Juan Williams Fired From NPR

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When was the last time you hired a teacher?

So was I: My girls are 7 and 8 (the 8-year-old is about to be 9).

 

Earlier this year, when I payed taxes.

 

Well you may have, if you are a homeowner. But supplying the money and doing the actual hiring are different two different things.

 

Agreed. Just because I buy groceries doesn't mean I have decision authority on who the store hires to stock the shelves.

Regarding the taxes, depending on where you live, you may have more than just property taxes gonig to fund the schools. In Maryland, most services are handled at the County level. School Districts are all broken down by County. Additionally, there are no local police departments for individual cities (except Baltimore). All the other police departments are County departments. As such, each County in Maryland has a 3% income tax that goes towards these services.

 

Here it is paid for by property taxes. There was talk a while back about trying to make people who live in apartments pay school taxes, but I don't think that ever happened.

 

Let's be fair here, gentlemen -- if you have your child in a class, you are likely to be pretty concerned about the nature of the person teaching that kid -- teaching is different than mopping the floor at WalMart. That being the case, go to just about any small town -- if the parents don't like a teacher, sooner or later, that teacher will be gone*. It's tougher in larger urban centres, as a teacher can be transferred.

Now this may not be fair, but when it comes to their kids, some people can't always be logical and fair. It's understandable.

*This is what happened to yours truly after his divorce. The town freaking turned on me and ripped me a new butthole! I barely made it out of there alive.

 

I know next to nothing about the personal lives my girl's teachers. I know they do a pretty good job of teaching them and that is what is important. What they do when they are not at the school does not concern me, as long as what they do is legal. Two things:

1. There is a screening process and background checks for teachers.

2. As long as teachers do not engage in any illegal activity, their lives are their own business.

LKD - It makes no sense that we have a phony standard for teachers and no such thing for the parents, where the children actually live. Example: A mom can be stripper, but a teacher can't go to see one in action because he may be a bad influence on the same kids he may be teaching.

BTW, sorry that happened to you and it proves my point about the holier-than-thou crowd. What a bunch of nitwits.

 

Chandos, as long as the US is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and as long as those teachers are government employees, I will continue to consider myself one of their employers. One of a great many, true, but still one. This is a pretty standard concept where I come from. No one I've met has had any trouble with the idea, and the only ones who weren't familiar with it were foreigners. If you are just trying to make a point, I suggest we just accept that we disagree. If you are truely unfamiliar with the idea that public servants are servants of the public, then I guess it's not as wide-spread as I thought. If the latter, consider this an introduction and decide of you agree or not.

 

Teachers in public schools are not employees of the US government. That's just lame. They are generally state employees, so a teacher in my state has no connection to you or your children. They are not "US employees," the way in which your postman is.

There are also private schools that have little connection to the government.

 

But Chandos, will you take letters from a gay or divorced postman, or take tickets from a gay or lesbian police officer? The horror! They may infect you, and would at the very least be a bad influence on everybody they get in contact with!

As far as private or denominational schools are concerned you are of course right. A friend of mine is lesbian and she is a mathematics and religion teacher at a catholic (led by the church) girl's school (which is in a sense indeed kinky). She has to keep this a secret for two reasons - for one the catholic church might revoke her missio (allowance to teach catholic religion in school) if they find out she is lesbian (or divorced or 'living in sin' for that matter - which was funny: When she did her exams we were flatmates. She got a routine phone call from the diocese that became investigative when I picked up the phone - they wanted to find out whether we were flatmates or a couple), and then her school might fire her for not meeting their standards for exemplariness. Also, having to keep this a secret makes her vulnerable to blackmail. However intrusive, legally they have every right to do all that, because, and only because, it is a denominational school.

All that said, she is an excellent teacher, who would have made a good academic career as theologian or mathematician if she had chosen to do so.

 

State governments are, in a functional way these days at least, a part of the Federal Government and, even if they are considered indepenant, are still elements of the United States government (which I consider to include both federal and state, regardless of how you relate the two). Yes, there is a difference between a federal employee and a state employee, but both are members of governments formed of the people, by the people, and for the people, and both are public servants.

And they have every right to fire a teacher for picking his nose in public, if they so choose.

 

That noble sentiment often appears to lead to a thoroughly false understanding.

More to the point: You are aware that nevertheless you, as a citizen and part of the people, neither have discretionary or perhaps even capricious directive authority over either state or federal employees - even though they are part of the governments formed of the people, by the people, and for the people and are public servants?

All you can expect them to do is to do their job well, obey the rule of law and respect your rights and be polite (as a consequence of them serving you as a citizen). That's it. And that's a lot.

Your or anybody else's personal ideas about what a public servant ought to do or not to do in his private life are irrelevant. You have under your political system abrogated any direct authority over federal and state employees to elected officials and the rule of laws they have enacted. These laws include the constitution, and its ideas about privacy.

