Frank Smith Says NB: DON PESCI: How to reform public education - The Middletown Press : Serving Middletown, CT

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

DON PESCI: How to reform public education - The Middletown Press : Serving Middletown, CT

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Even though I am attacked each time I post a suggestion that school vouchers are the answer to our problems with the school system, it appears that Don Pesci agrees with me!; March 16, 2011 at 12:27 PM
Anonymous said...: Unions and tenure are the major impediments to fixing this broken system. As long as a teacher is guaranteed his/her position for life regardless of poor performance and guaranteed raises no matter how poorly they perform, nothing will change.

If you want to start fixing this broken system, you need to get rid of unions and hold teachers accountable. If a teacher has to pass an annual review of their student's performance to keep their job, and only qualifies for a raise based on student and parent reviews of their performance, then maybe some of these lazy slugs the system has been protecting would be weeded out.

Another step to making the system accountable would be vouchers for all students. Stop mandating by government action that a student must attend a particular school, and instead offer each parent a voucher that may be used at any school, public or private.

This will force the mediocre at best public schools to compete with the private schools for their students in order to save their positions.

The system as it is currently designed guarantees these so-called public servants a job and a paycheck for their entire life whether they care to do their job or not, and unions protect this incompetence simply to keep those mandatory union dues flowing.

Putting an end to FORCED unionism in all levels of Connecticut government would also go a long way to fixing the problem. If the unions are so great, why can't they rely on members voluntarily joining and paying their dues? Why do they need to hijack their dues from people who have no choice as a condition of their employment but to pay whether they want to or not?

Why is the state and every municipal government in Connecticut in the business of forcing people to belong to organizations against their will?

Ohio and Wisconsin are doing great things to fix this problem in their states, but in our union controlled corrupt legislature, nothing will ever change.; March 16, 2011 at 8:48 PM

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