Concord School Teachers

[Lloyd Danforth]

wholey tunnel vision batman,  I think if this whole movement was a little more open-minded, you would have a greater backing and support. With comments like that from the moderater/administrator......your cause and fight for freedom just slapped you in the face.  I know I am off topic but, saying Unions suck is assanine. just my two cents. A just cause and fight for Freedom and Liberty can never be won with narrow minded views. I respect peoples  opininion, but very strongly disagree when someone says,"unions suck" guess they have been a member of every union ever established to formulate an opinion like that.

Someone has to say it.  We're not that desperate for members.

[CNHT]

wholey tunnel vision batman,  I think if this whole movement was a little more open-minded, you would have a greater backing and support. With comments like that from the moderater/administrator......your cause and fight for freedom just slapped you in the face.  I know I am off topic but, saying Unions suck is assanine. just my two cents. A just cause and fight for Freedom and Liberty can never be won with narrow minded views. I respect peoples  opininion, but very strongly disagree when someone says,"unions suck" guess they have been a member of every union ever established to formulate an opinion like that.

Someone has to say it.  We're not that desperate for members.

When a union advises its members to BREAK THE LAW, they indeed SUCK

It amazes me the number of lefties who think this site, and the libertarian movement itself, and even the FSP movement, and being 'free', has something to do with sucking as much out of the people collectively ( gov't ) as well.

[ravelkinbow]

I have been doing some thinking on the topic of unions.

I have been writing to all of the reps regarding smoking laws.
They statist argument is that the workers have a right to a smoke free environment.
Many of us argue then they should quit and get a new job.

I think that is the argument that I will now take with unions.
If you think that unions are bad, and the job requires that you join (or not join and still pay) then you should not take that job and you should get a new one.

The exception would be that if the job turned into a union shop and you already worked there.

Does this theory make sense?

This is why the right to work law would be good, think of this if you want to be a teacher you can't work outside the union, unless you can land a job in a private school which is not easy for a new grad.
When unions start to come into an area it becomes harder to work outside of them.  In Massachusetts you will have a very very hard time trying to find a hospital to work in that doesn't have at least one union. 
It makes sense to a point unless you can't do your choosen job because of union control.

[CNHT]

Losing the 'P' in PTA
How a once venerable organization became a front for teacher unions.

BY RITA KRAMER
Friday, February 24, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The hand-lettered sign outside the door to P.S. 166 on Manhattan's Upper
West Side said "PTA Meeting Thursday." To be exact, it was a parent group
that would be meeting, not the PTA.

The sign was proof of the extent to which "PTA" has become a generic term,
like "Kleenex" or "Xerox." Many parents are unaware of just how far the
century-old National Congress of Parents and Teachers (known since 1924 as
the PTA) has strayed from its origins in social uplift or from the classic
1950s-era image we may still have of it--an organization devoted to school
service, fund-raising (think of those bake sales) and wholesome
parent-teacher relations.

In fact, the PTA has been losing members steadily for almost a half-century
now, from a high point of more than 12 million in the early 1960s to a
current membership of about half that. Today only about a quarter of K-12
schools in the U.S. have a PTA chapter. The reasons for this decline are
familiar ones: money and politics.

The PTA had its beginnings in an era of women's clubs and settlement houses,
when affluent, idealistic women went to work bettering the conditions of the
urban poor. Although women still couldn't vote, they could exercise
influence through thousands of civic organizations and social clubs around
the country. Soon enough, they cast a critical eye on the conditions of
children in the public schools. They sought to address such matters as
nutrition and hygiene and to help Americanize the offspring of immigrants
arriving in waves from southern and eastern Europe.

In 1897, the members of the first National Congress of Mothers--the name of
the group that would eventually become the PTA--saw their mission as
fostering "a love of humanity and of country . . .and the advantages to
follow from a closer relation between the influence of the home and that of
the school." The president of the national PTA declared at a recent
convention: "We simply must change the country." What happened?

