Reply #217: Is it possible that this position is a matter of perception?

[haele]

Most teachers I know and am related to have little to no power over their classrooms, and that's a function of the school board and district administrators - all of whom have voted themselves the pay and benefits worth at least that of any three teachers - and are usually politically protected from their own excesses.
Asking for better pay - especially since most are plunking down up to 10% of their salary paying for their own classroom supplies and are not being paid overtime for all the after-school work and required extra-curricular training they need to go through yearly - is not unreasonable. How much should you pay someone who averages 60 hours of work a week? That's why upper management and CEO's claim to get away with their exorbitant salaries - they spend all that extra time making money for the companies doing political work after hours. Seems to me a cocktail party is not as hard as spending the 4 - 6 additional hours after school grading papers and re-analyzing one's syllabus that had been developed 3 months earlier to match to the current capabilities of the class one is teaching so that the majority of the children might have some concept of the subject matter - that is, if the children want to learn.
Asking for more power in the classrooms - to untie their hands, so they can re-write their lesson plans to the class, so they actually have more control of the responsibility they were given to teach. So if they're really bad teachers, it's more directed to the quality of their ability to teach rather than some objective requirement of the school board or district to stick to a book or useless "one-size-fits-all-McClassroom" package sold to the district by a corporate entity that obviously understands the children of the community more than a teacher who lives there does.

Every single point from the AFT object statement mentioned can be used in any union or employee-benefit organization's charter. I've seen similar for the local federal government workers union site, as well as for the local marine electrician's and shipfitters's unions - all to empower the worker and to allow the worker to be compensated fairly for the work they do.

Too many people think that to give the worker more responsibility for their work and to compensate fairly for the education required, the environment of the workplace, and the additional hours of work outside the workplace needed for the worker to do his or her job properly is a scam against employers, customers, and taxpayers.

Of course, many people still think indentured servitude and workhouse/prison labor is a perfectly reasonable way to keep the poor and desperate productive, and that people should be valued by the amount of property owned, employees and in their portfolios. These people tend to think of employees as tools that are pretty much disposable.

Haele