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Old 08-05-2011, 01:00 PM
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Default Students Learn How to Bargain a Teacher's Contract

Students Learn How to Bargain a Teacher's Contract
In the late 1990s, the Los Angeles Unified School District partnered with United Teachers Los Angeles – funded by a federal grant – to produce a multi-part curriculum entitled, “Workplace Issues and Collective Bargaining in the Classroom.”
Education Action Group obtained it from the California Department of Education.
The purpose of the lessons is to get students to appreciate the need for collective bargaining, and experience first-hand how it works. During the lessons, which can take up to a week of class time, students pose as either “labor” or “management” and bargain a teachers’ contract. They grapple with such issues as health insurance co-pays, raises and hiring procedures. Finally, the union has someone to feel its pain!
The curriculum includes a video which touts the success of the program. It’s insightful that the very first speaker on the video is the president of the teachers union, A.J. Duffy:
“UTLA plays a unique role in the labor movement in L.A. As the second largest teachers’ union in the country, with all of our other responsibilities, we are in the position to educate the next generation of civic leaders by reaching out to high school students and having them participate in a unique UTLA program. … The Collective Bargaining Education Project brings the lessons of labor to the classroom by involving students in the same process UTLA and other unions engage in to gain better wages and working conditions for teachers and students at L.A. Unified Schools.”
The union endorsements of the curriculum don’t stop there.
Linda Tubach, one of the curriculum’s creators, says “The students have a very direct experience with the issues that they’re going to face in their workplaces and their experience is a collective one in small groups, mentored by coaches who have direct experience in the collective bargaining process.”
At the time the video was produced, unionized employees in California comprised less than 18% of the workforce, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. So in other words, Tubach’s lessons don’t apply to over 80% of these future workers. But, of course, that isn’t what the lessons are about. They’re about ginning up awareness and sympathy for organized labor.
Alberto Valdivia, then UTLA treasurer, has nothing but praise for the lessons.
“This is really, really wonderful,” Valdivia says in the video. “And the reason that it’s wonderful is because it’s the students who are making the decisions. … Here you have this whole setup that is made for student enrichment, for student learning, for student knowledge.”
Viewers hear from more union officials and allies who are eager to heap praise upon the curriculum:
“I would think that this is one of the most valuable tools that the L.A. Unified School District has,” notes Miguel Contreras, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the L.A. County Federation of Labor.
“The vast majority of students will be entering the workforce in the next few years and it’s very important that they understand the role of unions,” says Kent Wong of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. “It’s very important that they understand the benefits of having a union contract and the role of collective bargaining in an environment that provides the only opportunity for workers to collectively negotiate their wages and their benefits.”
It appears that the curriculum is having its desired effect on students.
In the video, one student says, “It makes me – when I get my career or my job – it’s going to want me to get into a union, too, so that I’ll be protected, too.”
Amidst all this pro-union propaganda, parents and taxpayers are left to wonder if any part of LAUSD’s curriculum teaches students about how to start a business or how society and the American economy benefits from the entrepreneurial spirit.
It’s safe to assume that the Los Angeles school district cannot be bothered with pro-capitalist messages which would only distract from the mission of creating the next generation of labor leaders.
In 2000, the school district issued a memo indicating that “In two years, this [UTLA] program has directly served more than 80 teachers and their students in 39 LAUSD high schools. Almost 5,000 students have directly participated in a collective bargaining simulation.”
At long last, school administrators and union leaders are working together. It’s too bad that their joint venture involves indoctrinating students about the value of unionization and collective bargaining.
While it is difficult to nail down just how widespread the curriculum is outside of Los Angeles, the organizers claim they’ve received requests from school districts across the country to bring it to their communities.
“The project’s curriculum is literacy-based, approved by the District, and aligned with the District’s learning standards as well as the California History-Social Science Framework,” the memo states. Says something about California learning standards, doesn’t it?
The fact that schools from across the country want to use this curriculum says a lot about the state of American public education, too.
http://townhall.com/columnists/kyleo...act/page/full/
Schooling Matt Damon
Actor Matt Damon is a walking, talking public service reminder to immunize your children early and often against La-La-Land disease.
