by Bob Walsh
The pseudo-teachers in the Oakland, CA Unified School District are going to strike later this week over wages (primarily). They have not had a contract in two years and want a 12% raise. The district is offering 5%. A non-binding arbiter appointed by the PERB asserted that the teachers should get 3% retroactive for each of the last two years and new negotiations for the current year. Each 1% salary raise costs the district not quite $2 million.
The real pisser is that the Oakland School District is a joke. You graduate if you do not commit a violent felony in school and get caught at it. Being able to read or do basic math is not necessary. Showing up for school is optional. The students who actually WANT to get an education, all 17 of them, would be better off hanging at the public library or a local book store (if there is still one in Oakland) rather than getting mugged on the way to school or risk getting raped or beaten up in a bathroom.
California schools used to be the envy of the world. Now they beat out the schools in Macedonia, sometimes, if the wind is in the right direction.
For all I care they should put a fence around Oakland and use it as one huge penal colony. It is pretty much that now anyway. Instead of paying a toll at the bay bridge drivers could be required to throw cans of pork and beans out of their cars into the city for the prisoners to eat.
(Yeah, I'm prejudiced. I was born there. It was a decent, blue-collar working class city back then. That was then. This is now. Liberal policies and liberal idiots have killed it, like they killed Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore.)
5 comments:
I come from a family of educators. A lot of teachers have all but given up on trying to teach criminals whose have little or no family unit. They are not taught basic values at home and then they are sent to school where society thinks a teacher should be able to correct this. It's a sad situation and it's getting worse.
Interesting, Trey. I also come from a family of educators. Very progressive and enlightened educators. Towards the end of his life, my dad finally came out and admitted he was a socialist. I wonder how many of his young students he influenced...and to what extent.
Sometimes you still graduate if you commit a violent felony
Dave, I have never understood the appeal of socialism. When I was in 4th grade, I was the class spelling champion. One day the teacher partnered me with a student who couldn't spell and then made him my partner on the Spelling B. Needless to say we lost and I complained. I studied and read. He didn't. The teacher felt I should share my knowledge to benefit his ignorant, lazy ass. My blue ribbon was gone faster than a Democrat's credibility.
My 4th grade teacher influenced me. She was fired a couple of years later for screaming at the principal.
Many moon ago in CA they fired a middle school teacher that I knew, but fortunately had not had as a teacher, for incompetence. She was, in the opinion of most of her students and much of the staff, grossly unsuited for her job and at least half a bubble off plumb. She was one of only two tenured teachers fired in the whole state that year for incompetence and it took one lawyer working almost full time for a full year to do it. The vast majority of teachers are, or at least were, trying to do a good job. After a few years many of them are just trying to make it to retirement without being murdered in their class.
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