that front, studies suggest that parents are still the number-one influence in teen sexual decision making. Good news perhaps, since but for rare cases, teachers aren’t exactly jumping over couches in staff rooms to grab the sex ed curriculum.

I have probably never read so much useful information about what men are thinking about when they think about marriage in such a small space. We are thinking about fiscal conservatism, parental autonomy, stay-at-home mothers, and vouchers for private schools. The irony is that most young unmarried women are opposed to ALL of those things, and they VOTE AGAINST all of those things. And so, naturally, men want nothing to do with marrying them. Men may be interested in sex, but they certainly won’t be interested in marriage.

No one ever asks men what they want – everyone just assumes that men will keep acting chivalrously and keep marrying when all the incentives to marry are taken away! Ridiculous! If marriage doesn’t involve keeping what you earn, respect from the wife, family autonomy and social prestige, then men will not marry. Men like to do hard things ALONE – we don’t want to pay the government to “help” us, especially when the “help” means using our earnings to subsidize single motherhood with welfare and state-run education.

Women: if you want a man to think about marriage, this article shows the way you need to talk about marriage with men. Reading Dr. Laura’s “The Proper Care of Marriage”, Dr. Stephen Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody”, George Gilder’s “Men and Marriage”, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Love and Economics”, and James Dobson’s “Bringing Up Boys” would also be a good start. Probably the best two things to learn to impress a man are economics and Christian apologetics, with an emphasis on science and history.