Hell, in this state teachers are not even paid (adequately) to teach, but I sincerely hope they made tons of money by going to The Empty Suit's public forum last week.
Monday, December 09, 2013
Sen Soucek Accuses Protesters at Last Thursday's Public Forum of Being "Paid" Agitators
Hell, in this state teachers are not even paid (adequately) to teach, but I sincerely hope they made tons of money by going to The Empty Suit's public forum last week.
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16 comments:
Hey Dan. Why don't you look to your own votes in the state legislature for the reasons people are PISSED off at you? PISSED OFF.
It's a crying shame that the article in the Democrat doesn't allow comments. From what I've heard, and from the evening's audio I'm listening to, the crowd was never disrespectful, but clearly disagreed respectfully with the story Soucek was telling. He would have encouraged video to be shot. It was in fact a public forum. Any interpretations of the event can be better analyzed with video than not. Probably for his own benefit, he would not want the backlash made anymore transparent than they already are.
I don;t know about paid agitators, but there were a lot of :educators" there trying to feather heir own nests.
If I had known I could have been paid to speak the truth, I'd have signed up! What a crock of crap. This guy can't handle his own panel telling him he was dead wrong and acted so surprised people are passionate about their lives and livelihoods. Was he surprised the public was upset? Really? I guess he thought everyone would be so in awe of his presence they would just lie down and swallow his lies.
Yes, feathering one's nest is a pretty popular activity for teachers. Despite earning a four year degree, and in many cases a Master's degree, they work plenty of unpaid overtime, receive pay way below other professionals with the same years of college, and current earnings are 46th or lower in the entire US. You know, they are only in it for the money. Most of them have to work second jobs to make ends meet, and many even qualify for food stamps and Medicaid for our kids. Be they keep on teaching for some crazy reason. Maybe it's because they just want to teach kids how to write comments in a blog with correct spelling and punctuation.
"Be they keep on teaching for some crazy reason."
This sentence be making sense how?
You shouldn't be so quick to criticize the spelling and punctuation of others. Be you keep on posting!
Exactly! And, I think that is why Dan Soucek is so outraged. The audio tape doesn't support his story id being the victim. Is that why he didn't want an video? The photos show that it wax his staff that was massaging questions, harassing the attendees, and engaged in the immature childish antics. There was no justification for removal of the teacher either. Our sheriff deputies were used under pretense of a public meeting and keeping the peace. And , they only did the bidding of bullies instead! Despicable! Outrageous!
Let's see,
Teachers only work about ten months out of the year.
They have a for year degree or maybe a master's. Big deal, so do a lot of people in other professions.
They have to have continuing education courses. So do members of any other licensee profession.
Tenure kept them from being fired no matter how poorly they do their jobs.
They say there is no way to measure teacher performance so they want across the board raises. They are terrified of competition from private schools, so they oppose the voucher system with all their collective might, saying it would destroy public schools. How could that happen if there is no way to measure results? Is it because they fail to maintain discipline in their schools?
Their math skills are such as to declare hey did not get an increase in the education budget because the budget (while larger) is not as large as they wanted. They want this larger increase to provide them with an across the board raise that many do not deserve.
They refuse to realize that many hard working people in the private sector not only did not get a raise, but also lost their job due to the economy.
Feathering their own nests seems to be a fairly apt description of their actions to me.
Anonymous 7:48 - how many years have you spent as a public school teacher?
The comments of Anonymous 7:48 AM illustrate a common "us vs. them" mentality on the far right when it comes to teachers, and indeed any public employees. They also exhibit a number of false assumptions about the teaching profession that I feel shouldn't go unanswered.
Teachers are trained professionals and while their job is fairly unique in terms of structure and schedule, it's not easy and lots of people have misconceptions about how much work it entails. My mother was a teacher and I remember many nights that she would grade papers from after dinner until she put us to bed - and probably after that, too. This whole "Teachers only work about ten months out of the year" thing ignores the fact that teachers work longer hours than most other workers during the school year (typically 8 hours at school, then 1-3 hours outside of school every day, or about 50 hours/wk). And between professional development and planning, I don't ever remember my mom having a whole 2 months off in the summer.
But even if we figure that teachers get a full 8 weeks of vacation, comparing the number of hours worked each year shows why they don't deserve any beef about how much they work. A typical work week is 40 hours. For someone working 50 weeks out of the year (2 weeks vacation, no sick leave), they work about 2000 hours a year (50wks x 40hrs.). A teacher who didn't do any work at all for 8 weeks a year (which is unlikely), but worked a typical 50 hour work week the rest of the year -and believe me, that's very typical, ask any teacher or any spouse/child of a teacher- would actually work more hours, 2200 (44wks x 50 hrs.) Even if we figure in a few weeks with shorter hours (like when school isn't in session yet), the total number of hours is absolutely comparable to other professions.
This is also false: "Tenure kept them from being fired no matter how poorly they do their jobs." I could point you to any number of sources that debunk this myth, but this one lays it out most clearly: http://neatoday.org/2010/09/17/what-tenure-is-and-what-it%E2%80%99s-not/
Anon 7:48 also makes this condescending and erroneous statement: "Their [Teachers'] math skills are such as to declare hey [sic] did not get an increase in the education budget because the budget (while larger) is not as large as they wanted. They want this larger increase to provide them with an across the board raise that many do not deserve."
Many of us, both teachers and others, have good enough math and reasoning skills to figure out the difference between gross expenditures and per-student spending, and can factor in things like inflation. Just two sources that explore this in more detail:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=4011
http://projects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/north_carolina_ranks_no_48_in_per_student_spending_average_teacher_salaries
Teachers, and public education more broadly, play an enormously important role in our society and should be supported and not undermined. If anything, let's stop adding layers of bureaucracy and red tape like this new quartile-based system of evaluation that is going to suck thousands of hours of time and effort away from more important things, like actually educating kids!
Anonymous 12:04 How many years have you spent as a state Senator?
I really don't have any arguments with teachers deserving more money. I do have doubts about how much public education money is spent on administration instead of teaching. How much of a pay raise could watauga teachers have gotten if our board of education hadn't screwed up so bad on the selection of our superintendent of schools that they had to pay him BIG money just to leave? And how many brand new administrative jobs did he add to the school budget in the short time he was in power?
I support a significant pay raise for our teachers. But I also support similar raises for many of our county employees who are making less than they deserve too!
"Anonymous 7:48 - how many years have you spent as a public school teacher?"
Thee before I decided a profession in which hard wok and personal initiative meant nothing as slackers achieved the same raises as did hose that actually did their jobs was not nor me.
He seems to have a nice smile. Maybe that's why people keep voting against their interests and electing bozos like Dan?
Anonymous 7:48 said
"Thee before I decided a profession in which hard wok and personal initiative meant nothing as slackers achieved the same raises as did hose that actually did their jobs was not nor me."
Based on the 4 glaring typos in the above sentence, I'd have to say maybe you were not cut out for teaching in the first place. Most teachers I've known who have left in the first 5 years do so because they burn out or they can't hack it - or because they can make a lot more money doing something else.
"Thee before I decided a profession in which hard wok and personal initiative meant nothing as slackers achieved the same raises as did hose that actually did their jobs was not nor me."
Do you even check your posts before you hit the Publish button?
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