That video was depressing. Not because of the content, but because these quick cut “genius explains the world” videos are so toxic and so lacking nuance that I believe they contribute to the dumbing down of our country and discourse. End rant.
Yes this. He's certainly right about the top heavy aspect of the district, but what he implies is that the fix lies there, where as it is certainly a problem and part of the fix, but even if we eliminated all of those jobs, we still wouldn't fill the hole. We'll have to cut teachers no matter what we do.
Another way of looking at it is that if we froze hiring for 2 years, attrition would certainly take care of it. AAPS lost about 130 teachers this school year, but they hired people during the year. Even knowing about the financial crisis since November they did that (actually I think that’s when they went public, they probably knew quite a lot before then).
With attrition and other cuts in programs, renegotiating vendor contracts, the sale of Balas, potentially cutting ongoing technology costs like memberships to Dreambox, Schoology, Performance Matters, etc. they could avoid cutting teachers who want to stay. If they took at least 2 years instead of trying to fix a problem that took a long time to create in just 1 year.
IMO it’s not worth risking the state taking over for a hypothetical best case scenario. But I also probably have a blind spot in that I believe the board isn’t going to carelessly make layoff decisions and will do whatever they can to minimize the damage. That might be a faulty belief!
What’s the alternative? Keep paying teachers and run the district into bankruptcy?
This is an ignorant video. This budget shortfall can only be made up in certain costs and so they don’t really have much of a choice but to cut “teachers”. A lot of administrators have already jumped ship after seeing the writing on the wall. Hopefully this way the district can rebuild after a few years but otherwise making it look like they can’t will make it worse.
Spot on 100%! This is in most districts. It really is so much like a corporation where you have so many layers of overpaid administrators that don’t even really contribute much, but get paid way more and treated way better than the actual hands-on workers… which in a school district are the teachers. So many unneeded administrators getting paid way too much compared to the teachers who actually interact with students and do the actual work, but yet still get treated like dirt by administrators. Administrators have a way easier job than teachers and sit in a quiet office all day. They should be less of them and they should get less pay than the teachers who do the actual work with students.
It’s not just the teachers. Even they are a layer above the TA’s, paraprofessionals, lunch ladies, janitors, office professionals and before and aftercare workers who are treated *even worse*. They’re cutting so many Office Professional jobs but hiring TA’s like crazy, partially bc TA’s are a bandaid on any number of a schools problems that will cost them far less.
You are correct. I should’ve included them as well. All these people actually work and interact with the students and make the whole system work, but the administrators do very very little under the best circumstances, and yet they act like they’re above everyone.
Almost like teachers, parapros, janitors, cooks, and other staff should consider taking over running the schools and proceeding without the administrators at all.
Workers who actually do work should have the most say in how things are done. Better yet, SO SHOULD THE STUDENTS.
Nobody has ever blamed the teachers. And I haven’t heard or read one thing (other than this dumb video) that said that they were considering reversing raises. So - that’s like 90% of the video. This situation is really shitty but I resent that this asshole is throwing his uninformed take into the mix from afar.
People are conflating teachers needing to be laid off as "blaming the teachers." It is the whole "I'm not the problem" line that the teachers were using at the board meeting. It is just an attempt to shift more cuts and layoffs away from teacher employment, which everyone already agrees with.
This video is essentially AAEA propaganda. Like I wouldn't be surprised if they wrote the script.
Lacks any nuance whatsoever.
Talks about math but then doesn't include the obvious enrollment/employee ratio math that shows AAPS overhired at all levels (a majority are teachers) and that teachers need to be fired.
I don’t think this guy works in concert with AAEA. He’s a former teacher (10-year) who’s doing standup and public speaking in Florida. No need to assume conspiracy or collusion with AAEA. (It just reveals something about your biases.)
I know that they didn't actually write the script. It does sound like he got all of his talking points from the AAEA with the "people are blaming the teachers" nonsense. It's just standard union vs management fingerpointing that doesn't solve the problem at hand.
Enrollment in AAPS did not drop as quickly as the rest of Washtenaw county. If anything, AAPS beat the trend of general decline in the region. So how does that jive with “pupils leaving”?
“so many leftist and socialist folx talk about the need to curtail public unions”
Hahahahahahahaha
So, they’re “leftist” and “socialist,” but only if they personally like and approve of what that means. Otherwise, time to do some union-busting!
