Middle- Class Capitalists

David Brooks, nyt

Middle- Class Capitalists

David Brooks, nyt

The G.O.P. presidential candidates vow to spend more on scientific research and to take on special interests like the teachers’ unions. If schools can’t fire bad teachers and reward good ones, then nothing else we do to improve education will do any good.

Mr. Brooks, the above quote from your column today annoys me no end.

Teachers’ unions—the good ones— try to raise teachers’ salaries and make their working conditions humane. Many of them—such as the CTA in Hillsborough County, Florida--are in bed with the administration and thus ciphers when it comes to teachers' well being.

To say the Republicans are “taking on the teachers’ unions” goes against politicians' perpetual, pious promise to raise teachers’ salaries. If politicians carried through the empty promise to raise teachers' salaries, the need for unions would dissolve.

I never read that the Republicans or Democrats are going to take on the greedy, incompetent, featherbedding school bureaucracies.

School superintendents have a country-wide cartel which boosts and reinforces their obscene salaries. They quote each other’s hyped salaries as the going rate and pile some more on when they bargain with unsophisticated school boards that don't care about throwing away tax money on marginally literate, marginally competent superintendents such as we have both in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, Florida. Both boards have succumbed to these superintendents' bloated salary demands and raises.

Both superintendents--Ms. Elia, Hillsborough County, and Dr. Wilcox, Pinellas County--are marginally literate (see my corrections of Dr. Wilcox’s thesis from the Florida diploma mill NOVA:
http:/wilcoxilliteracy.blogspot.com/

Ms. Elia hires her friends and sycophants for $100,000-plus jobs. She hands out unbid contracts to buddies. The board lawyer, Tom Gonzalez, who got his job without the board's advertising it fifteen years ago, has raked in for his firm close to ten million dollars during that time as well as I can calculate. He won't send me the public information on the particulars of his relationship with the board as the state law requires.

Mr. Gonzalez knew when he took the unadvertised job for his corporation that Title VII requires advertising of jobs such as his. On the job, he condones with legal flimflam the board's cooperation with the administration in unbid contracts and buddy hiring for high-level administration $100,000-plus jobs.

The board is supine, ignorant, or too gutless to intervene in the taxpayers', students', and teachers behalf. Two board members--Kurdell and Olson--jumped on to Board Member April Griffin when she questioned an unbid contract to a former administrator. Kurdell and Olson told Ms. Griffin that she was being "disloyal" by questioning the infallibility of the administration.

Look at school administrations and collusive school boards if you want to see what is wrong with education. The Republicans are using a ritual campaign blab of kicking teachers' unions to cure what is wrong with the schools. It lacks basis in fact.

The Republicans and you should look at the greed and corruptions in school administrations and the cooperation of potted-plant boards whose goal is to sit on the dais at board meetings, look important, and gad about town as guardians of education to puff up their egos.

This obscene situation is Number One in what's wrong with the schools.

lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Blvd. 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708

copy sent to all members of the school board, the school-board attorney, some members of the school family abused by the school board, and the administration, and some denizens of the somnolent Bay Area press that lets this obscene situation unfold without reporting it to the public ldd