Tag Archives: Teacher Union

News

One day of substitute teaching qualifies union lobbyists for teacher pensions

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From the Chicago Tribune. (H/T Marathon Pundit)

Excerpt:

Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli were the only people who took advantage of a small window opened by lawmakers a few months earlier.

The legislation enabled union officials to get into the state teachers pension fund and count their previous years as union employees after quickly obtaining teaching certificates and working in a classroom. They just had to do it before the bill was signed into law.

Preckwinkle’s one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He’s 59, and at age 60 he’ll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.

His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.

[…]Over the course of their lifetimes, both men stand to receive more than a million dollars each from a state pension fund that has less than half of the assets it needs to cover promises made to tens of thousands of public school teachers. With billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, which serves public school teachers outside of Chicago, is one of several pension plans that are in debt as state government reels in a fiscal crisis.

This is why we need to rein these unions. Not only do they not provide quality educations for poor students in the inner city, but they are corrupt and wasteful.

If you missed my post on Ohio State Issue 2, then you should read it here.

News

California public schools introduce gay indoctrination starting in kindergarten

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From the liberal Los Angeles Times. (H/T Come Reason)

Excerpt:

At Wonderland Avenue Elementary School in Laurel Canyon, there are lesson plans on diverse families — including those with two mommies or daddies — books on homosexual authors in the library and a principal who is openly gay.

But even at this school, teachers and administrators are flummoxed about how to carry out a new law requiring California public schools to teach all students — from kindergartners to 12th graders — about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans in history classes.

“At this point, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Principal Don Wilson said.

Educators across the state don’t have much time to figure it out. In January, they’re expected to begin teaching about LGBT Americans under California’s landmark law, the first of its kind in the nation.

Notice how dissent from GLBT indoctrination is portrayed in the mainstream media:

In 2005, L.A. Unified debuted the nation’s first chapter in a high school health textbook on LGBT issues covering sexual orientation and gender identity, struggles over them and anti-LGBT bias. A section on misconceptions says sexual orientation is not a choice — a statement many religious conservatives disagree with.

Unfortunately for the leftist media, the peer-reviewed studies show that homosexuality is a choice – but that’s not what young people are going to learn in California public schools. They’ll learn what the GLBT lobby wants children to believe, instead.

And it’s OK to deprive a child of a mother or father:

On a recent morning, teacher Jane Raphael invited her two dozen kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders to sit in a circle and tell a story about their family. The students described a cross section of modern-day America: moms and dads and athletic siblings, crazy dogs, a cat named Lulu, a fish that died, divorced parents, a girl with two mommies.

You can bet that the public schools won’t be teaching the children about gay crime horror stories like Joshua Brown or Frank Lombard. These stories are a thousand times more horrifying than Matthew Shepard, but no one has ever heard about those stories. No, that’s not what the GLBT lobby wants children to learn about at all.

And that’s the problem with public schools – they only tell children what the government wants the special interest groups who get them elected want children to hear. The government wants to get re-elected, so they put public functions up for sale to the highest bidder. Special interest groups like the GLBT lobby promise them votes and campaign donations in exchange for telling children what they want the lobby wants them to believe. They only want to minimize the damage is to cut off the funding for government functions – perhaps by giving parents more control over education with voucher programs.

Even some Christian conservatives support this by voting to transfer money from private taxpayers into public schools. I once knew a Christian woman who told me that forcing her husband to pay more in taxes for public schools was a good idea, because public schools fed children free breakfasts so that all the children would be “equal”. Although she denied it, what she was really voting for was the indoctrination of children with gay proganda using her family’s money – money earned by her Christian husband. Apparently, she thought that the public schools needed her husband’s money more than her family did. When pressed by me, she admitted that she held that view because it made her feel good – she had never thought about the consequences of her voting for her husband’s ability to lead the family in a Christian direction.

Lenny has more to say about this decision by the California public schools.

News

Should teachers be paid more money?

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From the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Mark Perry posts regarding the new AEI Education Outlook by University of Missouri economist Cory Koedel which shows Education to be by far the easiest course of study in most colleges. Mark finds additional evidence from Cornell University to back up Koedel’s claim. Education majors enter college with lower SAT scores than students majoring in other fields but leave college with higher GPAs.

[…]But, as a forthcoming paper that I have co-authored with Jason Richwine will show, the low standards applied in education degrees also complicate the task of determining whether public school teachers are fairly paid. Teachers claim to be underpaid because they receive lower average salaries than private sector workers with similar levels of education. (Our paper shows that, even if this is true, they more than make up the gap through generous benefits, but we’ll ignore that for now.) But note that the control variable here is the level of education — meaning, Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, and so on — and not the quality of education nor, more importantly, the ability or productivity of the worker.

[…]Put bluntly, public school teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores, major in the easiest undergraduate course of study, take Master’s degrees in education that have no appreciable impact on teaching quality, and then wonder why they’re not as well paid as someone who got a Master’s in chemical engineering. They shouldn’t.

Education is what you study when you can’t get into anything else, and you don’t learn anything in it. What we really need is to hire teachers with real degrees in math, science and business. There should not even be an education MAJOR.

Here’s a fun story about the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU).

Excerpt:

Like many Illinois citizens, the CTU has seen reports that three out of four state high school graduates are not ready for college.  And the union’s response has been, well … the CTU hasn’t really said anything about it.

You see, the fact that students are leaving Illinois’ K-12 public education system totally unprepared for college, the workplace or life in general – that’s not really the CTU’s thing.

Instead, the union is “upset” and feeling very “disrespected” because the Chicago Board of Education doesn’t have the money to pay CTU members the four percent pay raise they were promised in their contract.

The union is also steaming over the fact that more than 1,500 teachers have been laid off, some of which have been placed on a “secret” do-not-hire list, CTU President Karen Lewis told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Pay, benefits, working conditions – these are the things that the teachers unions are willing to strike over. If only 23 percent of Illinois high school grads pass a college-readiness test, well, what do you expect them to do about it? Lewis is quick to point out that union teachers are just simple “workers,” doing the best they can with the kids they are given. (It’s mostly the parents’ fault, anyway.)

Sure, some trouble making education reformers may suggest that kids are doing badly on the tests because their school days have been frittered away on silly social justice lessons, but the fact that the CTU is being stiffed on its four percent pay raise only underscores the need for such a curriculum.

Teachers don’t like it when you expect them to earn their salaries. They just go on strike.