When it became evident that Kasich was going to ram through legislation to take away collective bargaining rights from unionized workers, meetings began to spring up to organize opposition to this assault on the middle-class. One such meeting was held early-on at Fatima Family Center in Hough. Curious, I stopped in to see how well attended it was, and, not surprisingly, the room was packed.
Sitting front and center in the audience was Steve Loomis of the police patrolmen’s union. Odd, I thought, for a couple of reasons. One, the room was full of progressive Democrats, so to see a conservative Republican sitting their singing out of the same hymnal with them was somehow incongruent. After all, most of Loomis’ right-leaning members probably voted for Kasich.
And two, just as soon as Kasich moves to exempt safety forces from the onerous new law, policemen and firemen are going to abandon their union brothers and sisters and rush right back into the arms of the party that dissed them. Why? Because these guys simply are not interested in the well-being of anyone but themselves. And their selfish thinking is far too prevalent among so-called progressives in the union movement.
Merit Pay for Teachers
The most popular teacher at my high school (back in the Jurassic Era) was an elderly gentleman named Evans Kern who taught Chemistry. He regaled students with comments meant to inspire us. He would point out the window to the funeral home across the street and virtually yell, “That’s the House of Wills, and this is the house of wants; I want a good job, I want to make money after I graduate, but to do that you’ve got to get a good education.”
Problem was, while he was an inspiring orator, he was a horrible teacher. Not one person in his entire class the year I was in it (or the years before or after) could learn to balance a chemical equation… and he took pains to let us know how stupid we were.
Then he got sick and a substitute teacher, a little white-haired elderly woman, took over his class, and — lo and behold! — two days later everyone in the class could balance a chemical equation. The fact was that old Evans Kern had stayed in the classroom way beyond his useful span. And there are no doubt other teachers hanging on in classrooms today.
The problem is, merit pay (which is being suggested for Ohio teachers) had been tried in other states and proven not to work… too many variables go into the equation that produces a successful teacher. Nonetheless, some teachers clearly do burn out (just like in other professions), and there should be some method of “promoting” them out of the classroom, but there isn’t, and children suffer.
Wrong Solutions
I keep going back to the egregious statements made by PD columnist Phillip Morris for one major reason: The potential harm they do in terms of implementing workable solutions for the problems of the underclass.
Morris posits these folks don’t want to work, yet when McDonald’s hosts a hiring event, the line of people applying was around the block. He then opines that the solution to inner-city violence is vigilantism by older residents. These are statements people on the far right love to hear because it clears their consciences of any responsibility for the erecting and maintaining of a bigoted social structure and racial pecking order that ensures failure among certain classes of people.
If these people are themselves to blame, then why should we taxpayers fund education and programs like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone? It won’t do any good anyway, right? Wrong. The Children’s Zone has proven over the last two decades that it works and works well. It takes potential tax takers and turns them into eventual taxpayers.
By failing to solve the problems of the underclass we are insuring that we’ll be paying for the outcomes of the dysfunctional behaviors (incarceration, welfare, and high medical costs) forever. By “educating” our way out — yeah, I know it takes years, but it’s the only way that really works — we can solve the problem of the underclass once and for all.
Wouldn’t that be a great legacy, to be known as the generation of Americans who finally came to their senses and made this country live up to its stated ideals by creating conditions that allowed everyone to at last be free? Poverty, after all, really is a prison you know. But so too is ignorance, and we don’t need PD columnists spreading more of it around.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.
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2 Responses to “MANSFIELD: Strange Bedfellows & Wrong Solutions”
Hank Wait
I’m not so sure the police and fire will abandon their brethren. They didn’t in Wisconsin even though they were exempt from Walkers attacks on collective bargaining.
Kate Klonowski
I agree that merit pay is the wrong way to encourage good teaching–it takes much more than that. You pointed out correctly that too many x-factors contribute to student success–a financially stable community is one of them. Do we make good teachers in challenging schools suffer because they have fewer resources to bring their students’ standardized test scores up? Do we reward a teacher like Mr. Kern who masqueraded as an educator simply because he has seniority, powerful friends, apathetic overhead or a good union? (I am not a proponent of union-busting or loss of collective bargaining, but they ARE guilty of protecting incompetent teachers). Why not start paying teachers what we pay those in “respectable” professions? Drop the “well they only work 9 months a year” BS. The issue here is the money allotted to education is indicative of a city/state/country which doesn’t respect the value of education. If we start paying teachers a truly competitive and desirable salary, we might see more competitive and desirable educators and (more importantly) administrators. Teaching is NOT a “fall-back” job. Society needs to stop talking about it as if it were.