Socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant decided to she would show her symbolic support for the teachers’ union illegal strike (which mayhopefully end this Thursday) by introducing a resolution acknowledges September 14-18 as Seattle Educators Week. As could be expected for something that allows Seattle politicians to pander to union bosses while not actually having to do anything, the council passed the resolution unanimously.
Never one to shy away from extreme, melodramatic rhetoric, Sawant declared, “Over the past decades public education has come under ferocious assault by successive Republican and Democratic administrations across the country. Public schools have been deeply underfunded and teachers have been pushed to increasingly focus on standardized testing. There has been an attempt to dismantle public education, first with vouchers, and now with charter schools.”
Sawant went on to state that a union victory would be a “huge step forward for the students and educators who make up Seattle Public Schools.” She also said that a “a victory for the union” would be “a victory for education across the country” because it would show that “we can resist attacks on public education.”
According to MyNorthwest.com, Sawant donated $500 to help fund the strike and encouraged her fellow council member to follow suit. No word yet if Sawant plans to assist the Seattle School District in covering the hefty cost of the illegal strike$100,000 per day in taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to be exact.
Just to be clear, this is the type of “ferocious assault” Seattle teachers have endured at the hands of the school district. Check out the pay increase offer union executives rejected over the weekend,
“It isn’t a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government
education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state’s goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government’s propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They’ll fasten the chains to their own ankles.”
-Lew Rockwell
If you object to public education — you know, the system which has raised the United States from colonial backwater to world-dominating leadership in many industries, including information technology and aerospace — could you please tell us how you’d amend Washington state’s constitution? Because that document makes education of children our state’s “paramount duty.”
We’ll understand if you don’t reply — those self-affixed chains of yours look pretty heavy…
Fast forward a few hundred years from that colonial backwater and look how public education is more about making the teacher unions rich and forgetting the actual education part today, when it matters.
Yeah, Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing have really suffered from having to rely on Washington state’s public schools for talented workers.
What color is the sky in your world?
I thought Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing were supporting (pleading with) the Obama’s admin.’s proposal to increase the visa applications for scientists and computer techs., because our education system (“It’s for the children”) can’t produce them.
Yes, we have not provided enough resources to meet our educational needs. Our public education system produces highly educated, skilled workers, but not enough of them. Both the McCleary decision and private employers agree we need to do more. Hence Council Member Sawant’s concerns.
I’m one of those private employers. Money does not translate into academic excellence and command of a field. If you have a research bent, compare the output of the public school system with highly paid, yes highly paid, teachers to the parochial system where teachers are dramatically underpaid in comparison. The output of the latter exceeds the output of the former in nearly all instances. It’s not money that equals output.
Money does not translate into academic excellence and command of a field.
You get what you pay for. Boeing has thrived for generations on the work performed by graduates of Washington state’s public schools, technical colleges, and public universities. At the same time, Washington state has always been a net importer of engineers. The system provides high-quality education; it was just never funded well enough to produce the quantity of graduates our industry required. (It’s almost a crime that the UW has more qualified applicants for engineering school than the college has room for them.)
If you have a research bent, compare the output of the public school system with highly paid, yes highly paid, teachers to the parochial system where teachers are dramatically underpaid in comparison.
That’s not news. Any teacher can tell you that the students with the most involved parents are the students most likely to succeed. Parochial schools get their students because the parents of those students take the initiative to get their students out of the public schools, and into the parochial schools. This gives parochial (private, magnet, charter) schools an inherent advantage over the public schools, which do not benefit from this selection process.
It’s not money that equals output.
In the case of quantity, yes it does. We need to stop under-funding the system which provides insufficient numbers of top-quality talent to Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Paccar, &c.
What public education was in this country is not what it is today. I don’t object to what public education once was. You’re spot on in your assessment of its “onceness.” But that’s not the case today. I taught for 11 years in two research universities as a professional faculty member. I saw firsthand the decline in education. College freshman and sophomore years *should* be freely open to all, I concluded as a result. The reason? Those once rigorous first years in college, years that deepened and widened knowledge and pushed one into the depths of analytical thought processes, now are at high school level. Faculty now teach that which students once learned before attending college. And meanwhile, I know faculty exiting to high schools because the pay and work environment is better and easier. Go figure…
You’re spot on in your assessment of its “onceness.”
I didn’t use that word, nor did I imply our educational system can’t be improved. I was replying to Molly’s simplistic nonsense about government indoctrination in our public schools.
Faculty now teach that which students once learned before attending college.
When trying to educate too many students with too few resources, a decline in quality is almost impossible to avoid. If we’d provided the ample funding required by our state’s constitution, we might have avoided the problem you’ve here described.
Denying resources to the educational system, then blaming that system for resultant underperformance, accomplishes less than nothing.
I always wanted a job where I had to only work 7.5 hours a day and just 180 days a year and having 2 months off in the summer and then get paid for a full year. I wanted a job making about $80,000 plus a year. A job with almost unbelievable benefits. A job where it was almost impossible to get fired.
GEE WHIZ, I guess I should have become a teacher and worked in the Seattle’s public schools. My children attended private school (our choice) and I’m retired now and have always had to pay taxes funding the public schools. Seems like after a certain age you should be exempt from paying school taxes because I’m pretty certain I’m not having any more children to send to school.
I am as opposed as the next to increasing the wages of teachers in K-12 yet I also am quick to correct thinking that teachers work only 7.5 hours daily. I know few salaried employees or business owners who work 7.5 or even 8 hour days. Teachers are not unlike other salaried professionals. The difference is teachers growl about their labor hours and wages more than other professionals. That, to me, makes me think of them as less than professional, quite frankly.