Kansas casts eye on teachers' unions

[lastlib]

More Brownbackistan/Kochtopia shenanigans:

http://www.kansascity.com/2013/03/06/4104938/kansas-casts-eye-on-teachers-unions.html

The battle over teachers unions has marched its way across the country. Ohio. Michigan. Wisconsin. Idaho. And now it’s in Kansas, greeted by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his conservative allies in the Legislature.

Lawmakers are moving to undercut the tenuous power of teachers unions by barring them from using voluntary paycheck deductions for politics.

And they’re going after teachers’ ability to bargain collectively on key issues — hoping to give cash-strapped school districts new flexibility and leverage in contract talks.

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One more step by the 1%/Koch brothers to make life harder for the 99% in the working class, and to make them more dependent and subservient to their corporate masters. Collective bargaining is a First Amendment right! It should never be limited to the whims of the legislature. This will make it harder to get good teachers, and the end result will be less-educated children--which fits into the long-term plan of the billionaires.

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[SheilaT]

1. I can remember when teachers and nurses thought that joining a union was somehow demeaning.

Now, almost everyone ought to be in a union. Teachers and nurses especially.

I am, like many others, perfectly capable of criticizing teachers, but I also recognize that I could not possibly work in a classroom and do what they do. This is an excellent example of walking in someone else's shoes I like to think that one-on-one I was terrific with my two sons as they were growing up. I even gave serious thought to home schooling but recognized that I was not temperamentally suited to doing that. Actually, I think that all parents ought to give serious thought to home schooling because it helps you focus on what it is you want for your child's education. Not that very many should home school, but that there needs to be a good interaction between the child and the home.

Back to the original point. Most teachers are genuinely dedicated people who care a lot about their kids and do their absolute best by them. They need the support of the community, the parents, the administrators.

Oh. And schools need to be properly funded I had the good fortune to be able to send my kids to a private school, starting when the oldest was in 7th grade, and the younger in 3rd. So I'd already had experience with public schools. Excellent public schools, I must say. And my reasons to move my kids from public to private were quite personal, and I was very unpopular at the private school because I kept on saying that I should not be exempt from a single dollar of taxes because my kid was no longer in public school. What I did learn was that we need to fund the public schools so that they can have the small class sizes, and further fund them because it's the public schools that must take on the kids the private schools can't or won't take, the kids with serious learning disabilities for instance.

How about we trade a couple of aircraft carriers for public school funding?