Been dealing with unions for over 40 years. Show me a union, and I’ll find you a couple of percent of its members that are incompetent and hide behind union procedures and rules to keep their job.
That sounds like the crap you see everywhere, regardless of unions. Some folks are great at figuring out how to use every loophole to avoid working hard. That's no more a knock on unions than it is on private companies.
It absolutely is. If someone is canny enough to pull it off unabated, then you just have to wait until they slip up bad to terminate them. Unions actively protect mediocrity and incompetence. I believe you yourself have had more than a few posts here about bad police. Well, who do you think protects the bad police when all of the warning signals are going off? It’s not until someone gets beaten, shot, or a knee to the upper back that the union is willing to not fight for them and cut them loose.
Again, I said that I’ve never known anyone to be “protected” by the union and you called me a liar. The only person that I know that requested the union’s help in a termination proceeding was turned down. Besides, most teachers are on annual contracts so getting rid of someone is easy. Oh, and by the way, nice goal post moving.
Unions actively protect workers. They protect all types of workers, from the high performers to the incompetent. That's their job. What protects bad police? Police unions. But also our legal system, government, and citizenry.
Answer to your first sentence is yes. As to the rest of your post is all I heard was blah blah blah blah.... electrons.
Louisiana gets serious about education. Or at least, cashing in on the idea of education. Apparently, you can buy a diploma for $465. No classes or tests required. Diplomas for sale: $465, no classes required. Inside one of Louisiana’s unapproved schools
Fla towards the bottom for teacher shortage. This was as of aug. Will be interesting where this is in Jan as more politics and state government in teaching makes an impact. The U.S Teacher Shortage 2023: A State by State Breakdown
Probably because they don't go on strike very often. They generally get what they want, since no one wants the police to go on strike, and the government supporting them can raise taxes as needed to deal with the problem. Companies cannot just raise prices every time the union wants more benefits. So there is a lot more friction with unions in the private sector. For those of us in manufacturing, we also realize that unions are one of the barriers to making high-quality goods. Example A: Ford, GM, and Chrysler (versus Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai). Unions prevent discussions between management and workers that are necessary for a collaborative effort to improve quality. Manufacturing is important because it is one of the industries that drives the economy (both locally and nationally). If the economy isn't humming, then there's no money to pay for public sector services like the police. If it makes you feel any better, I will go on record as saying that I dislike police unions, along with teacher unions and other public sector unions. I generally support the police themselves, however (when they aren't beating people senseless).
I think the bigger problem is that principals are often unaware of who their really good teachers are and who their not-so-good teachers are. They typically never spend any time in the classroom. They seem like they are more concerned with managing the school's finances, the latest test scores, and keeping parents from pulling their kids out and enrolling in another school (which causes them to lose funding). At least, that was the case when my wife was teaching. It may be difficult to put together enough documentation to get a teacher fired as well.
The chart is a breakdown of teacher ratio (per 1,000 students in this case). Wouldn't it stand to reason that states with the highest growth will have the biggest problems? Fl being one of those. More students are moving here (I know as we design schools) and the budgets for hiring teachers doesn't exactly turn on a dime. Those NE schools have stable or falling student growth. I know some teachers in NY state so some knowledge there supports this.
The bigger problem here in Florida is that if you let someone go, there is no one to replace them with. I don’t think that some folks realize how bad this really is.
In St John's county last year, our kids high school started the year with three Chemistry teachers and finished the year with one. I know of several schools that lost their Physics teachers and couldn't find replacements, so they just signed up whole classes of Physics students to FLVS and hired a babysitter to keep order in the classroom.