Confessions of a Unionized Thug: Why are Supporters of SB 5 so Angry?

Trust me, you don't want to get supporters of Senate Bill 5 mad.  If you do, and they run out of logical points to make, they start calling you names.

Recently, I posted a blog entry titled "Casey Anthony and the Hollow Promise of "School Reform."  I was trying to make a simple point:  that those who vilify public school teachers (and other public sector workers) overlook many important issues.

Todd Marion, apparently a fan of SB5, saw the title of my post (I don't think he read it) and responded on Facebook:  "Leave it to a lib to 'cash in' on a trajedy."

That wasn't quite what he wanted to get off his chest, so he posted again:  "Some nut goes on a shooting spree...ban guns. A devestating hurricane....global warming. An oil spill...stop drilling. Now this. What a scum bag!!!!"

A scum bag!  Ouch.

I don't think Todd quite got my point.  So let me try again.  My point is that A LOT of problems we see in schools relate to terrible parents, and the pipe dream belief that we can "test" our way out of the mess we're in is kind of...well...stupid.  Yes, I'm sorry to say this, Todd, but I think Kasich's plan to "fix" education in this state is stupid.

I think SB 5 is stupid.

Todd was still mad, and wasn't done.  It might be me, but it seems a lot of conservatives spend a lot of time stewing and angry, and spend a lot of the time when they're angry venting about public sector workers.  I mentioned to Todd that as a teacher I had probably done more to help real kids than he ever would.  That made an angry man angrier.  He responded: "Comparing the parent of a failing child to a murderer is absolutely ridiculous. However, I'm never surprised by how low you union thugs will go. Typical liberal rhetoric.....never let a good trajedy go to waste. You should be ashamed of yourself."

But I wasn't ashamed of myself.  I was only mystified by Todd's unreasoning fury.  So I looked up "thug" in my dictionary.  The first defnition was:  "a vicious or brutal gangster or ruffian."  The second choice was:  "a member of a religious organization of robbers and assassins in India."

I wondered:  was Todd, the fan of SB 5, insulting my religious views?  Or did he know something the cops (also unionized thugs) didn't know?  I don't think my teacher friends or I have brutally attacked anyone.  All I've seen happening is peaceful protests up in Columbus and some industrious gathering of 1.3 million signatures to overturn this foolish law.  I wondered again.  Was Todd against freedom of speech?  Was he against the right to assemble?  Did he want to take away the right of workers to petition?  Why was Todd so ANGRY?

Todd's next post was brief:  an apology for mis-typing "tragedy."  I let it go.  Typing isn't my forte, either.  Todd and I share that bond.

Michael -----, a second supporter of SB 5, jumped into the discussion and explained that he was halfway through my post.  From what he had read to that point he responded, "I'm reading this article now, and not to far into it, it says we need to get rid of the bad teachers as fast as we can........With SB5 in place, it will be a reality, not a pipe dream..........;)"

Now it was my turn to respond.  Todd seems to be stewing in bile, which seems true of a lot of people who attack unionized workers; but I would try.  I don't FEEL like a unionized thug.  I feel like a guy who's a good father.  I feel like a guy who was a dedicated teacher.  I feel like many of the right-wing attacks on working Americans are fueled by illogic. 

I told Todd that I believed standardized testing (a linch-pin of SB 5) was NEVER going to help kids who need help in our schools most:  kids whose parents are sick psychopaths, kids like Casey Anthony's daughter, who live with evil at home.  I told him I wanted to know how more vouchers were going to solve our biggest problems when Hamilton County, alone, had 8500 cases of child abuse and neglect in one year.  I wanted some angry conservative, Michael or Todd or Governor Kasich himself, to tell me how vouchers would help when the PARENTS don't really care.  I wanted someone to tell me how taking bargaining rights away from teachers would solve problems in Scioto County, where reports indicate that one out of ten babies born now has illegal prescription drugs in his or her blood.

I guess I just don't see how attacking public sector workers is going to help education or Ohio children.

So:  let me wish Todd and supporters of SB 5 well.  I hope they can get over some of that angry, because it's not good for the health.

Meanwhile, I'll be leaving Cincinnati on July 20 to bicycle my way to California.  Yep, this unionized thug is taking it on the road in an effort to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

I did a similar ride back in 2007; and with the help of great students and the Loveland, Ohio community, where I used to teach, we raised $13,500.

Now, I'm riding for the cause again and it makes me feel good about myself and my liberal views and my life-long commitment (similar to almost every teacher I ever met) to helping real kids.

Maybe Todd will donate.  It might make him feel better.

I started my ride at Acadia National Park and rode 1200 miles in June, back to Cincinnati.

Another 2800 miles to go and my ride will take me through Yosemite National Park
and down to the Pacific coast.

If you would like to donate to help find a cure for type-1 diabetes please click HERE! 

(This single click takes you to my fund-raising page.  There, click again on "donate to this event."  Then click "Biking and Painting for Diabetes."

Casey Anthony and the Hollow Promise of "School Reform"

I've been tinkering with this post today because one of my former students, whose judgment I tend to respect, said he thought it didn't make any sense.

