Letters
Letters to the editor, June 16
Hernando Today
Published: June 16, 2012
Poor performance of educationPublished: June 16, 2012
Why are our school students doing so poorly? All they do is complain about it and no one has an answer. The answer may be poor performance by some of our teachers who are controlled by the teachers' union.
If this is so, then it requires retraining of our teachers, release from the tight control of the teachers' union and lastly if no improvement then removal of them.
The foregoing is easy to say but it will be very difficult to get the teachers' union to act on this, particularly the firing.
The teachers' unions are very reluctant to fire any teacher even if they are incompetent. The unions are more concerned in protecting their teachers rather than their students. The teachers' unions are the largest unions, the richest unions and the most powerful unions.
The teachers' unions financially decide the fate and election of many politicians, but only if they fully agree with the union's policy, particularly those who in their future office will be dealing with the union over union contracts and legislators who will support laws in their favor.
Large support of money and personnel for elections make the teachers' union "King" makers of the Democratic Party. During election years the teachers' unions require each member to contribute as much as $500 to the union candidates.
According to the terms of most union contracts with the school administration, the teachers' union controls all aspects of the teachers' job. Union contracts with the school administration are mind-numbing for they can contain as much as one thousand pages of union rules.
Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom 25 percent of their college grade performance and in most cases students are making a choice of teaching as they have no where else to go and teaching was not their first choice.
There are a few teachers who are not high achievers and who work with a civil service mentality of 8 a.m. to 3:15 a.m. As a result of poor teaching and poor student achievement, we are ranked No. 27 in the world. Are we producing an army of illiterates?
The strict rules of the teachers' union contracts must be reformed to place greater emphasis on improving the education of students. A special group of forward-thinking teachers have gotten together in order to reform the teaching system, free from the restraints of the teachers' union.
They have accomplished this by opening charter schools where they are able to hire teachers of their choice, who are highly motivated and in most cases have been specially trained or previously oriented to their advanced program for teaching.
These new charter schools have, in most cases, been vey successful. As time goes by we hope to see more of success in our schools.
Norman Pallot
Weeki Wachee