Teachers again

No, I don’t think that all teachers are great and wonderful paragons of virtue. At the very least they are like people in other professions – some are good and some are bad, with some most likely at either extreme. For some reason, though, they are being attacked.

I do think that teaching has become a thankless job and teachers in general are easy targets and a ready distraction to keep our attention from bigger problems. We should focus on the problems instead of attacking some monolithic figment called ‘Teachers’ or ‘Unions’.

Sure, public schools need to be improved, but cutting funding is not going to fix them. Privatizing schools isn’t going to fix them, either. Charter schools and private schools typically show better results only when they refuse admission to difficult or special ed students.

If your plan to fix the schools is to make them unaffordable for most people and not care about the rest of the kids or any special services I think you need to find a better plan. If your plan is to just get rid of public schools and replace them with private schools that do exactly the same thing I think you still need to find a better plan. If the tax money is there to be pumped into for-profit private schools then the money is there to improve public schools that are non-profit and open to all students. It is a question of ideology: should tax dollars go to private corporations or to public schools?

For some reason, many people think that government spending is only good if tax money goes to private companies. I don’t see anything wrong with paying public employees to do jobs that are designed to benefit the public. We need to make things better, but privatizing all government services is not a solution.