10 Reasons Public School Teachers and Unions are Failing Children and Bankrupting America
Posted By Megan Fox On March 14, 2011 @ 8:00 pm In Email,Feature,News | 1 CommentCorruption, greed, incompetence, bureaucratic bungling: Those are the things most likely to be found when the charade of public union outrage is peeled back to reveal the inner workings of collective bargaining. There is no doubt America is engaged in an ideological battle. On one side are the public sector unions and “workers” demanding the taxpayers cough up more to fund their fat paychecks and bloated pensions. On the other side are the majority of Americans who work in the private sector, fund their own retirements and health care, and have no entitlement programs they haven’t designed themselves. The public sector is asking for more blood while the private sector is beaten unconscious and bleeding from every major artery.
The newly elected Republican guard is trying to stop the bleeding, starting with the mess that is the public union. The howling has only just begun (see Wisconsin and Ohio). The Left has used unions and “workers’ rights” throughout history to weave their socialist ideals into the fabric of society. They use words and ideas that sound good in theory like “all children have the right to education! All workers have the right to a fair wage! A chicken on every table! A rice cooker on every counter!” They use these mantras to make anyone who doesn’t think leftist ideas actually help people feel ashamed of themselves. But when you get down to the practical application of their ideas, you find the nice words are covering up a festering, rotting corpse of horror.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the public school system where we are facing record malfeasance and mismanagement of public trust.
10. Grace Currin
No list about government waste would be complete without a visit to one of the best… of the worst in public education: the Chicago Public School System where bad teachers survive and illiterate kids waste away. Grace Currin’s entire fourth grade class will be showing up for summer school because of her inability to educate them sufficiently to pass. That’s right, they all failed. Three different principals in her school tried to fire her. They failed due to union attack dogs who refused (and continue to refuse) to allow any dues-paying tenured member to fall off the rolls no matter how stupid they are. Witnesses to her teaching style have reported heinous behavior.
The noise level in the class is unbelievable. Kids are fighting. Children are rolling around on the floor. They are throwing chairs across the room. One day I walked into her classroom and said, ‘Did you see that chair fly across the room?’ and she said, ‘I told them not to do that.’
Currin even admits she’s part of the problem, but mostly blames it on the children.
I am part of the problem, but remember, you can’t expect miracles when you have low achievers.
Currin has been teaching for 30 years. It strains the mind to imagine how many young minds were ruined by her ineptitude. However, she can still count on the full support of her union who apparently couldn’t care less that Chicago school children pay the price.
Next: A six-figure salary for teaching one class a day –>
9. Tom Dromgoole
This story just hit the news stands last week. Tom Dromgoole is a New York teacher making $100,049 per year. I’m sure you’re thinking he must be a very hard-working teacher who picks up tons of extracurricular activities. You would be right if those extracurricular activities included a union representative job paying $50,000 a year, while causing him to only be able to teach one class a day. After his class is over, Dromgoole reports to his union job. As a result, the school district has to hire a substitute teacher to teach the rest of his classes. The taxpayers of New York are getting hammered with paying for two teachers when they only need one. The New York Post reports that 1,500 teachers are currently doing what Dromgoole is doing and costing the city 9 million dollars a year in substitute teacher salaries.
Reached Friday outside his Brooklyn townhouse, Dromgoole brushed past a reporter who asked about his UFT work, saying, “No comment.”
The Post confirms that Dromgoole isn’t the only one of the 1,500 teachers getting a deal this cushy.
The DOE lets 40 experienced teachers collect top pay and fringe benefits, but work just one class period a day.
Under a longstanding contract agreement, the DOE excuses these veterans to work for the UFT — currently 38 as district representatives and two as union vice presidents. The UFT pays them another salary, plus expenses.
One veteran teacher told the Post:
“It’s a plum because you’re not teaching. Some principals give them little or nothing to do” because the UFT reps are powerful.
Mayor Bloomberg’s office, reported to have agreed to this fraud, also refused to comment. But don’t worry, it’s all for the children.
