Wisconsin Gov. Walker Threatens To Deploy National Guard Against Unions

Remove all ads!

That is the problem, the unions have made it so we are not getting what we paid for. Have you ever looked at what it takes to fire a teacher? If teachers were like the rest of us and could be fired for poor performance I believe we would see a significant upgrade in the teaching. Teachers, just like everyone else, should be paid based on their ability not on how long they have been in the union. Have you ever wondered why teachers don't change schools? It is because they have no reason to. If you were a great teacher you should have the ability to market yourself as one and command the salary you want. Instead teachers get paid by someone looking across a chart comparing how many years you have been there and what degree you have. Change all of these things and we will have some serious education reform.

---------- Added 0 hours, 4 minutes and 12 seconds later... ----------

I forgot to add "Republicans are just attacking Obama" to my list of diversions from the real issue. That is just an added bonus

 

Right. That's all we need to know. The unions are to blame. Brilliant.

 

"Ability" they are talking about this here as well, "good" teachers should be paid more. This is covert talk for "lets cut wages for all teachers". How do you expect to guage a teachers ability? How are you supposed to figure which teachers are good and which are bad? In some places they look at % passed, thats a great idea then I can just pass everyone. It would be great if there was a way to evaluate a teacher's performance in a good way. Ask the pupils? Then you get teachers sucking up to the pupils. Standardized testing? I think it would need to be pretty big tests cause I doubt the teacher would teach anything not coming on the test. So tell me Snook and BTA how do you plan to figure out which teachers to reward and which ones to fire?

Oh and BTA telling me that they are the second highest paid teachers in the US is like (I have been trying to come up with a good simile for 20 minutes to no avail) comparing something really small to something really small? Point being is that it doesn't say much and the high drop out rates, well I doubt it is the teachers fault and I must say that I would like to think that they are keeping it down instead of driving it up. Take care of your state's social and poverty problems if you want kids to stay in school.

One thing that is a sad truth here and I am convinced it is a sad truth there is the poorer the child, the poorer the school and the poorer the teacher. Working in "bad" neighbourhoods is almost impossible and the only teachers working there are burnt out wrecks unable to get a job anywhere else and the occasional passionate zealot who sooner or later join category one. Before I got my current job I was subbing in different schools in the area and I was appalled by the differences between schools. Schools in rich neighbourhoods had everything and all the children passed and it was hunky dory and everything was great basically there were NO problems there while the children in the poor neighbourhoods got nothing and had all the problems. And this is in equal Sweden with a massive distribution of wealth I shudder to think of how it is in the US. Oh wait, it is easily fixed if we just get good teachers who has the good taste to work for free for hte good of the children everything will be great!

 

This reminds me - how much are you paying for it? And how do you know what you should be getting for that amount?

I've heard my fair share of everyone-bashing in the educational system (trust me, there are worse places than the US, overall), and it makes me critical whenever someone tries to shift the blame wholly or mostly on one actor.

"Instead teachers get paid by someone looking across a chart comparing how many years you have been there and what degree you have"


I would say that both certainly can be valid reasons for higher compensation. Not the only reasons, but I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. Many companies have loyalty compensations for employees who have been with the company longer, so higher pay for "veterans" isn't a problem in and of itself. They don't do it for altruism or because the boss likes to keep the same drinking buddies, either - this creates loyalty to the company and the collective, and an experienced team usually has an easier time working together. These apply for schools as well, and there are added benefits: having the same teacher over several years can be a plus for the students, who don't have to adapt to different styles, and the school, which can plan on continuity in the programs and better alumni outreach. A better degree, on the other hand, implies that the teacher is better prepared and thus is more likely to do a better job understanding and explaining the matter. It also means the teacher might have somewhat easier time finding a job somewhere else. Current performance can and should be a factor, if the school budget allows for bonuses, but both of those you mentioned can also be factors. Also, do note that measuring performance can be a bit more complex, even apart from any subjectivity involved. After all, what if the teacher just inflates grades or teaches students only what is needed for the test instead of all they are supposed to cover? On top of that, you need to find ways to adjust the results to compensate for the class itself.

Certainly, favoring older members and paying too much attention to degrees have their downsides, but I'd say both experience and education are important foundations for a good teacher. Let's not disregard everything else apart from momentary performance, especially before agree how to measure that .

 

Because it's not sustainable and it doesn't generate public sympathy. It may prolong the issue, allowing them to generate a little more public sympathy other ways, but it's nothing more than a delaying tactic itself and is likely to be viewed negatively by many.

Throwing more money at the problem only works when you can be confident of punishing people for not getting results. That is rarely the case with unions of any kind, and almost impossible with union-controlled schools. Unless you molest a student, you can be pretty confident of having the same job next year.

