dagblog - Comments for "A Foreigner Looks at Amtrak"

Thanks - I'd wanted to touch

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 19 May 2015 05:23:55 +0000

In reply to Yes, there's merit in seeing

Thanks - I'd wanted to touch on this, but my rant was already quite long (& on touch phone)

1) voucher schools where they create conditions unlike public schools without the trouble kids - and then those teachers perform great (or else). Meanwhile, real teachers in public get forced to deal with highly disparate students - many borderline retarded, horribly backwards in reading level, unprepared for methodical schoolwork, and no parental backing from home to get them through study gaps - and showered with lots of "math & science & reading, math & science & reading" focused on a homogenous level of achievement unrelated to where a kid is. are the goals useful for the child? if the child passes that test but doesn't know a host of more important life skills & understanding & background info, are they better prepared for followup education or the real world? (how many people need science or more than basic math in their daily lives?) More important, if a teacher is talented in his/her field, the chances are he/she will be thrown into an environment where pedagogic technique is wasted because the students can't follow or the conditions in the school are too chaotic with too few resources.[read Daily Howler for this analysis ad nauseum - and where newspapers & savior bureaucrats will make up "facts" to gloss over both the real hurdles & lack of effectiveness of new methods - and perversely hide successes behind age-old stereotypes, pulling defeat from victory, ]

And then some Republican fucker will cut the school budget again and then complain about the lack of results in public schools. My father quit the Republican party because his state simply couldn't respond normally to an education crisis by funding the schools, and instead went into a "no taxes" mantra.

2) so yes, sometimes it's unfairly hard to fire an incompetent teacher - and put into context it's not surprising that if teachers invariably go into shitty politicized situations, they'll look for protective rules to shield themselves from inevitable outcomes - whether they're talented or incompetent. If they were "the troops" we'd be going all loving on them for needing more pay and support (except when they come home and we shove them in underfunded VA facilities and ignore their stress disorders)

3) I think there was a 3, but have to go do something real

Yes, there's merit in seeing

ocean-kat — Mon, 18 May 2015 23:14:34 +0000

In reply to Unions are good in theory,

Yes, there's merit in seeing the problems on "our" side and in seeing where the other side does something good. rmrd has several times criticized me for doing just that. But there's the matter of perspective as PP pointed out. We can't solve all problems right now. Are the problems the unions are fighting greater than the problems they "cause?" While we likely agree that unions are sometimes over zealous in protecting incompetent teachers I suspect that's a miniscule problem compared to things like tying teacher's pay to standardized tests. Tying teacher's pay to standardized tests isn't just unfair to teachers it negatively affects the quality of all students education. In addition by tying school funding to standardized tests it incentivises corruption in the administration. That corruption can be rationalized by citing the unfairness of the system and as protecting the students from those unfair and destructive funding cuts.

Unions are good in theory,

Verified Atheist — Mon, 18 May 2015 21:43:51 +0000

In reply to Nice seque into gratuitous

Unions are good in theory, and necessary in practice. However, I can definitely attest that there are many things wrong with the teacher unions, at least in Georgia (which is where I lived back when I was a public high school teacher). More pay was definitely a cause worth fighting for, but I was very disgusted at how hard they made it to fire poorly performing teachers. Yes, tying teachers' pay to students' standardized test results is stupid, but so is making it very difficult to fire teachers that demonstrate a lack of skills and knowledge. I know you hate the tu quoque fallacy, but there's merit in seeing what one's own side is doing wrong, and sometimes whether one thinks it's a tu quoque or just useful introspection depends on one's mood and just how much one likes the other side or his/her own "side".

Nice seque into gratuitous

PeraclesPlease — Mon, 18 May 2015 08:33:33 +0000

In reply to A Foreigner Looks at Amtrak

Nice seque into gratuitous hippie-punching and "both sides do it" relativism. Damn Democrats/libruls just wanna stop personal responsibility, keep drunk drivers from being sentenced, keep shitty teachers from being fired.

Sad he didn't bring up "feather-bedding" from the 50's (if it existed then) where unions would keep extra horse-and-buggy personnel riding shotgun in the age of freight trains, cars & lorries - just those God-forsaken unions keeping wages up & freedom down.

Sorry, but it was liberals who pushed to keep air controllers and flight & shipping personnel unionized and well-trained, such as for the quick response when a plane took a nose-dive into NY Harbor & well-trained tug captains pulled people out. Yes, there's a balance with teacher pay and performance, but teacher (school) conditions are often ignored, along with extra unpaid hours, brutal worsening conditions & the overall societal good of including remedial dysfunctional students rather than the cherry-picked better-equipped students at voucher schools. It's like ignoring the extra benefit of reduced congestion from Amtrak and that highways and gas are heavily subsidized, in telling Amtrak to go it alone. Sure, union workers got left with "cadillac" health care packages while giving up pay & work hour & longevity benefits over the years - and then the US government stepped in to whack those damn union workers' last vestige - while keeping bonuses for bailed-out yuppie stock traders.

Perspective is required in analyzing these issues, and a simple single-variable brainfart dissection usually gets it wrong but plays right into Rush Limbaugh-land demagoguing. Oh well, so many shit articles that start off well. Yes, we've neglected infrastructure - and neglected trained, safe workers. Liberals were on the side of improving both - conservatives were on the side of cutting costs, training and working conditions for both. Both sides *don't* do it - only the conservatives do. Liberals may have some problems, but those problems are 1/10th the problems of the conservative side - the scale is fully off-tilt.