Next: Excruciatingly bad poetry and teachers gone wild…
8. The New Jersey Teachers Association
“1, 2, 3, 4! Legislators owe us more!” was the chant at the recent NJEA conference. Undercover journalist James O’Keefe was there with his hidden camera. What he got on film was super entertaining… and sickening at the same time. One teacher happily laughs about all the “free sh*t” they get at the convention while another plays a video game laughing at those silly taxpayers who pay her for doing exactly nothing. Even worse, Alissa Ploshnick, special education teacher, bragged about how hard it is to fire a teacher who has tenure.
It’s really hard. Like, you seriously have to be in the hallway [explicit] somebody.
From the examples on last week’s list about unions who protect child predators, sometimes not even that suffices. Then she went on to explain that not even racism is enough to get a tenured teacher fired, giving an example of a teacher who called a student the “n” word and still retained a teaching position. O’Keefe went further, calling the school with someone posing as a parent to get the school’s policy on calling black children the “n” word. He was told the teacher could not be fired, but that they could move the child. When the teachers weren’t drinking and telling raunchy stories to O’Keefe, they were in session where some incredibly bad rhyming was the soup du jour.
Let’s have a whiskey
And get a little misty
Join me now
And slander Chris Christie!
That teacher should be fired simply for excruciatingly bad poetry. She’s in charge of the minds of the future? Scary. When they weren’t chanting about Christie, they were making not-so-veiled threats against him.
Well, everybody wants to, well, take this guy out one way or the other. You know what I mean?
Yeah, Jersey Boy, we know what you mean. You don’t have to spell it out for us, wink wink. But hating the governor is not a crime. What is a crime, is abusing students. Another drunken fool talked about how he could be a principal and really “[explicit] with kids.” I think someone should find that gentleman and make sure he isn’t already doing that. During another break-out session a teacher confessed that her school created a padded room where they lock up “out of control” students. If only there were a similar solution for out-of-control teachers’ unions!
Next: Drunks, druggies and potheads…
7. Addicted Teachers
Middle school teacher Kylene Nelson was found by administrators passed out in her car and surrounded by wine bottles while her students sat unattended in an empty classroom in 2006. She was asked to go on leave for the remainder of the year and enter a rehab program. She was allowed to return to a different school in the district after a short probation. In 2009 it happened again. Her students video-taped her with their cell phones dancing suggestively with students during class and appearing to be drunk. When she was tested, it turned out she was drunk and stoned on marijuana. Nelson voluntarily resigned after the second incident but her reprimand allows her to go back to teaching as early as 2013.
In Hawaii, a rash of drug abusing teachers were discovered in 2007 leading to legislation to require random drug testing of teachers.
[Bronwyn]Kugle, 38, [an elementary school teacher was] charged yesterday with conspiring to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute 2.2 pounds of cocaine and 990 tablets of MDMA or “Ecstasy.”
In October, Leilehua High School teacher Lee Anzai was arrested on charges of selling crystal methamphetamine. In December, two Mililani Middle School teachers — Lisa Luhrsen and Benjamin Ayson — were arrested for allegedly smoking marijuana before they showed up for work on a Monday morning.
The legislation didn’t pass without a fight from the teachers union which refused to agree to the random testing without an 11% increase in pay. But even after getting their pay raise and agreeing to the random testing, they now say if the random tests are tried, they will fight them!
“Random testing isn’t going to suddenly increase test scores,” said Mike McCartney, executive director for the Hawaii State Teachers Association. “This is a huge distraction from how to make our schools better.”
The union says it will agree to drug testing in cases where there’s a reason to suspect drug use.
Even though the law says all 13,000 teachers are subject to random testing, the unions are flouting the law and the Department of Education refuses to pay for the $35 per teacher for administering the drug tests. It was pretty ingenious to negotiate a raise over a policy the union never intended to follow, once again proving the unions are more interested in their pocketbooks than in the safety of children.
The ACLU predictably jumped on the bandwagon and sued the state of Hawaii for implementing the random drug testing legislation.
Next: Test scores don’t matter…for teachers –>
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Rest of the article here.
Disgusting.
http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/03/14/epic-fail-10-reasons-public-school-teachers-and-unions-are-failing-children-and-bankrupting-america/print
