Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
And, remember back a while, when Kerry first proposed this sort of thing in a speech to the NEA faithful, and they got quite cool to him for a bit, and then he quietly backtracked and vowed not to screw with teachers, and then they backed him wholeheartedly?
Just lke his overt hawkishness is backed by a stealth plan to withdraw from Iraq soon, I suspect this radical ed fix will simply disappear, if in fact he doesn't issue four or five contradictory messages before the election. He needs the NEA, and this isn't going to please them.
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Most of my teacher friends are actually supportive of this proposal. To be sure, they are on the younger side and several of them teach at charter schools, so perhaps they are not indicative of the real forces at work in the NEA. But I just don't think it's as monolithic as you say.
Of course as I type this I realize that another force at work may be the recent lean budget years out here in CA and elsewhere. With all the pink slips that have been flying around at the end of every school year of late, perhaps the promise of added dollars and the knowledge that the underperforming teachers will be the ones on the firing line (instead of the current LIFO system) could outweigh the traditional teacher resistance to reform.
