Why I Hate My Union

First of all, while people always talk about the teachers' "Union" we are actually a "professional association" NOT a labor union. And although you'd never know it by the way some teacher's gripe about it, we are professionals and, if we expect to be treated that way, should ACT that way.

That being said:

In my first job as an amusement park ride operator and later as a "lead" ride operator I received performance reviews at least once a season. Although my job only consisted of pressing buttons on a roller coaster control panel, and later as lead, giving employees their lunch breaks at the correct time, my performance evaluation had a grading scale like this: Exemplary, Superior, Good, Fair, Satisfactory, Poor. I always received exemplary job reviews. Later one I moved to a different position at a desk in the same park and continued to receive exemplary performance reviews.

When I took my first teaching job, I was crushed when I got my first evaluation. My shock was not because I did not perform well enough, but because so little seemed to be expected of me. If a guy who doesn't even need a high school diploma can get "exemplary" for pushing a button when the light flashes, shouldn't a professional who has a college degree and a teaching certificate be expected to be evaluated as critically? My first evaluation came back with a "Satisfactory" rating checked at the top. "But you were extremely satisfactory," said my assistant principal. As I am sure is the case in many places the only options on the top of the form were "Satisfactory" and "Unsatisfactory." In my amusement part days, a satisfactory job review wouldn't have been very good at all, in my professional life its as good as it gets.

Why do we as professional expect so little of ourselves? Why do we aim for mediocrity and so often manage to hit the mark?

Because our union demands it! If we had "real" job reviews that differentiated the truly outstanding educator from the merely satisfactory educator my current situation might not exist. Perhaps they would see that my colleague, band director number 2, while she does have the appropriate certification to do my job, and she does have more years on the job than I do, just doesn't do the job as well as I do.

I student of mine sent me an e-mail recently after he heard that I was being let go. He wrote, "I hope you get a job close by and do so well that you make Anytown School District look stupid for letting you go!" I hope so too.

My mom always told me life wasn't fair...

As you can surmise by my previous post, my reign as king of the band geeks (at least as the monarch of the band geeks at my current school) has come to an unexpected end.

I've been the director here for 12 years (actually 11.6 if you count that the first year I was only part time. In the end it doesn't matter that I did a fabulous job, that I imparted musical wisdom, that I fostered a love of music making, or that I built the program in a matter of 2 years from a part time job to overflowing. When the bean-counters at the district office looked at declining enrollment at the high school in my district, they decided we had 1 too many music teachers and had to RIF the junior guy. Even after 11.6 years, that would be me.

I saw trouble brewing 2 or 3 years ago when our district passed a bond that would result in expanding my school while closing another building. I realized then that we would have 1 too many band directors in the district. I asked the union president (who was the other band director) about impending doom and she told me "don't worry about it." So I didn't.

To complicate matters more, there are other music teachers who have certification outside of music. Those people could either step aside and teach those other subjects full time, or part-time in addition to part-time music, or the district could involuntarily transfer them to those positions and save my job, but for some reason no one is willing to do that.

It seems that unions will fight to the death to save an incompetent teacher who is about to be let go. There was one such teacher at my spouses school. The administration tried for years until he finally resigned on his own. Why then, when (and I don't mean to toot my own horn too much here) they have a competent, popular, successful band director all the union can do is step aside and say "well, it looks like the district followed procedure."

Honestly, it's frustrating enough to make me consider whether I should stay in education at all. But then, my mother always told me "life's not fair."