I do know this: after reading sirs' silly posts for years, I know that he knows nothing useful about anything. He oozes pure negativity from every pore. The main difference between him and Rich, Kramer and the Multiplicity of Christians is that it takes him a lot more words to be annoying.
God forbid that anyone should ever put him in any classroom.
Teaching involves a lot of outside preparation. In the first several years, getting it all together is overwhelming; after three or four years, one can use the materials , handouts, and tests one has prepared over (there are computer programs that will write tests from a database, so they will never be identical), and then work on improving the instruction of the points that seem most difficult for the different types of learners one has in his class. It is a lot more complicated to be a good teacher than to be a good sanitation worker.
Every union is a reflection of the people in that union. The few times when I have taught in a union school (five years total, out of forty), the unions were extremely interested in the development of the students, except for the UTD here in Dade County. I taught there for four months, replacing someone who quit, and the place was so annoying that I left and never considered returning. Administration was a ghastly, ponderous bureaucracy, and the union was complicit with them. Two years afterward, Pat Tornillo, the UTD president was exposed in a scandal and forced to resign.
What I said was that there was insufficient information in the story about the RI teachers to make any informed comment. Of course, when it comes to not being paid for work, I have been there and done that. Once, all the Humanities and Math professors were told that we would be paid to tutor students preparing to take a state exam for half a semester. When we had completed this, we were told that we would not be paid, but we would not be forgotten, whatever that meant. Then two years later, the administration changed and no more was ever heard about this again. It is difficult to be placed in a position where you have to sue your employer to get paid as promised. Of course, we were only given a verbal promise, and no one was allowed to opt out of the plan. The teachers in the business division and those who taught religion and other subjects were not recruited. Nearly all of them had much smaller classes and many were paid a lot more.
It is crap like that that cause teachers to form unions.
The majority of voters in any school district do not have children at all. So it is always difficult to get proper funding. It is more difficult in Florida, where we have a lot of retired people and wealthy people who do not care about the public schools because they send their kids to private schools.