Add to that the fact that most teachers today have little to no real authority in their classrooms, and most students realize it. In some places, they aren't even allowed to fail a student any more. That kills moral faster than most anything else, which is why we see such poor performance.

This is one of the bigger issues, but it's one the unions often don't even allow into the discussion. Personally, I'd say standardized tests that aren't released to the teachers beforehand, so they can't 'teach to the test'. After all, we don't give the students the test to study up on beforehand, right? Why not? Because they'd only learn the answers to the test and not the material as a whole.

Beyond that, Joacqin, you seem to be missing the part where the median teacher's pay with benefits is in excess of $100k per year in Wisconsin! That's not small change. Now, sure, maybe half of that is benefits, and maybe shifting that ratio would help, but if you can't fire bad teachers, or give good teachers raises, then that just guarantees a system that will be flooded with leaches. Good pay doesn't just attract good workers. It also attracts greedy, selfish, lazy sows. If you don't have a system to sort the one from the other, you'll go nowhere fast.

 

While I don't claim to have all of the answers as to how to evaluate a teacher, standardized test scores are a good spot to start. I have never understood the complaint about "Teaching to the test". If the test is testing the things we want the students to be competent and the teachers are teaching that then I don't really have a problem with that. If anything I might prefer it for it would weed out all of the other stuff (recently Teen Snook had to write a "love poem" using Geometry terms for his honors Geometry class and it was frickin painful for the entire family).

As Chandos mentioned earlier and in the video I posted, it is the teachers in the large urban (and therefore poorer) areas that are paid more. True it is considered combat pay, but you can't really say that the "poor" are getting shafted in regards to resources.

As to solving the family issues that affect education while it isn't a union/teacher problem, it does fall under the same type of umbrella of "Doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over and expecting it to eventually work".

As to how much am I paying. Local budgets are a part of the public domain so it isn't too hard to figure out how much is being spent. I personally know how much I'm paying in state and local taxes and it is quite a big number. If I was given access to that amount, I'm sure I could find a very good private school for Teen Snook in which I would be able to guage his performance and move him to a different school if I was not satisfied. Now the only way I could do that would be to sell our house and move to a different town which isn't as easy.

Employee loyalty is only worthwhile if the employee adds to the company. Using that logic in a situation of "permanent employment" doesn't work. In the private sector someone with ten years experience who decides to stop giving their best effort will not see their eleventh year.

 

That's not even in HISD, but on the north side, a lower/middle blue-collar area. The kids there are infamous for being really out of control. I've heard from people that the large urban areas in Cali are even worse. You would think the politicians would want to restore order to the schools, but instead it's easier to blame the unions. There's little risk in that.

My mom is one of those tea party, Glenn Beck lovin' conservatives. In fact, her friends wanted to send her to Beck's rally because she is such a fan. Anyway, she thought she would be clever and send one of my nieces to a "Christian school" rather than the "evil" public school, and she put up a good chunk of change. I think, but I'm not positive, it was even called the "Christian Academy," or something like that. The first couple years, I have to admit, it went pretty well. The quality of teaching was very good. Then she paid up for the next year, but the school never opened that year. The guy who ran it, [he was a also "minister"], took off with the school's money, and was finally convicted for fraud. He tried to claim bankruptcy, but his books revealed he was skimming all along, which is why the school went broke. So much for the "private enterprise" approach. My niece had to finish in public school, but still did very well, I'm happy to say.

 

Teaching to the test, as you put it, often leads to teachers teaching memorizing rather than understanding. If a child can parrot back the curriculum then they're sure to past the test and the teacher gets a raise (and the child feels good about passing) - but it doesn't necessarily mean that the child is learning to THINK.

 

I am just going to bow out, this vehemence and lack of respect for a profession just saddens me. I am a bit confused though, if the pay is so good and the job so easy why won't you guys get into it?

 

??????????

This has been a potentially eye opening day for me.

See I've been joining the protesters most days and spending my time doing that and I have had time to read the internet.

This could be a rumor or it could be 100% true but I've heard something interesting.

It seems the unions may not have been the only target.


Wisconsin is a moderately high tax and moderately high service state.

We also have less unemployment than S. Carolina and a few other very right wing and right to work states.

We have a state government that tries to get a lot of good things done.

I'll have to check details but let me point out how all this began.

Wisconsin had a Budget Repair bill the Republicans were trying to railroad through which would have done a lot of things that don't repair the budget.

Busting public sector workers may only have been one of them.

Another is doing severe damage to social and educational services provide by the state government.