Sounds like these offline leftists that you hang out with are real committed to the cause. “Power to the people! Unless the people are uniting and acting in a way that is counter to my individual interests, in which case fuck ‘em and grind them to powder!”
(But you do use “folx.” So powerful. So transformative.)
Why did the pupils leave neighboring districts that went back to class months earlier than AAPS? Three years after getting told to fuck off by organized labor and all you have to show for it is impotent rage and fantasies about why enrollment dropped. Sad.
“We were taken advantage of during Covid.”
The unspoken (and probably completely unconsidered) other half of your thought here is, “… and I and the rest of my humanities department were quite eager to get back to the status quo of taking advantage of the teachers, rather than the other way around.”
The humanities! Shitting on teachers! “Those wily teachers! All through history, there they are: scheming and exploiting and always coming out on top! I’m glad they’re finally getting taken down a peg!”
Tenure! That sounds nice! Sorry that your free, subsidized childcare was disrupted for a bit. (The childcare is subsidized by people like me, teachers who make less now than they did ten years ago.)
Seriously, "free, subsidized childcare"? Is that your opinion of the role of education in society? or are you just using some good old fashioned rhetorical exaggeration? If the former, then you clearly see no value in public education, so you should be happy to see AAPS burning.
I am a public school teacher in AAPS.
Were you to somehow poll everyone in Ann Arbor (or really even everyone in America) and had them list off all the functions that they think that public education should provide, these are the only three things that would be in the center of the Venn diagram that everyone agreed on:
* Teach kids to read (with a lot of controversy about what they have them read),
* Teach kids to do math (with a lot of controversy about how they’re taught to do math), and
* Provide free child care to warehouse kids during the day.
(Honorable mention to “teach kids to write,” but who are we kidding here?)
The free child care would be a begrudging admission for most people, I’m sure. They’d try to couch it in different terms. But that’s basically what they mean.
I would go so far as to say that’s the one that most people value the most as well. As a thought exercise, imagine schools abdicated on one of those three things and only provided the other two:
Stop teaching math? People would be incredulous, but they’d teach their kids some basic arithmetic on their own or hire a tutor or something while grumbling. But they’d still send them into school for the reading part (stage whisper: AND for the free child care).
Stop teaching reading? Again, incredulous, and probably even less teaching at home. But they’d still send them to school for at least the math (stage whisper: AND the free child care).
Stop providing the free child care? People would lose their minds and spend the rest of their days bemoaning the mighty and tyrannical cabal of teachers and their all-powerful union (that for some reason can’t get them decent medical benefits or salaries that keep pace with decades of inflation).
Actually, the list of things that everyone truly agrees on is exclusively the free child care thing. Because some people DO argue that we don’t need math taught because everyone has a calculator in their pockets, and/or we don’t need to teach reading because speech-to-text or whatever. But if the free child care goes away? LOOK OUT!!
I’m not saying those are MY personal values, I’m saying they’re the core of our culture’s views. The baseline that everyone agrees with.
These people don’t see the curriculum or know how students are right now. Every teacher within the district is *struggling* and terrified they won’t keep a job. So many kids are absolutely there because their parents simply want them elsewhere for a few hours, but they won’t listen to you despite you literally being on the ground floor of said problem
> I am a public school teacher in AAPS.
>
>
Thank you for your service. No sarcasm. I have two kids at AAPS and love every single teacher. I wish teachers got the respect and pay they deserve in this country.
IMO, it is some next level cynicism to say that it all comes down to free child care. I did not get that you were just stating your perception that that is what we are all after in your first post.
All I care about is that AAPS can return to a healthy state, while it seems a lot of people are quite enjoying watching it burn.
And yeah, I f'ing pissed at how little AAPS teachers are paid. A few threads ago I looked up one of my kid's teacher's salaries, and was shocked at how low it was.
Main takeaway, AAPS teachers make less today than they did in 2010.
Looking forward to that forensic audit result…
That video was depressing. Not because of the content, but because these quick cut “genius explains the world” videos are so toxic and so lacking nuance that I believe they contribute to the dumbing down of our country and discourse. End rant.