In "The Politics of the PTA" (2002), Charlene Haar explains that the PTA
shifted its focus mainly because of its longstanding alliance with the
National Education Association. Formed in 1857, the NEA once shared the
parent group's concern for schoolchildren in such matters as school
curriculum and the qualifications of public-school teachers. Indeed, in
1920, the National Congress felt so much in line with the NEA that it moved
into the association's impressive Washington headquarters. Already allied
with the teachers group on support for a "progressive" curriculum that would
emphasize "life skills," the PTA would from then on curb its more general
social programs and limit itself to matters directly affecting education.

Ms. Haar chronicles the major policies on which the two groups cooperated
throughout the 20th century. Having begun as equals, the PTA gradually
became the subservient partner. Both organizations refused to support the
National Defense Education Act--passed in 1958 in the wake of the Soviet's
launch of Sputnik--because, as Ms. Haar explains, it "provided funds for
mathematics, science and other defense-related curricula but could not be
used for teacher salaries."

By the 1960s, the PTA was known as "a coffee-and-cookies
organization"--unquestioningly offering its seal of approval to the newly
unionized NEA. It was the issue of teacher strikes, though, that dealt the
reputation of the PTA its final blow. In 1961 the AFT, representing New York
City's teachers, staged the nation's first citywide strike, and in 1968
Florida teachers followed with the first statewide strike. To avoid
conflict, the PTA abandoned any pretense of independence and supported the
walkouts.

A few years later, the PTA tagged along with the NEA, lobbying for a
cabinet-level federal department of education. What followed were a series
of legislative victories for the teachers unions. Among their outstanding
lobbying successes, backed by the PTA, was the defeat of a bill co-sponsored
by Sen. Patrick Moynihan in 1978 proposing a tax credit for as much as half
of private-school tuition. In the aftermath, many parents began their exodus
from the PTA, including a large number of Catholics whose tuition fees for
parochial schools would have become less burdensome under the plan.

Today the PTA supports all of the union's positions, including increased
federal funding for education and opposition to independent charter schools,
to vouchers and to tuition tax credits for private and religious schools.
This "parent" group lobbies for teachers to spend less time in the classroom
and to have fewer supervisory responsibilities like lunchroom duty.
Moreover, they want a pay scale for teachers that is based on seniority, not
merit. In November, the PTA even helped to defeat California's Proposition
74, which called for limiting teacher tenure by extending the probation
period for new teachers from two to five years, a proposal designed to give
administrators more time to weed out bad instructors.

With polls indicating that the union label is a liability with the public,
an arrangement has developed whereby the NEA provides needed financial
support for the PTA, which in turn bolsters union positions at the
grass-roots level. As one union official put it: "[T]he PTA has credibility
. . . we always use the PTA as a front."

Not only does the PTA support the NEA on issues that protect the
public-school teachers' monopoly, the parent group also speaks up in favor
of the NEA's more radical curriculum ideas, like sex-education programs that
replace "don't" with "how to" and that propose the inclusion of a
gay/lesbian unit starting as early as kindergarten.

Many parents have decided that they no longer want to fund this kind of
nonsense: They feel that their dues money would be better spent close to
home, on after-school programs, computers and school supplies. As the PTA
becomes increasingly irrelevant to the lives of children in public schools
and parents become less willing to pay its dues, it is gradually being
replaced by alternative, mostly home-grown, organizations that may call
themselves guilds or councils or associations but are generally known as
Parent Teacher Organizations--PTOs. These groups collect no dues and follow
no political line.

Tim Sullivan, a Massachusetts entrepreneur and former New York City
public-school teacher, saw the need among the independent groups forming
around the country for the kind of information and services once provided by
the PTA. In 1999 he founded a company for independent parent-teacher groups.
PTO Today publishes a magazine and maintains a Web site that provides
opportunities for parent networking on its message boards. Both in print and
online, PTO Today answers the kind of questions that parents of
public-school children ask--how to organize a family night, how to raise
money for extras like arts-and-crafts supplies and what kind of insurance is
necessary for field trips. With any luck, the PTOs will put the PTA out of
business entirely.

Ms. Kramer's books include "Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's
Teachers" and "Maria Montessori: A Biography."

