- Joined
- Feb 24, 2003
- Messages
- 681
- Reaction score
- 0
I feel like I have to jump in at this point because I'm currently teaching and this is a question that the voucher supporters never have a great answer for:
Let's suppose that private schools do quickly replace all of these failing public schools with horrible teachers. One problem- who is actually going to teach in all of these new wonderful private schools that pop up to save the day? Somehow I don't see large numbers of successful professionals dying to sign up for a job that starts at 30-35k/year, so the only alternative would be to shift current public school teachers to these new private schools. The same public school teachers that are often ridiculed by the coucher crowd. The bottom line is that you have to have warm bodies in the classrooms teaching.......voucher proponents imagine a world where there is an unlimited supply of people to tap into who haven't been corrupted by college of education programs that can step in and solve all our problems. This is ridiculous.
Also, people who don't understand public/private education have a few misconceptions(largely due to the media):
1) 90-95% of the private schools in this country pay less and have considerably less benefits than the public schools in the same area. The benefits differences(health insurance, retirement) are often significant. Yes, there are exceptions with certain elite private schools. But many teachers at the private schools that reflect the norm would love to jump into public schools but for whatever reason(accredidation, training, personality, etc) and they just couldn't make it in. Also, a non-trivial number of teachers at these wonderful ordinary private schools are retired public school teachers who want to supplement their retirement with another salary. So in those cases, the quality of instruction in the classroom can't be greater than it was in previous years because the instruction is supposedly the same.
2) The impact of teachers unions in many parts of the country is often overstated. Perhaps in certain states they play a large role(New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Illionois??), but where I'm from local or state-wide teachers unions are of almost no consequence to individual teachers. Because of this misconception that all public school teachers are tied to unions which are tied to democrats, the impression is that teaching unions have an impact on elections. Perhaps in other states, but here in georgia, teachers were one constituency group that actually led to the defeat of a recent democratic governor.
It's funny how education is the one profession where everyone but actual educators and educational administrators themselves feel they must decide how things should be done. Sure other issues(compensation, patient load, treatment options related to compensation) may be decided by lawmakers and HMO's, but it's not the same. Imagine how orthopods would feel if government officials were coming in and telling them how they should perform joint replacements. Not how much they will get paid for them or when they can schedule one, but HOW to actually perform the procedure. It wouldn't be tolerated, but it is in education.