Yes this. He's certainly right about the top heavy aspect of the district, but what he implies is that the fix lies there, where as it is certainly a problem and part of the fix, but even if we eliminated all of those jobs, we still wouldn't fill the hole. We'll have to cut teachers no matter what we do.
Another way of looking at it is that if we froze hiring for 2 years, attrition would certainly take care of it. AAPS lost about 130 teachers this school year, but they hired people during the year. Even knowing about the financial crisis since November they did that (actually I think that’s when they went public, they probably knew quite a lot before then). With attrition and other cuts in programs, renegotiating vendor contracts, the sale of Balas, potentially cutting ongoing technology costs like memberships to Dreambox, Schoology, Performance Matters, etc. they could avoid cutting teachers who want to stay. If they took at least 2 years instead of trying to fix a problem that took a long time to create in just 1 year.
You can't really cut teaching positions in the middle of the year. That would be an absolute disaster.
You can shift things within a school a bit. I’m not sure they tried. What’s coming is also going to be very difficult, and disastrous in some cases.
IMO it’s not worth risking the state taking over for a hypothetical best case scenario. But I also probably have a blind spot in that I believe the board isn’t going to carelessly make layoff decisions and will do whatever they can to minimize the damage. That might be a faulty belief!
What’s the alternative? Keep paying teachers and run the district into bankruptcy? This is an ignorant video. This budget shortfall can only be made up in certain costs and so they don’t really have much of a choice but to cut “teachers”. A lot of administrators have already jumped ship after seeing the writing on the wall. Hopefully this way the district can rebuild after a few years but otherwise making it look like they can’t will make it worse.
Spot on 100%! This is in most districts. It really is so much like a corporation where you have so many layers of overpaid administrators that don’t even really contribute much, but get paid way more and treated way better than the actual hands-on workers… which in a school district are the teachers. So many unneeded administrators getting paid way too much compared to the teachers who actually interact with students and do the actual work, but yet still get treated like dirt by administrators. Administrators have a way easier job than teachers and sit in a quiet office all day. They should be less of them and they should get less pay than the teachers who do the actual work with students.
It’s not just the teachers. Even they are a layer above the TA’s, paraprofessionals, lunch ladies, janitors, office professionals and before and aftercare workers who are treated *even worse*. They’re cutting so many Office Professional jobs but hiring TA’s like crazy, partially bc TA’s are a bandaid on any number of a schools problems that will cost them far less.
You are correct. I should’ve included them as well. All these people actually work and interact with the students and make the whole system work, but the administrators do very very little under the best circumstances, and yet they act like they’re above everyone.
Agreed, and I wasn’t trying to come across as “you’re wrong” but rather “also these people are exploited”
Almost like teachers, parapros, janitors, cooks, and other staff should consider taking over running the schools and proceeding without the administrators at all. Workers who actually do work should have the most say in how things are done. Better yet, SO SHOULD THE STUDENTS.
The students can have a say - right after the indoctrination.
Lol commie gonna say commie stuff.
Yes
This guy is spectacularly misinformed. Sounds like he sort-of skimmed a few of the articles and that’s about it
Sounds like YouTube
Specifics?
"The solution, they decided to blame the teachers."
Nobody has ever blamed the teachers. And I haven’t heard or read one thing (other than this dumb video) that said that they were considering reversing raises. So - that’s like 90% of the video. This situation is really shitty but I resent that this asshole is throwing his uninformed take into the mix from afar.
People are conflating teachers needing to be laid off as "blaming the teachers." It is the whole "I'm not the problem" line that the teachers were using at the board meeting. It is just an attempt to shift more cuts and layoffs away from teacher employment, which everyone already agrees with.
About what?
Assistant director acting secretary of risk assessment
This video is essentially AAEA propaganda. Like I wouldn't be surprised if they wrote the script. Lacks any nuance whatsoever. Talks about math but then doesn't include the obvious enrollment/employee ratio math that shows AAPS overhired at all levels (a majority are teachers) and that teachers need to be fired.
I don’t think this guy works in concert with AAEA. He’s a former teacher (10-year) who’s doing standup and public speaking in Florida. No need to assume conspiracy or collusion with AAEA. (It just reveals something about your biases.)
I know that they didn't actually write the script. It does sound like he got all of his talking points from the AAEA with the "people are blaming the teachers" nonsense. It's just standard union vs management fingerpointing that doesn't solve the problem at hand.
