Clearly, my point was that the AFT, as far as I am aware, is not putting enough of its resources into organizing compared to other unions. If this is incorrect, I’d like to see the numbers.

As for dues, we both know that unions’ resources are determined by the amount of money collected from members, not the ratio of dues to members’ salaries.

But, let’s talk about productivity in public school education system. A system that educates 88% of the children from the ages of 6 to 18 in this country. What is the best way to insure productivity in the classroom? You know the answer better than I do-you’re in lots more classrooms and schools than I am-it’s smaller classes. Fewer students in the room mean the teacher can accomplish more in a specific period of time. The inverse of the business model. However, the training is key, so, keep training our teachers and continue to offer them lots and lots of training and retraining. Let’s have a 60 hr. above a masters salary differencial and a PHD differencial. You also know this works and has been discussed by the rank and file for years.
Let management, doe and uft, focus on making those two things a reality. This will take at least two years to implement. Bureaucracy moves slowly because you cannot ask these people to focus on lots of different needs at once. Two major things will do.
What’s the old phrase? Keep it simple sally. We need to talk and nag until they get sick of hearing us and just lower the class size and give the teacher lots of great stuff to learn.

It seems to be “teachers should be paid but………”

Divina seems to think doctors deserve so much more. To me that is laughable. If you really understand medicine and economics in this country you would know that 80 per cent of all money for medical care is spent on the last two years of life when little can be done apart from annoying the patient. Babies delivered, scrapes, bruises, the hernia, broken bone, rashes for the rest of us come to very little of the total cost of medical care.

Hence a teacher who prepares a child for his whole life which will typically span decades struggles for pennies while a doctor, in many ways just a licensed thief, makes out like a bandit, almost literally, performing largely useless, invasive, instrusive, unsettling and upsetting procedures on an octogenarian.

And before you jump into defend your favorite thief I mean doctor, one study called the Dartmouth study compared the health and longevity of people living in Minnesotta with people in the Miami area which has twice the per capita doctors to see if the Miami area residents had better health care or longer life span. THEY DID NOT, of course. The only difference was that in Miami a person is more likely to spend the last six months in a hospital or nursing home going through every last dime they saved in their entire lifetimes.

Furthermore this whole business of public education so being on the defensive is ridiculous as well. Our teachers have problems due to sociological issues from the students’ families. The fact that we are somehow guilty by association is as bizarre as blaming the oncologists at Sloan Kettering for the deaths of their cigarettes smoking patients. Our union has done a very poor job of noting the correlation between poverty and low reading, math scores.
Why not aggressive ads: This is Sharon pregnant at 15 with her second child, Her mother has AIDS, she has never seen her father. Every day UFT members struggle to make a differenc in the lives of Sharon and so many of her peers, etc. etc.

This is Jose he misses school a lot because his grandmother, a crack addict, isn’t able to help him get ready. He waa born prematurely because his own mother used drugs and alcohol throughout the pregnancy. Every day UFT members struggle to make a difference int he lives of Jose and so many of his peers,etc.

We can see what a society values by noting how much it pays its workers.

Unless we figure out a way of making public school work better we may not have public schools.

Many of the sharpest critics of public schools have been our traditional allies.

Bloomberg and Klein are easy targets today – the parents, the ministers and the employers off the children we teach could become the enemies of tomorrow.

No one is going to “leave us alone and let us teach,” unless our teaching shows results. Yes, poverty and crimes and poor housing, and the list goes on and on are awful impediments to being successful – but – the clock is ticking – and if we don’t “get it right” soon the very concept of public schools will become an anachronism.

But to compare oneself with neurosurgeons, or even family doctors is really not a valid comparison. The training is far more rigorous, and, they work much longer hours than the average professional.

One would better make the argument by comparing oneself with a different sort of profession, say, an MBA. Perhaps an accountant or an economist.

In order to get better pay, you have to dispell myths about teachers. It isn’t really about the investment you made into your education. It is what people are willing to pay for it. For example, the first chair violin player at the Metropolitan Opera doesn’t make 6 figures, yet they are probably one of the best violinist in the world. That person probably started their musical education no later than the age of 8. They only get paid what people are willing to pay them through ticket sales etc.

So if you want better pay, you have to educate average citizens to what exactly you do, what your investment has been, what you do off hours etc.

For instance, the average New Yorker does not know that teachers possess masters degrees. The average New Yorker assumes that when kids are not in school, then the teacher is not working either.

On the flip-side, many teachers on this blog assume that the average 9-5 employee works only 9-5, never at home, never after hours, and always with overtime pay. That also isn’t true.

This is how you make in-roads. After all, every person working feels that they deserve better pay. I would guess in most instances they are right. But you have to invest yourself in educating people who can make a difference into championing your cause. That means educating parents and letting it trickle down.

Your information concerning union organizing is incorrect.

One of the reasons why the split in the AFL-CIO was so problematic was that the unions did not divide neatly along the lines of those who have done real organizing, and those who have not. While the SEIU and UNITE-HERE have done serious organizing, the record of the rest of the Change to Win — Hoffa’s Teamsters, the Laborers, the Carpenters, and the UFCW — pales by comparison. And there are unions that remained in the AFL-CIO — the AFT, AFSCME and the CWA being most prominent — that have organizing records every bit as impressive as the SEIU. Over the past twenty years, when the labor movement was losing members left and right, the AFT more than doubled its membership. And the UFT’s organizing drive among home day care providers is certainly one of, if not the, most important organizing drives in the labor movement today.

Perhaps one of these days I will blog about organizing, because the reality is more complex than one often finds portrayed in the news media. While I do not want to suggest that the question of will on the part of the unions is not important, it is not the sole determinant by any means. One of the reasons why SEIU, the AFT, AFSCME and the CWA have had the success they have had, against the general trend, is that our organizing, for the most part, is in the public sector and in service industries. Consequently, the employer can not be as hostile as he is in the private sector, and the effects of globalization, such as outsourcing abroad, are minimal. You can’t teach children how to read, provide daycare, provide health care or janitorial services from half-way around the world. There is a reason why the UAW is madly organizing graduate students, and it is not because they have more in common with autoworkers than they do with teachers or nurses. Rather, it is because it is a whole lot easier to be successful at organizing graduate students [at least before the Bush NLRB stripped away their right to organize in private institutions] than it is at organizing auto parts manufactuers.

This is why the organizing of UNITE-HERE bears careful study. UNITE-HERE has prioritized organizing as much as any union, but their results are uneven. When they do organizing in the service sector, especially hotels and laundries, they are successful, but they have had a much harder go of it in the textile industries, which have been ravaged by globalization. What that suggests is that who one is trying to organize is at least as important as the will to organize. The unions with successful organizing records should not be so quick to crow about their successes, given that they all are organizing in areas which are much easier to organize. Organizing Wal-Mart is going to be a helluva lot more difficult than organizing teachers and nurses. But the future of the American labor movement may very well rest on successfully organizing it, just as it rested on successfully organizing the large automobile corporations in the 1930s.