If you’ve been thinking that the mainstream media has been more critical of teachers’ unions of late, Terry Cowgill at Big Journalism confirms your observations and names names. For instance: A story in yesterday’s Washington Post on the recent ratification of a new D.C. teachers contract, which calls for using student improvement as a measure [...]
The Washington Post reports on the new contract ratified by the union yesterday. Some highlights from Bill Turque’s article: The contract, a product of nearly 2 1/2 years of contentious negotiations, combines a rich traditional financial package with unorthodox initiatives historically resisted by unionized teachers. It includes a five-year, 21.6 percent increase in base pay [...]
Deborah Meier at Education Week’s Bridging Differences recently wrote a passionate but unfocused piece titled “Good Schooling is Built on Respect.” Unfortunately, she never got around to discussing what the post’s title promised. Meier does talk about seniority and she worries about the fate of teachers’ unions: Honoring seniority is an age-old idea. It would [...]
There was quite an interesting dust-up in New Jersey yesterday when the governor responded to teacher Rita Wilson’s complaint that she wasn’t getting paid adequately for her education and experience: … borough teacher Rita Wilson, a Kearny resident, argued that if she were paid $3 an hour for the 30 children in her class, she’d [...]
The NY teachers’ union (UFT) wishes people– you know, the “blame the teacher crowd and the Wall Street Hedge Funds behind them”– to “quit playing politics” with the school children of New York. EdWise has the TV ad that the UFT began running last week in an attempt to prevent the possible $500 million education [...]
There’s a lot of well-deserved buzz about Madeleine Sackler’s new documentary, The Lottery. The film follows four families who have entered the lottery for admission to kindergarten in the hugely-successful Harlem Success Academy, a charter school in New York. It’s hard to argue that parents of poor kids don’t care about their kids’ education– or [...]
In what American Thinker‘s Thomas Lifson calls “a remarkable display of self-degradation,” New York State judges are thinking of joining New York’s largest teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers. According to the New York Post, some judges– fed up over a lack of raises for 11 years– have decided it’s time to “get some [...]