What Has the Teacher's Strike Actually Achieved (Apart From a Load of Angry Parents)?

Last week's teachers strike really was a bit of a damp squib and really hasn't had quite the impact that the unions were hoping for.

The challenge for the civil service unions is that many civil servants (even union members) can't see the point in one-day strikes. Most civil servants are frustrated by the government's attempts to change the pension entitlements (as most of us would appreciate) but going on strike and losing a day's pay really doesn't have much of an impact.

Most striking civil servants would have gone back to work on Friday to find that little has changed but that the work left undone lies waiting. This then puts pressure on the staff to catch up with the backlog.

The interesting thing is that the government really holds all the cards in this situation. The unions will struggle to call out an extended strike because many civil servants can't afford to take too many days of unpaid time off. Not only that but the unions don't really have the clout that they once had with the workforce and many civil servants aren't even members.

However, the teacher's strike had a bigger impact since many parents couldn't go to work because they needed to stay home to look after kids who would normally be at school. Thus the teachers found themselves getting little sympathy from the public at large.

Having been a teacher myself for a while I can appreciate that it's not an easy job. The holidays are generous but the stress of managing classes and the work that goes around them (not to mention the endless stream of government initiates) makes it very draining to say the least. Many teacher work 60+ hours a week at a rate of pay that would be considered poor in the private sector.

Still, not all teachers went out on strike. But the number that did was big enough to brass off large numbers of parents.

While the teachers were on strike, thousands of employees were forced into an unplanned day off work and many employers were left very unimpressed by the teachers' action (since small businesses really miss even one employee being off work). And the customers (the children who were meant to be in school) are now a day behind in an already overfull curriculum.

As a result, many folks have even less sympathy for teachers. Despite the long hours and high levels of stress, teachers still get nearly 12 weeks holiday a year and their pensions are part funded by tax payers (even if their pensions aren't that great any more anyway).

The government only has to watch the teaching unions make their own lives more difficult through calling a strike. Then, with right PR, they can easily swaypublic opinion against the teachers by blaming them for such disruption to parents' working lives.

So, what has the strike actually changed? Not much really!

Karl Craig-West is a blogger, website builder, public speaker and business activist who lives in Leicester, England.

He can be found at http://www.craig-west.co.uk/ but more frequently spends time writing and promoting on http://www.businessinpolitics.com/.

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Gonzalez: Klein lost respect of teachers, parents - New York Daily News

Though his departure was announced on Tuesday, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's influence has been waning for some time.

You could tell the Joel Klein era was ending long before Mayor Bloomberg made it official on Tuesday.

It became clear one cold January night in the cavernous auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School, during an extraordinary all-night meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy.

The panel, Bloomberg's rubber-stamp replacement for the old Board of Education, was about to approve Klein's proposal to close down 19 low-performing public schools and install several new charter schools in their place.

State law required the panel to go through the motions of a democratic process by holding a public hearing.

More than 1,000 angry parents and teachers filled the auditorium that night. The list of speakers seemed endless. Many gave eloquent defenses of their programs. Several begged for assistance from school district headquarters.

I was dumbstruck to see teachers and even assistant principals take their turns at the microphone and publicly berate their boss, Klein, for refusing to support neighborhood schools.

The chancellor, who spent long stretches of the meeting on his BlackBerry, walked out of the room at one point.

Suddenly, the entire auditorium rose in unison. Everyone began chanting: "Where's Joel Klein? Where's Joel Klein? Where's Joel Klein?"

The longer Klein stayed away, the louder the crowd became. Not until he sheepishly returned and took his seat did things quiet down.

When the panel finally got around to voting, it was near dawn, yet hundreds of people were still in the room.

That's when you realized the disconnect between advocates of Klein's regime and the countless parents and teachers who long ago grew weary of his autocratic and disrespectful style.

Klein's legacy is truly a Tale of Two Cities.

To Manhattan's wealthy elite, the city's longest-serving chancellor was "one of the most important transformational ... education leaders of our time." That's what Bloomberg called him Tuesday.

The chancellor, they say, fought aggressively to reduce the racial achievement gap in education, brought in scores of innovative charter schools and brought corporate management methods to a "dysfunctional" system.

But most New Yorkers simply do not agree that he succeeded.

Only 30% of city residents believe our public schools have improved under Klein and Bloomberg. So says a poll conducted last month by The Wall Street Journal, a paper owned by Klein's new employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Many critics now realize all those trumpeted state test score results over the past few years were grossly inflated.

They see how Klein's headlong rush for more charter schools spawned bitter neighbor-versus-neighbor battles for scarce space.

His constant reorganizations of the school bureaucracy only demoralized and confused the system's veteran employees, teachers say. The racial achievement gap has not significantly diminished.

In short, progress was hardly stellar when you consider the unprecedented increases in state funding for public schools in the past decade.

That night of the marathon meeting at Brooklyn Tech, it was apparent Klein had lost the confidence and respect of too many teachers and parents.

A few months later, a Supreme Court justice overturned his decision to close the 19 schools. Then came the revelations of the inflated test scores.

We will soon see if our new chancellor actually listens to parents and teachers once in a while.

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com

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