Washington state has rejected a $13.2 million grant from National Math Science Initiative to train Advanced Placement math and science teachers, fund more classes and reward students who pass AP exams and their teachers. From The Columbian:
Texas-based NMSI insisted that new AP teachers be compensated directly, including extra pay based on students who pass an end-of-course AP exam and thus qualify for early college credits. There was to have been a sliding scale for poor and more-privileged schools, too.
That’s directly counter to Washington teachers union contracts that require collective bargaining on such issues.
In Texas, NMSI has boosted dramatically the number of minority students passing AP exams.
Of course they do. Teacher unions insist that all teachers are the same and pay should be based entirely on seniority and acquisition of various types of union-approved credentials. Subject matter knowledge is simply not an item in the mix.
University schools of education, in fact, have pretty aggressively expunged nearly all subject matter knowledge classwork from teacher education curricula these last 40 or so years and the results are sadly evident everywhere one looks these days.
As math is kind of the ultimate knowledge-intensive academic subject, it is a persistent irritant to unionists who oppose the subversive idea that people ought to maybe be paid based on what they actually know and can impart to others. Horrors! My god, if we let the AP math teachers make extra money, the next thing you know the non-AP math teachers will want in on the deal and, gee, maybe history teachers who actually know some history will be making demands next and that way lies madness, madness, I tell you! We need to keep everyone in the teaching “profession” as interchangeable as the dipstick inserters on the assembly line at GM.
As long as the schools focus on the one-size-fits-all certification process, where a brain-dead individual holding a piece of paper is hired before a an expert in the field who can also teach, the pay issue will remain.
Whatever one’s opinion about the Washington teachers’ union, the NMSI is at a fault here.
A grantmaking organization dedicated to improving math and science teaching should not be in the business of reforming union contracts (however bad they are). The union contracts already exist. NMSI should have found a way to work around the problem.
This is not difficult to understand.
A great many teachers long to be seen as professionals. The teacher’s unions, of course, approach everything with an industiral shop floor mentality. Administration acts like government bureaucrats everywhere, every place, every time.
And across the country, parents increasingly move to vouchers, where they can; charter schools, where they can; and private schools, where they can afford it.
Gee, what a surprise.
Bill
I’d take a pay cut to teach the AP kids…
Bravo, Dick! Exactly!!
This type of action is why teaching will NEVER be a profession.
I’m a Wa State parent and am not surprised in the least. I know there are dedicated public school teachers, but the union and their biggest supporters are frankly socialistic and anti-intellectual. They also want to be seen as professionals, yet act like low-skilled widget turners. They can’t have it both ways. After 3 mos in Wa Public Schools, we put our DD in private, and haven’t looked back. We have paid property taxes on one or more properties at a time for the last 21 years, and currently pay over $10k/year. On top of that, we’ll have to pay another $60K thru 12th grade for private school. Thank you, Washington State Education Establishment. Count on our “nays” for any and all future levies.
Cardinal Fang: The union contract is the problem.
> A grantmaking organization dedicated to improving math and science teaching should not be in the business of reforming union contracts
Fang seems to believe that the organization has some obligation to fix or work around union contracts. He’s wrong. The organization’s goal is to improve math and science teaching.
If union contracts gets in the way, it’s the job of the folks who like union contracts to either fix them or stand revealed as being more interested in their contract than in math and science teaching.
Public school advocates consistently behave as if public school funding is the goal of public education.
Cardinal Fang is the only one of you who thinks clearly. The rest of you would flunk any logic class, and would certainly fail at being attorneys.
Mike’n'Taxes said:
“The rest of you would flunk any logic class, and would certainly fail at being attorneys.”
!!!
Mike needs to learn how to read. No one is claiming that the union didn’t have the legal right to block these efforts to improve public education.
Instead, we’re pointing out:
(1) This is yet another example of teachers preferring their benefits over education. They have the right to have that preference, but it’s fair to point out that they do, especially since they claim otherwise in other situations. (Note that this program didn’t actually threaten anyone’s benefits - these payments were extra, they weren’t taken from one teacher and given to another.)
(2) The folks who are upset the the contract got in the way should be upset with the folks who demanded that the contract take precedent. The union had the right to block this program, but it wasn’t obligated to do so.