Meanwhile, a supporter of Senate Bill 5 saw the title and weighed in with his opinion on Facebook.  I don't think he actually read the post, but he was mad enough to call me a "union thug."

Actuallly, I'm just a harmless blogger who often sees current events through the lens of a former public school teacher.  That was true again this week with the acquittal of Casey Anthony on charges she murdered her daughter, Caylee,.  For those who followed the trial closely on television, the jury's decision sparked an explosion of outrage.  For those who did not, let's just say that Casey left the family home in Florida on June 16, 2008, with Caylee, then nearly three, in tow and did not return for 31 days.

When she did Caylee was nowhere to be found and mom claimed the toddler had been abducted by a nanny; but it soon turned out that the "nanny" did not exist. 

It was the start of a bizarre case and bizarre trial and at the end all we know for sure is that a little girl is dead, her body found several months later with duct tape covering the mouth, decomposing in a trash bag by the side of a road, with a Winnie the Pooh blanket she loved nearby.

As a writer interested primarily in education--in finding ways to help all kids--in no way do I mean to trivialize the death of this young child.  It's a tragedy that stands alone.  And yet, from a retired teacher's point of view, this kind of tragedy comes as no surprise. 

For years we've been hearing about the failure of America's public schools, about the failure of public school teachers--as if bad teachers are the biggest, or even the only problem, in our schools.  So what we get are all kinds of experts talking about standardized tests, as if we can TEST our way to some perfect world, where all parents care and all kids get a wonderful educaton.  You don't have to be a public school teacher to know this:  but if you are you know there are a lot of terrible parents out there and they send us almost all the kids who struggle in the public schools.

These days, the most vociferous critics love to trot out this old quote from George Bernard Shaw:

“He who can, does. He who cannot teaches.”

Unfortunately, no one ever seems to remember this quote, also from Shaw, whose father was a raging alcoholic:

“Parentage is a very important profession; but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of children.”

You can find shocking examples like the Anthony case any time you want.  When I was bicycling recently across Maine, the local papers were filled with details of the murder of Amy Lake and her two young kids.  The triggerman was Amy's estranged husband, the youngster's crazy dad. 

Maybe what Shaw should have said is, "He who can, produces sperm." 

That's the real problem.  That's the problem we need to consider:  that the worst members of the human race still produce sperm and eggs.  What's the "school reform" plan in the news today designed to addresses that fact?

Sure, there are bad teachers out there.  And we need to get rid of as many as we can, and do it as fast as we can.

The problem, though, when reformers talk about "fixing" schools, when Congress passes a law that promises every child will be proficient in reading and math by 2014, when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says "it's all about the talent," meaning that education reform all boils down to the man or woman at the front of the class,  is that we refuse to look the Casey Anthony's of the world squarely in the face.

We don't pay enough attention to their kids until it's already a month or more too late.  We ignore the children who suffer, day in, day out, in homes with awful moms and dads.  Had Caylee lived long enough to enter kindergarten her problems would have gone far beyond crayons and glue and standardized testing would not have been the cure..

Casey Anthony is not the aberration many we might care to imagine.  Hundreds of American parents kill their children every year.  Many hundreds of thousands more abuse their sons and daughters regularly.  I spoke to a Hamilton County child welfare worker not long ago and asked how many cases of child abuse and neglect his agency handled in a typical year.

Eight thousand, five hundred cases in one Ohio county in one twelve-month stretch.

As someone who tried to help every child I ever taught or met, I keep wondering when we're going to have a "school reform" plan designed to really help these kids.  Tying teacher pay to test scores won't do it.  Certainly, increasing the number of vouchers the State of Ohio will grant won't do the trick.  What do schools do--what do we as a society do--when PARENTS don't really care?  That's the "school reform" questions that bothers me.

And it bothers me every day.

For far too many children problems start long before they enter kindergarten.  In far too many cases problems begin while the child is still "safe" in the womb.  In April a series of articles in the New York Times highlighted growing prescription drug abuse nationwide.  One story focused on Portsmouth, Ohio and Scioto County, where some of the highest rates of overdoses in the state can be found.  There nearly 1 in 10 babies born last year tested positive for drugs.

As the Times explained, "The pattern playing out here bears an eerie resemblence to some blighted cities of the 1980s; a generation of young people who were raised by their grandparents because their parents were addicts, and now they are addicts themselves." 

Nina Mannering was one.  At age 29, she was having trouble raising her 8-year-old daughter.  She tried to kick her habit and entered a counseling program but was told to leave after her boyfriend brought her pills.  In January 2010, while living with an older man, a 65-year-old veteran who had access to the kind of prescriptions she craved, both were murdered by another addict who broke into the home looking for their stash of pills.

At some point, our leaders have to wake up and realize that nothing they're now proscribing to fix the problems "in" our schools is ever going to make much difference, not until someone comes up with a standardized test to administer to moms and dads.

You could wave your magic wand today, and if you could make all the bad teachers in the world go away, tomorrow you'd still have 80% of the worst problems we see now in our schools.