degsme:

Lets try some facts rather than myths shall we?

First off, University Profs are catering to a select audience that is paying $$ to be there. Thus many teaching deficiencies - such as the overuse of Perch and Preach - is rampant. So lets ignore the nonsense about how University Profs know how to teach. Uni profs get and keep their tenure based on their research (Publish or Perish) not on their ability to teach.

Now onto parochial schools. Even the notoriously liberal (sarcasm here) Hoover institute admits that Parochial schools spend MORE than public schools on a per-student basis, because the local archdiocese invariably subsidizes the tuition. Furthemore a significant number of the staff are "ordered" which means that pension, medical and other benefits are payed for by their orders. The net result is that on average Parochial schools spend MORE THAN TWICE what public schools in their local area spend.

What if you knew your subject and taught it? Well how do you do that last part if you don't know how to teach? Well typically you Perch and Preach and only manage to communicate your ideas to about 25% of the class that has an auditory learning modality.

So before you go swallow your foot even further, please try and get some facts.

Degsme, let me educate you as to some "facts."

First of all, public university professors are not catering to some super-select audience, and they're certainly not paying much to go there (hence budget problems.) Second, what you call "perch and preach" is hardly ever used in liberal arts schools, teaching is a HUGE part of the tenure case, and is very serious business.

But whether in HS or college, some people are natural teachers, some are not but get better with training, and some just suck. The problem, as I see it, is that the latter class can't be given the boot. My brother works in one of the worst inner city schools in the country. The kids are beyond pathetic, no one has a father at home, half of them have been arrested, no one is reading anywhere near grade level, etc, etc. You need a very special kind of person to go into that environment and do anything constructive. You're not going to find those qualities on a resume. You need to hire people, see what happens, then fire a lot. But the teachers unions don't allow this to happen. There's this idea that the most important thing is how long you've worked at a job. WHO CARES? A lot of these people get NO BETTER with experience. They were bad when they started, 29 years later, they're just as bad. Often worse, because they've given up even trying and know how to game the system so that it doesn't matter.

I'm a university professor, not a HS teacher, but from what I have seen so far of teacher's unions in general on this issue, I am disgusted. Unions need to get on the right side of this issue and demand excellence, not adequacy. It seems like everytime the union is invoked to deal with someone not doing their job, they're there with an armada of lawyers and bluster to make sure justice is never done. It's like the mafia. I respect the work that unions do legislatively to argue for benefits and salary increases (assuming it works, which is questionable), but I am fed up with "MY" union, as they like me to call it, consistently protecting the guilty. All you have to do is walk through a school system to find teachers who are utterly, tragically incompetant. They need to be given the boot: no delays, no apologies, no severance pay. Just the boot. If this takes a tyrant, then so be it. It's not like there's such an overabundance of teachers that administrators would go around firing every good-for-nothing teacher they could even if they wanted to, so in any case, it's only going to be the truly horrible that are fired.