Teacher Unions vs Education Vouchers, Home-Schooling, and Charter Schools

Teacher Unions vs Education Vouchers, Home-Schooling, and Charter Schools

Forty years ago, a debate raged among public school teachers in New York State over the question of whether to affiliate themselves with labor unions.

The debate essentially centered on the issue of whether teaching was a profession or a trade. A compromise was reached with a semantical subterfuge when many teachers opted to continue calling their locals “federations” or “associations,” thereby retaining the illusion of professionalism, and joined the New York State United Teachers, “a union of professionals.”

Forty years ago, the American public education system produced graduates who could read, write, cipher, and think. Granted, we didn’t accomplish those goals as well as our forebears had but they didn’t have to compete with television and cultural and sexual revolutions. Still, we did a pretty damned good job–as contrasted with educators today.

Was the unionization of education the only cause in education’s transparent decline?

Not at all. Many teachers were already members of de facto unions which represented them in the same way they are represented today. Also, there are various outside influences on kids today which were present forty years ago but which hadn’t yet fully blossomed into the negative forces they are now.

And cell phones, iphones, Blackberries, smart phones, personal computers, and the Intenet didn’t exist.

Are teacher labor unions necessarily a bad thing? Again, not at all.

Teachers have greatly benefitted from the powerful clout of statewide and nationwide affiliations and school budgets have ballooned. They are not necessarily a bad thing, unless union extremism as seen in teacher participation in last spring’s riots in Wisconsin and the hardships inflicted on taxpayers by those balloons are factored in.

As a desperate response to failing public school systems often more intent on propagandizing than teaching, parents have resorted to a unique alternative, homeschooling their kids.

Teacher unions and their elected officials have fought tooth and nail against that desperation. Home-based learning effectively served as a denunciation of the inefficacy and the misguided values inculcated in public schools so what else could they do?

Education vouchers allowing parents to shop for the best elementary and secondary schools for their children represented an even greater threat to entrenched union interests and they, too, have been resisted as if they were a creation of the devil.

After all, if parents were permitted to pick and choose, they wouldn’t choose failing schools and would therefore put pressure on districts to compete by raising their level of instruction and discipline and to return to their fundamental pedagogical mission.

Both home schooling and education vouchers undermine America’s public education system and that’s not a bad thing either in light of the fact that system isn’t educating very well.

Another alternative to sending children to public schools that provide, at best, a babysitting service has sprung up in the past two decades: charter schools. If vouchers are the creation of some devil to teacher unions, charter schools must be the creation of Lucifer himself. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=12206.)