I'm an unabashed cinephile and have been following Roger Ebert's blog for some time. I enjoy his writing and appreciate his advocacy on many progressive issues. He has called out Sarah Palin and her death panel lies and eloquently made the case for universal health care. Now he is making observations on the American education system in light of two recent documentaries that he's seen, and his conclusion seems to be that teacher's unions stand in the way of necessary and common sense reforms. While he acknowledges that we do have good schools and heroic teachers, the system overall is failing.
I don't think our education system is very good and ultimately that has profound implications for our economy and for everyone in our country. It's not simply a matter of funding, though that too undoubtedly plays a role. Some schools are notoriously underfunded while others are overfunded.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/...
Ebert writes, "Decades of research and test data indicate that the primary factor determining a school performance is not its budget, physical plant, curriculum, student population or the income level of its district. It is teaching. The most powerful opponents to better teaching are the teachers' unions. I am a lifelong supporter of unions. But Waiting for Superman makes this an inescapable conclusion. A union that protects incompetent and even dangerous teachers is an obscenity...That's a conclusion I suspect good teachers would be the first to agree with."
This is such a complicated issue, but an extremely important one. I'm not exactly sure I understand how bad teaching is measured. Is it strictly results-oriented? I've had my share of bad teachers, but I'm also not really sure they can be solely accountable when so many social problems at home contribute to student performance. In my experience, I got crappy grades in high school when I was dealing with problems and pressures at home. I got excellent grades in college after I had time to recover from some of those issues. Still, at all levels of my education, I've had bad teachers and good teachers, and a teacher can make the difference between success and failure, between grasping a difficult subject and having it go completely over one's head.
So what can we do? Should tenure be rescinded for bad teachers? How can they be made accountable? Education is an important investment and access to a good education is a fundamental progressive cause.
Organized labor is also important for protecting wages and health care for middle class families and getting out to vote for progressive causes, but what can they do to help ensure that we have the best teachers in our schools?