Your actual direct influence on public servants is limited to voting and at worst perhaps suing them for misconduct. Considering that a lot of people in the US have very divergent and at times exceedingly nutty ideas about the role and tasks of public servants that decidedly a good thing.

 

Texas teachers are not YOUR public servants, they are public servants of the people of Texas; they are state employees, not federal employees. And teachers that teach in private schools are not public servants at all.

Not really. It depends on the contract, or agreement, that both parties enter into. A teacher under contract may have legal recourse.

 

That was my point.

 

Ragusa -- NOG can always join the PTA.

 

NOG, following that logic through can lead to some pretty absurd conclusions. My wife is a teacher, and she - just like every other employed person in MD - pays state and county taxes. Because she is a homeowner, she - just like every other homeowner in MD - pays property taxes. Strangely, she does not see herself as self-employed.

Is it fair to assume that there is no teacher's union in your school district? As Chandos rightly points out, teachers have contracts. For you to be fired, you have to be found to be in breach of contract. For all practical purposes, there's only two things that you can do to get you fired. 1) Do something illegal, and by this I mean something beyond a summary offense like a speeding ticket. 2) Show negiligence in showing up for work - like going beyond your allotted vacation/sick days without having a medical reason, or repeatedly failing to show up on time. To use my wife as an example, her contract states she has to be at school 30 minutes prior to the arrival of students. Since the first buses start pulling in around 8:10, she needs to be there by 7:40.

So all I have to ask is this LKD - How is your getting divorced grounds for essentially running you out of the school? Or, more to the point: How did getting divorced cause you to lack the capability of performing your job as a teacher properly? Because that's ultimately the grounds on which you should be judged. If your capability as a teacher was essentially the same before, during, and after the divorce, then there should be no reason for them to suddenly have a negative impression of you. How did the parents even know you were going through a divorce?

True, but that's a far cry over having some kind of decision authority over who happens to be teaching your child. I went to public school me entire life, and while my parents were certainly interested in who my teacher was, they were by no means in a position to send me to a different class within that school or to a different public school if they happened to not like that teacher. The only alternative they had if they didn't like the public school teacher was to pay to send me to a private school.

In fact, school districts go to great lengths to ensure it shouldn't matter which particular teacher your child has. The school district puts out a curriculum each year with the idea that the standards are uniform. For example, a 2nd grade student in school A is learning the same subjects and using the same textbooks as another 2nd grade student attending school B on the opposite side of town. They obviously have different teachers, and the way the teachers present that information may well be different, but the actual stuff the kid is learning over the course of the grading period is supposed to be the same, irrespective of exactly where you go to school.

 

Succinctly, I was depressed and was not as effective as before. In a small town, EVERYONE knows just about everything about everyone. Parent's complained that I wasn't giving enough feedback, the VP was assigned to find fault with everything I did, and while I wasn't actually fired, I was "pushed out" and left before things got really nasty.

Bottom line is, if parents make enough fuss, things can get very rough for a teacher. The squeaky wheel and all that. It takes time, but it can be done. Modern principals can find ways and ways again to make life difficult for a teacher while not violating collective agreements.

That said, I think it can eb a good thing for parents to want a role in their children's education.

 

I never claimed to have final authority over the actions of public servants, only a voice. I claimed that the collective voice of the People may be used as an acceptable standard by which public servants in positions of particular trust are judged. And yes, that can extend outside of the workplace in certain circumstances.

I never claimed they were my public servants. I claimed they were your public servants.

And again, I'm not talking about private school teachers there. Thanks for missing that in my last post.

That's true. I should have said, within the bounds of any contract agreement.

Both you and Ragusa have tried to put words in my mouth in your last posts. I'd appreciate it if you could explain to me where you got these bizarre ideas about my arguments.

And yet, in part, she is. Not in the majority, just like if someone earns .05% of their income from self-employment (maybe a side job or something), they don't count for any legal purposes (I think) as self-employed, but at least a little, they are.

True, but I don't think anyone was arguing to the contrary.

 

NOG, fair enough, but what certain circumstances?

 

Well, in any situation where a public servant (as an individual) is a common role model, such as a teacher, or where significant authoritative trust is put on them, such as police officers, anything to damage that role model status or that authoritative trust, even if not illegal, would be reasonable. For example, if it is discovered that a police officer has been drawing money out of his ill mother's bank account (to which he has been given legal access, so that he could pay her bills) for personal spending. Or if a teacher is found to have had sex with student-aged prostitutes in a foreign country (in which it isn't illegal). Of course, any of those are bound by any contracts that said employees may have, but I think some sort of basic behaviour clause is common in such things. LKD may know otherwise.