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Slobjob Zizek posted:Next, we have the issue of professionalism. Teachers are direct employees of districts, but they are unionized and individual districts cannot force them to teach a certain way. They are not like employees of a retail business; the line of authority is much more diffuse. Okay, great, teachers have academic freedom, tenure, etc. That's great for them. Maybe great for students, but only if the teacher's freedom leads him or her to teach better than the standards. If not, then the freedom is a net negative for students. Again, the federal government cannot do anything about this anyway, it can only effect teachers through several layers of management by holding funding hostage at the school-, district-, and state-level. Speaking as a former retail employee, the line of authority is not that much different. I went from Wal-Mart management to inner city public school teacher, and it really struck me how similar the policies, procedures, and due process were in both institutions. In both cases, extreme failure resulted in lengthy documentation processes to terminate the employee. I've seen both happen from up close and they were pretty much equal in terms of duration and burden of proof. It has also seemed to me that in a retail setting, where everyone has a unified goal (make money by selling things) and benefits monetarily from achieving this goal, that the management chain works much more smoothly. In an educational setting, there are no real monetary incentives for doing much of anything other than coaching. Without incentive, then there's no real motivation to change teaching styles. Management can't realistically be in your room enough to fully document you out without months of work, and they're poo poo on too hard by the lunatics above them pushing political agendas to put in that kind of effort. Plus, when they do, you just get another job immediately because there's a shortage of people willing to teach for poo poo money in a poverty stricken educational environment. In retail, there is no shortage of desperate, college-education lacking people willing to work 70 hour weeks for a chance at a middle class life. At Wal-Mart, I managed maybe 20 people at a time during normal business and I would have 2-3 sub-managers assisting, plus regular employees that wanted to take a shot at promotion taking on management responsibilities. At times that would spike dramatically, but during those times all of the regular employees would take on management responsibilities. If I did well, I got a multi-thousand dollar bonus check. If I were a step higher, that bonus would expand to 10k+ if the store does well. It was not unheard of for a store manager to get a 100 thousand dollar bonus check. In school, I have 220 students. I'm supposed to have backup in the form of hall monitors, principals, and inclusion teachers. Hall monitors are a joke, the principals have their own quotas to deal with (drive out the old teachers who don't use technology as much) so they ignore or kick discipline back to the teachers, and inclusion teachers are a myth. I have a security button, in case there's an emergency. These get answered about 20% of the time. We didn't have fire extinguishers in the building for two months at the beginning of one year. If you don't have fire extinguishers in a retail store, the loving firefighters that shop there will potentially write major dollar tickets on your rear end. That kills your bonus. Also, the school doesn't run the loving air conditioner until past 3:00 PM as a cost cutting measure. It was a hundred goddamned degrees outside yesterday in Texas. Nothing I do will increase my paycheck by much other than perhaps becoming a private tutor for the wealthy. That's probably the next step, because the alternative money route in education is going into administration.
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Sep 5, 2014 03:30
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Skeesix posted:Call me crazy but I'd hope it would be quicker and easier to fire someone from Walmart than from a teaching job. What you're describing to me is just that, perhaps especially in Texas, there are no more employment protections for teachers than for your average Walmart employee anymore. The biggest difference was that any given Wal-Mart store has a relatively small cast of long term characters, and a lot of temps or people in a probationary period that just get fired as a matter of course at the end of the probationary period. If you make it to a regular part-time position, you gain the benefits of the due process protections, but they're not obligated to give you any hours. Hence the standard retail firing tactic of cutting someone's hours to nothing until they quit. If you're full time or salaried at Wal-Mart, the process is pretty much identical for firing in that context vs firing a teacher. I would suspect this is true all over. Teachers tend to be a lot more educated than Wal-Mart employees, and they have a union, which offers a modicum of protection. Most of that protection manifests in the form of an understanding of the system and access to legal counsel, which will help guarantee that if you are being fired, the firing party followed the required processes.
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Sep 6, 2014 01:39
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