{"id":2842,"date":"2010-03-11T00:05:58","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T05:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=2842"},"modified":"2010-03-11T00:20:56","modified_gmt":"2010-03-11T05:20:56","slug":"teacher-unions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=2842","title":{"rendered":"Teacher Unions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I find myself souring on teacher unions. The timidity of the teachers in the face of the Red Plan&#8217;s dislocations has been shocking but not surprising. Dr. Dixon has done more to put our teachers through a ringer than the last ten superintendents put together. And its possible that they ain&#8217;t seen nothin yet. The ones in their twenties and early thirties will talk about Dixon for years to come. <\/p>\n<p>I once aspired to challenge Frank Wanner for the Union Presidency back before I was canned. I used to think about writing a book about my teaching called &#8220;The worst teacher in the world.&#8221; I might write it still if I live to be ninety but I&#8217;ve got four or five other books in mind to write first.<\/p>\n<p>In some ways I can&#8217;t help but think that the teachers have only themselves to blame for sucking up the &#8220;too good to be true&#8221; plans of JCI and Dr. Dixon. When they began to sense the awful truth about it they swallowed their tongues. <\/p>\n<p>Duluth was not an inner city school district. We were a fine district that drew 600 students from outside the area into our schools through open enrollment when I was on the Board to take advantage of our superior education. Today we are an exporter of students to other districts. <\/p>\n<p>This brings me to the story about Education in Newsweek Magazine which came in the mail today. I highly recommend <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/id\/234590\">this article<\/a> and several others that accompany it.  The articles makes it plain that Newsweek&#8217;s reporters think ridding the schools of bad teachers is THE key to restoring our schools. They would probably consider Dr. Dixon a great hero because the Red Plan will give him unprecedented power to get rid of dead wood.<\/p>\n<p>The Red Plan will be responsible for so many teacher layoffs that the DFT&#8217;s heads will spin. Maybe it was all part of Dixon&#8217;s plan from the beginning. I wouldn&#8217;t put it past him. How fortunate for him to have such patsies to deal with in the union. Frank Wanner loves to tell stories about the incompetent Superintendents he&#8217;s had to deal with in the past. I wonder if he&#8217;d enjoy hearing what Dr. Dixon really thinks about him? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I find myself souring on teacher unions. The timidity of the teachers in the face of the Red Plan&#8217;s dislocations has been shocking but&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,80],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}