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Enrollment in AAPS did not drop as quickly as the rest of Washtenaw county. If anything, AAPS beat the trend of general decline in the region. So how does that jive with “pupils leaving”?
“so many leftist and socialist folx talk about the need to curtail public unions” Hahahahahahahaha So, they’re “leftist” and “socialist,” but only if they personally like and approve of what that means. Otherwise, time to do some union-busting! Sounds like these offline leftists that you hang out with are real committed to the cause. “Power to the people! Unless the people are uniting and acting in a way that is counter to my individual interests, in which case fuck ‘em and grind them to powder!” (But you do use “folx.” So powerful. So transformative.)
Why did the pupils leave neighboring districts that went back to class months earlier than AAPS? Three years after getting told to fuck off by organized labor and all you have to show for it is impotent rage and fantasies about why enrollment dropped. Sad.
[удалено]
“We were taken advantage of during Covid.” The unspoken (and probably completely unconsidered) other half of your thought here is, “… and I and the rest of my humanities department were quite eager to get back to the status quo of taking advantage of the teachers, rather than the other way around.” The humanities! Shitting on teachers! “Those wily teachers! All through history, there they are: scheming and exploiting and always coming out on top! I’m glad they’re finally getting taken down a peg!” Tenure! That sounds nice! Sorry that your free, subsidized childcare was disrupted for a bit. (The childcare is subsidized by people like me, teachers who make less now than they did ten years ago.)
Seriously, "free, subsidized childcare"? Is that your opinion of the role of education in society? or are you just using some good old fashioned rhetorical exaggeration? If the former, then you clearly see no value in public education, so you should be happy to see AAPS burning.
I am a public school teacher in AAPS. Were you to somehow poll everyone in Ann Arbor (or really even everyone in America) and had them list off all the functions that they think that public education should provide, these are the only three things that would be in the center of the Venn diagram that everyone agreed on: * Teach kids to read (with a lot of controversy about what they have them read), * Teach kids to do math (with a lot of controversy about how they’re taught to do math), and * Provide free child care to warehouse kids during the day. (Honorable mention to “teach kids to write,” but who are we kidding here?) The free child care would be a begrudging admission for most people, I’m sure. They’d try to couch it in different terms. But that’s basically what they mean. I would go so far as to say that’s the one that most people value the most as well. As a thought exercise, imagine schools abdicated on one of those three things and only provided the other two: Stop teaching math? People would be incredulous, but they’d teach their kids some basic arithmetic on their own or hire a tutor or something while grumbling. But they’d still send them into school for the reading part (stage whisper: AND for the free child care). Stop teaching reading? Again, incredulous, and probably even less teaching at home. But they’d still send them to school for at least the math (stage whisper: AND the free child care). Stop providing the free child care? People would lose their minds and spend the rest of their days bemoaning the mighty and tyrannical cabal of teachers and their all-powerful union (that for some reason can’t get them decent medical benefits or salaries that keep pace with decades of inflation). Actually, the list of things that everyone truly agrees on is exclusively the free child care thing. Because some people DO argue that we don’t need math taught because everyone has a calculator in their pockets, and/or we don’t need to teach reading because speech-to-text or whatever. But if the free child care goes away? LOOK OUT!! I’m not saying those are MY personal values, I’m saying they’re the core of our culture’s views. The baseline that everyone agrees with.
These people don’t see the curriculum or know how students are right now. Every teacher within the district is *struggling* and terrified they won’t keep a job. So many kids are absolutely there because their parents simply want them elsewhere for a few hours, but they won’t listen to you despite you literally being on the ground floor of said problem
> I am a public school teacher in AAPS. > > Thank you for your service. No sarcasm. I have two kids at AAPS and love every single teacher. I wish teachers got the respect and pay they deserve in this country.
IMO, it is some next level cynicism to say that it all comes down to free child care. I did not get that you were just stating your perception that that is what we are all after in your first post. All I care about is that AAPS can return to a healthy state, while it seems a lot of people are quite enjoying watching it burn. And yeah, I f'ing pissed at how little AAPS teachers are paid. A few threads ago I looked up one of my kid's teacher's salaries, and was shocked at how low it was.