The South Dakota Education Association is organizing some "high-profile activity" in Sioux Falls on Saturday. I assume they mean protest against Governor Dennis Daugaard's now even worse package of education reforms, a.k.a. HB 1234. I hope they mean darned loud protest:
Enough is enough! Legislators are not listening to us and we're not going to be ignored. We need to raise public awareness about what's happening and rally their support.
Sioux Falls legislators are hosting a legislative coffee that starts at 10AM this Saturday at the Holiday Inn in downtown Sioux Falls. We are planning a high-profile activity around this event and need you and as many of your colleagues to join us!
Please show up at the sidewalk closest to the Chamber of Commerce parking lot—across the street, to the east of the Holiday Inn as close to 9AM as possible. Not from Sioux Falls? We'd still love to see you--SOLIDARITY! [South Dakota Education Association, Facebook post, 2012.02.09]
Legislators not listening? Every active teacher who testified on HB 1234 Wednesday testified against it. Yet legislators so far are siding with the people who don't educate your kids every day.
Some serious protest is in order. Spread the word.
Although I do not serve as a teacher in the conventional sense, my works do play an educational role. I wonder how I'd feel if my publisher offered me a higher royalty, as a writer of educational works, than a novelist or self-help writer would get.
As things stand, most textbook authors get lower royalty rates, not higher rates, than authors of novels or navel-gazing guides, but I won't take the discussion down that road. Instead, I'll pose the question: Should we treat our public school system as a business, or not?
Governor Daugaard thinks we should. I've heard him say so.
At first belch, treating the public school system as a business struck me as a good idea. But then I got to thinking: Do we want to imagine our teachers as commodities and our students as functional products of a business machine? I should hope not!
While I can see how my role as an author makes me a commodity (McGraw-Hill is in fact a private business enterprise) and my books are products, I cannot see that teachers should be treated as commodities and students as their products. I find the very idea repugnant, and its implementation immoral.
On the other hand, I don't think that our educational institutions should be entitled to get unlimited funds on demand, with complete disregard for the taxpayers who provide those funds.
Favoring some fields in teaching over others, or some teacher performance scores or ratings over others ... That whole business reminds me of affirmative action, which so many conservatives have vehemently opposed down through the years.
As a fiscally conservative but socially liberal "radical Republican," I believe that the governor and legislature are on the wrong track with the teacher pay issue. From a purely moral standpoint, I would say that teacher pay should go up in this state by 50 percent across the board, so we can at least compete with our neighbor, wild, wonderful Wyoming.
Once we've started to pay all of our teachers decent money, then we can get on with the rest of the discussion.
We might have to raise the sales tax by a penny to pay for a scheme such as the one I suggest. We'll find out in November whether or not the taxpayers are willing to ante up that kind of money.
Stan, we are very far from the opposite extreme you mention, where education would get unlimited funds on demand. Our schools, governed by local boards, directly engaging children and parents on a daily basis, are held more accountable to their constituents than perhaps any other public institution.
You are right on the primary issue we should be dealing with: paying all teachers decent money. If we are experiencing a stagnation in academic achievement, it may well be because we are reaping the practical impacts of a generation of funding neglect and the assumption that we can still get the best teaching without paying full price.
And morally, you are dead on: treating education as a business objectifies students and teachers. When I objectify students instead of viewing them as unique and inherently valuable human beings, I teach worse. When we treat teachers as cogs in a machine, we get worse results.