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  3. A remarkable thing happened in New York recently: the state legislature, in

A remarkable thing happened in New York recently: the state legislature, in

游客2024-03-09  22
问题     A remarkable thing happened in New York recently: the state legislature, in effect, turned down the chance to win $700 million in federal money. No one does that, except extremely conservative Southern governors—oh, and occasionally teachers’ unions. A few years ago, the Detroit union forced the local government to reject a $200 million charitable gift to build 15 charter schools, using a model that was already succeeding in the city. And now we have New York’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT), hindering the state’s attempt to file an application that might have won $700 million in federal education funds—and again the issue is charter schools, with a substantial amount of teacher responsibility thrown in.
    The New York teachers’ union was launched in 1960 and led in the early years by the smartest and toughest union man I’ve ever met, Albert Shanker. The teachers are among the most powerful interest groups in New York State. The UFT’s slogan is "A Union of Professionals," but it is quite the opposite: an old-fashioned industrial union that has won for its members a set of work rules more appropriate to factory hands. There are strict rules about pay, school assignment, length of the school day and year. In New York, it is near impossible to fire a teacher—even one accused of a crime or drug addiction. The teachers are hiding in "rubber rooms" at full pay, for years, while the union pleads their cases. In New York, school authorities are forbidden, by state law, to evaluate teachers by using student test results.
    Toward the end of his life, Shanker began to realize the union was headed down the wrong path. In a 1993 speech, he talked about the need for more responsibility: "... we are at the same point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product... I think that we will get—and deserve—the end of public education through some sort of privatization (私有化) scheme if we don’t behave differently."
    In the end, the challenge has come not from privatization—but in the form of public charter schools, in which individual entrepreneurs are chartered by states to create their own schools. The successful charters usually have longer school days and years, more intense efforts to guide student behavior, more creative or theme-oriented curriculums and more aggressive evaluation of teachers.
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