A lot of these are provided directly by local government but the state sends money to help-so there is a partnership (sometimes very helpful in poorer areas).

It seems this way of things stands in ideological opposition to the Koch Brothers-a pair of very very right wing oil billionaires.

They may have cut a deal with our current governor so their ideology could be set loose on our state (actually one of a couple as it seems they are deeply connected to politics at a national level).

This whole mess could be part of a backroom deal.

Right now our governor, besides trying to break public unions, has turned away almost a billion dollars (if not more) in various types of aid from the federal government on top of this.

The Koch brothers don't like government doing things for citizens it seems-so if the federal government was helping a project get done then that project may become a target.


Back to the budget repair bill.

A few weeks ago our governor pushed a tax cut through in an "emergency session" he called of the state legislature that was supposedly called to boost our state's economy.

Well that tax cut caused much of the deficit that would need to be "repaired".

That means a modification has to be done to the existing state budget to make the books balance.

The state budget has been used before to put new laws into place instead of passing such a law on its own in the first place-so its own merits can be examined.

So in the guise of "repairing" the state budget our governor was about to undo over 50 years of state labor law (allowing public workers to organize) and harm the state's social and educational infrastructure.

Yes our state has a debt that we have to figure out how to deal with. But the deficit is more of a short term budget issue that budget repair bills are supposed to be used in order to correct. Debt is long term (and usually larger but addressed over the long run) while deficit is short term (and usually much smaller in amount).

So Walker may have disrupted the state budget so that he could "repair" it and insert a bunch of new laws at the behest of semi-hidden but powerful figures in politics.


This sounds like a conspiracy story.

But some of the things in it are true.

The tax cut was passed a couple of weeks ago before this broke out.

And I can say that Walker has been quite deceptive in how he refers to what he is trying to do with unions-with some of the media not reporting the most important/specific details (that the unions were willing to take the pay and benefit cuts he asked for so long as their negotiating ability was maintained).


And seeing the difference between what was portrayed in some of the local news channels here and what the union leaders said in front of thousands of people did make me think of Orwell (I'm hoping that has changed by now as 2 of the 4 channels seemed to be giving coverage to notion this is about negotiating rights/abilities).





Now maybe this is all a bunch of rumor nonsense but that still leaves Walkers dishonest treatment of unions to be opposed-so I'll be back out there protesting this week.

But now I'm wondering if what I was going to try to oppose was simply a part of something larger.




Also I've been taking pictures and I'll be uploading some of when I organize myself-mostly of crowds and individuals of particular note (people with funny signs, funny or interesting signs themselves, and the crowds).


I think I may have noticed a pattern of GOP state legislators traveling in groups last week-the number of state troopers seemed to at least double when they come through/are escorted by them.

If anyone can do it please pass my thanks along to state Senate Democrats.

It was reported a day or two ago that the state Senate Democrats left the state. I'm not sure if this was during or after when I believe I saw the state troopers looking for the state senate Democrats in by searching some of the rooms in the capital building but state troopers had been sent to the home of one of the Democratic leaders in the state senate. Fortunately he wasn't there to be found.

Like I said before, I really feel like my Democratic state senator (and the rest of them and some of the Democrats in the state Assembly) really earned my vote and/or support.

I know there is someone else from Wisconsin hear on the boards. I would appreciate it if you guys helped circulate that message.

The Tea Party people came yesterday but they were majorly outnumbered by the number of protestors outside the capital building alone (not including those inside the capital building).

The city police wisely tried to maintain some distance between groups of them and the protestors though separate individuals/small groups of them did intermingle with the protestors.

I slid/stepped between a couple of people to try to keep a tense situation from developing even more between a protestor and at least one guy (he was part of a small group of who I believe were tea party people).

There were insults sometimes exchanged between people on each side but, thankfully, the day went fight free as far as I know.

I got into a debate with a counter-protestor (tea party guy?) myself.

All in all things stayed peaceful which is good in my opinion-and also what I and many of the organizers of the protest want.

I don't know if I'm against a lying governor or a lying governor crony and hidden big money ideologues but in any case right now I'm happy about how things went Saturday and the couple of days before as well.

One of my main concerns is how word and is getting out to my fellow Wisconsinites and what it is (if any of you can help with this as well you have my thanks).

I'm thinking things were calmer because I think I saw private security guards (I think they were just major event types) there yesterday for the first time, but that may have simply been because there were thousands more people there yesterday and local law enforcement wanted extra people-either way it went well.


Oh, and Ragusa, I tried to rep you for the 2nd time in this thread but it won't let me just yet-so consider yourself verbally repped.

 

Thanks.