In Damon's world, all public school teachers are selfless angels. Government workers and Hollywood entertainers are impervious to economic incentives. And anyone who disagrees is a know-nothing, "corporate reformer" ingrate who hates education.
Last week, the liberal box-office star addressed a "Save Our Schools" march in Washington at the behest of his mother, a professor of early childhood education. He attacked standardized tests. He praised all the public school teachers who "empowered" him and unlocked his creative potential by rejecting "silly drill and kill nonsense." Speaking on behalf of "an army of regular people," Damon decried the demoralization of teachers by ruthless, results-oriented free marketeers whom he mocked as "simple-minded."
What Damon's superficial tirade lacked, however, was any real-world understanding of the deterioration of core curricular learning in America. Students can't master simple division or fractions because today's teachers -- churned out through lowest common denominator grad schools and shielded from competition -- have barely mastered those skills themselves. Un-educators have abandoned "drill and kill" computation for multicultural claptrap and fuzzy math, traded in grammar fundamentals for "creative spelling," and dropped standard civics for save-the-earth propaganda.
Consequence: bottom-basement U.S. student scores on global assessments over the past two decades. Blaming the tests is blaming the messenger. The liberal education establishment's response to its abject academic failures? Run away. This is why the Save Our Schools agenda championed by Damon calls for less curricular emphasis on math and reading -- and more focus on social justice, funding and "equity" issues.
Out: Reading is fundamental.
In: Feeling is fundamental.
After his drippy pep talk absolving teachers of any responsibility for America's educational morass, Damon then lashed out at a young libertarian reporter who had the audacity to ask him about the negative impact of lifetime teacher tenure. "In acting there isn't job security, right?" Reason.tv's Michelle Fields asked Damon. "There is an incentive to work hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job. So why isn't it like that for teachers?"
It's elementary that people will work longer and harder if they know they will be rewarded. There's nothing anti-teacher about the question. (And before teachers-unions goons go on the attack, I am the child of a public school teacher and the mother of two children in an excellent public charter school by choice.) But Damon's hinges came undone when confronted with the mild question.
"You think job insecurity makes me work hard?" he retorted. "That's like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when she has tenure." Gathering all the creative potential he could muster, Damon unleashed crude profanities on Fields. "A teacher wants to teach," Damon fumed with his mother next to him. "Why else would you take a sh**ty" salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really loved to do it?"
Never mind that most out-of-work Americans would find nothing "sh**ty" about earning an average $53,000 annual salary plus health and retirement benefits for a 180-day work year.
Damon went on to deride standard, mainstream behavioral economic principles as "intrinsically paternalistic" and "MBA-style thinking." And when the young reporter's cameraman pointed out that there are bad apples in the teaching profession as in any profession, Damon called him "sh**ty," too.
Tinseltown stars can afford to put emotion over logic, progressive fantasy over practical reality. The rest of us are stuck with the bill. And those whom bleeding-heart celebrities purport to care most about -- the children -- suffer the consequences of bad ideas.
Interminable teacher tenure in America's largest school districts, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles, has produced a rotten corps of incompetent (at best) and dangerous (at worst) educators coddled by Big Labor. As the D.C.-based Center for Union Facts reports, "In many major cities, only one out of 1,000 teachers is fired for performance-related reasons. ... In 10 years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey's schools."
By contrast, as the educational documentary "Waiting for Superman" (produced by avowed liberal turned reformer Davis Guggenheim) pointed out, one out of every 57 doctors loses his or her license to practice medicine, and one out of every 97 lawyers loses their license to practice law.
In Los Angeles, it's not just meanie tea party terrorists making the case for abolishing teacher tenure. When the Los Angeles Times exposed how the city's tenure evaluation system rubber-stamped approvals and ignored actual performance, the district superintendent admitted: "Too many ineffective teachers are falling into tenured positions -- the equivalent of jobs for life." USC education professor Julie Slayton acknowledged: "It's ridiculous and should be changed."
Pop quiz: Would multimillionaire Matt Damon apply the same warped employment practices and dumbed-down curricular standards to his own accountants that he champions for America's public school teachers? Film at 11.
http://townhall.com/columnists/miche...mon/page/full/
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