Friday, January 14, 2011
- Chrsitie Is Going After Tenure
When they said 'go big or go home' they were absolutely talking about Chris Christie. He's going after the jewel in the crown of 20th century organized labor. Tenure - the rule that guarantees permanent employment for every dues paying teacher.
The national teacher's union, the NEA, has already announced that a complete nationwide strike of every teacher in America would not be off the table in defense of tenure. Christie is right of course, and the American public knows it. But most teacher apparently do not. If it isn't overwhelmingly obvious, public school teachers are big on 'taking offense' but not very big on smarts.
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How anyone can get up and act as if the purpose of tenure and the intentions of its designers aren't settled questions is beyond my faculty for explanation. Do you think the questioner really believed it true that districts can remove poorly-performing teachers? Well, OK--that this can happen in a reasonable fashion?
It's such a Paul Krugman-like position to take.
I've got to tell ya, I can't think of any group of people that are more intentionally self delusional than public school teachers. They are the 'Timothy Treadwell's' of the modern world.
In case you don't know - he was the focus of the film 'grizzly man' and I've written about him before. He was a self educated naturalist who would live totally unarmed in a tent in grizzly bear country in Katmai national park on the Alaska Peninsula and film the bears. In the meantime he would violate every safety rule the park service has for camping in bear country on the premise that those rules were making it impossible for him to properly ‘protect the bears’ from poachers. (It’s an extremely remote national park where visitors have no choice but fly in on a floatplane – there aren’t really any poachers there at all.)
A rational man would say 'this is awfully dangerous' but not Treadwell. He really and truly believed that the love and affection he had for the bears was so profound and so concrete and so palpable, that the bears would pick it up across the firmament, and then - knowing he loved them so - he would be perfectly safe. In the process he got some really death defying footage of him sitting within inches sometimes of the bears as they fed on the yearly salmon run.
Eventually of course, both he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by the bears.
Public school teachers have the same sort of detachment from reality; At least the ones that go and public defend their profession seem to. But they’ve been breathing the union helium for so long that they simply don’t realize that their position is an artificial one supported by political decision making. And when that political wind changes direction, they’re all going to lose the things they’ve come to think of an absolutely deserved even though no one else in the professional world has anything like it.
Public school teachers (in my experience anyway) aren’t very smart. And my 10 year old daughter knows more about economic reality than most teachers do. But like it or not they’re going to learn. The easy life (and luxurious retirement) for public servants is over if you ask me.
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