People in the US should keep in mind that collective bargaining is a right under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. On the federal level that is so for federal employees since an executive order by JFK. Internationally it has been enshrined in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This assault is one on fundamentals.

This is from a Canadian court but they sum up nicely what collective bargaining is about:

Let's get back to the aforementioned video and the part about the respect and power scales ...

​

It is no accident that you do not have collective bargaining in dictatorships or corporatist or fascist societies. That is so by default.

 

Like BTA, I have no problem with the profession. I have known some increadible teachers that really changed the way I thought. I have nothing but respect for them. What I have a problem with is the current system where performance, good or bad, isn't rewarded accordingly, where it's pretty much impossible to get rid of the bad, and where unsustainable compensations are crippling the society the teachers are aiming to serve.

And like BTA, I don't get into teaching because I'd hate it. If I'm going to teach anyone, they have to want to learn first. You don't get that option teaching in schools.

Actually, Ragusa, the National Labor Relations Act doesn't cover a number of sections of business, most relevant here are government workers (on any level). Individual states have a wide mish-mash of union laws concerning public workers. Some have absolutely no rights to organize. Others have all the rights granted under NLRA. Many have something in between the two.

All of these systems work by-and-large. You see, one of the other things Americans should realize is that many of the labor laws in the US (40-hour work week, weekends off, workplace safety, restrictions on child labor) were actually established durring WWII (a period of nationalized production and suspended union activity) to up factory efficiency and lower accident rates. Someone realized that taking a hit in production like this actually raised the overall quality of your product, lowered the cost of absent workers (due to fatigue or injury), and made everyone happier all around. Many more were added later without union pressure for similar reasons. Unions didn't get that for us, and those things won't magically disappear without unions.



pplr, thanks for reporting from the front lines. What you're describing does sound pretty conspiracy-theory stuff (much like some of the stuff Beck puts out, are the Koch brothers the 'evil' twins of George Soros?), but in politics these days you have to be careful before you rule anything out.

What your saying about the defecit and debt are different from the national storyline (and who knows how accurate that is). They're saying that a significant annual projected defecit will continue for many years, resulting in major debt quite quickly. One other thing that doesn't make sense to me is that this is all based on a tax cut that was passed weeks ago. If it was passed just weeks ago, then you don't know what the actual impact is yet. The entire idea of the bill, as I understand it, was to lower corporate tax rates to tempt new corporations to come in, thus increasing the taxed base while also bringing in new jobs, which means a larger tax base for other taxes as well, plus more business and jobs. That's not guaranteed to happen, but basing several years of projected deficit off of only a few weeks of actual results doesn't work. I don't know if that means the budget problem is actually somewhere else, or if it means this whole fiasco was fabricated from the start, but something's fishy with that story.

 

Unions provide a counterweight to the sheer financial and market power of corporations. An individual alone doesn't stand a chance to bargain with, say, General Electric. To deny this disparity is dishonest. To deny that it is being used to their advantage by companies is stupid.

Unions make sense since they allow individuals to co-align to pursue they interests as workers. In doing so they are the counterpart to people co-aligning to form corporations.

Since I don't mind making a point with a sledgehammer if I have to, I kindly refer you back to the aforementioned video and what it has to say about disparate distribution of wealth and respect and power scales and 'What I say goes' (at 3:11).

 

I don't see how the fact that elected government officials decide on the pay of public servants protects those public servants from abuse in any way. I might even consider arguing the opposite. Politicians can and do turn the pay of public servants into a political football on a more or less regular basis. Just, uh, look at Wisconsin.

Let's not lose sight of the very real abuses that caused unions to exist in the first place. It can be (correctly) argued that many if not most of the abuses that led to the rise of labor unions are no longer possible due to more stringent government regulations protecting workers' rights, but it can also be (correctly) argued that the same forces that oppose big labor also tend to support rolling back the very protections that make labor less necessary. There is an army of conservative ideologues out there opposing not only organized labor, but the minimum wage, the 40 hour work week, and basic OSHA regulations. In doing so, they would unwittingly turn the clock all the back 100 years.

 

Employees of publicly traded companies can also vote for their corporate officers by purchasing common stock, so I still fail to see the difference. Most voters are not public servants and therefore are not going to the polls with the interests of public servants at heart. Most voters are, in fact, so woefully ignorant about the pay and benefits earned by public servants that it is unreasonable to expect voters to decide on informed public policy about pretty much anything. (Yes, I do think ballot initiatives are a terrible idea...) Expecting public servants to protect their pay at the ballot box is like expecting a child to change the course of a river by throwing in a pebble.

 

I was wondering when the other Wisconsoner...er, Wisconsonian...er, um...Cheese Head would chime in.