[Kat Kanning]

I have been doing some thinking on the topic of unions.

I have been writing to all of the reps regarding smoking laws.
They statist argument is that the workers have a right to a smoke free environment.
Many of us argue then they should quit and get a new job.

I think that is the argument that I will now take with unions.
If you think that unions are bad, and the job requires that you join (or not join and still pay) then you should not take that job and you should get a new one.

The exception would be that if the job turned into a union shop and you already worked there.

Does this theory make sense?

Yes, and we can also refuse to do business with union shops.

[CNHT]

Yes, and we can also refuse to do business with union shops.

If the unions could stop breaking the laws, we could stop punishing the workers, most of whom were probably REQUIRED to join...
If they want to exist for bargaining power, good for them.
But then we have the issues of this compelled speech and using member's money to support candidates and causes they do not approve of.

[CNHT]

I was just the last caller on Gardner's show on 3/14 and I hope you heard it. It was about compelled speech.

[cathleeninnh]

I heard, and you did great!

Cathleen

[CNHT]

I heard, and you did great!

Cathleen

Kewl!!!

[Recumbent ReCycler]

I commend those of you who are taking action to point out the wrongdoings of these teachers.  As far as unions go, I have never joined one, but I have worked at places that had unions for certain types of employees.  I think unions do not do anything that the employees couldn't do themselves.  I have had jobs where I made more money than my coworkers, and even sometimes more than my supervisors.  Why? you might ask.  I got paid more because I had skills and experience that the other employees and some of my supervisors did not have, and I told the person who was hiring me that if they wanted me to work for them, they would have to pay me more than their initial offer.  I have worked at a couple jobs where nobody was allowed to work overtime because the company couldn't afford to pay time and a half.  Since I couldn't pay all of my bills with what I made working 40 hours a week, I approached my employers, and told them that I wanted to work more than 40 hours a week, and that I would be willing to forego the increase in pay that normally comes with overtime hours.  At one of the jobs, I was allowed to work as many hours as I wanted because I agreed to work all of my hours for a flat rate.  At my other job, I was allowed to work overtime, but instead of getting paid time and a half or a flat rate like I had offered to work for, my boss decided to pay me about 1.1 times my normal rate for overtime hours.  I work six days a week because I want to.  Fortunately my boss tries to keep me happy, and has not denied a time off request yet.  I don't make as much money as I have made at previous jobs, and I'm sure that I could easily find and get a job that pays more than I'm making now, but I enjoy my current job.  Even though I make about $5/hour less than I made at my last job, I get paid to do something that I wasn't allowed to do at my last job, and I usually get to choose my hours now, and now I don't have nearly as many rules to contend with.  At previous jobs, I have worked my way up the ladder from peon to manager in a matter of months, not because I was next in line or had tenure or whatever, but because I worked hard and was professional, and the folks who worked for me supported me because I always took care of their needs before my own and treated everyone fairly.  I have a feeling that I probably wouldn't do as well in a union because of the way unions appear to be run, where things like tenure and politics seem to have more influence over a person's advancement and pay than skill, experience, and hard work.  Unions don't seem to promote productivity, which is what makes companies profitable.  I'll bet that a unionized corporation is more likely to go bankrupt and go out of business than a non'unionized corporation.  From what I've seen of government unions, their sole goal seems to be getting the taxpayers to pay their public servants more and more money.  Government unions appear to always support bigger, less efficient, more expensive government, which is the inverse of what we are trying to achieve.  Government unoins and some other unions do indeed suck, without a doubt, as much money from our wallets as they can get.

[tracysaboe]

WOW!

I didn't think that was even possible to request to work more then 40 hours w/o the time and a half.

I've often thought my life would be better if I'd be allowed to work 1 60 hour a week job instead of 1 40 hour and 1 20 hour a week job.

Tracy

[Dreepa]

WOW!

I didn't think that was even possible to request to work more then 40 hours w/o the time and a half.

All you have to do is ask.
It all depends on the job and the managers.

[Dreepa]

Contract approved:
http://concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060526/REPOSITORY/605260350