Real Bible Study

Real Bible Study applies to real life.

The doctrine of justice in the Bible applies to contemporary events, even though the Bible was written long ago.

For example, in Wisconsin, the Governor and the Republican legislature are bent upon removing the collective bargaining rights of the state’s teachers, not to mention other public employees, even—from the reports I’ve heard—nurses.

I recently read where the State of Tennessee is planning to take away rights of teachers in a similar fashion.

It is happening in Michigan, too. In an article titled “The West Bloomfield Teacher ‘Sick Out,'” published on line at www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/14584, dateline February 18, 2011, an article written by Tom Gantert, mentions:

• Contract negotiations between the administration and unions began in October 2009. The teachers’ union contract expired August 31, 2010.
• Superintendent JoAnn Andrees said that West Bloomfield teachers do not do any premium sharing for health insurance and do not have a deductible in their plan. “The district can no longer afford to pay for everything,” Andrees said. “The money is not there now. I can not continue that practice.”

The facts brought against teachers in the rest of the article only sound worse in following paragraphs.

Below the article are links under “See also:” to other anti-teacher articles, including an issue Republicans always attack, “Don’t Tenure Current Teacher Tenure Law.”

Noting the sponsor of the “Michigan Capitol Confidential” website tells it all: “A news service for the people of Michigan from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.”

There is much adverse commentary—adverse to teachers, that is—in the comments submitted below the article.

Now, I believe in the First Amendment, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of Religion, as much or perhaps somewhat more than those reported on, reporting, or commenting on the Internet page I have cited. So they are welcome to express their opinions, even if such opinions are uninformed.

But I have also been a teacher in the inner city high schools of Detroit, Michigan, from 1962 until I retired in 2001.

One of the first things I encountered as a teacher in Detroit was the grossly unfair procedures used by the school administration to “rate” teachers. My brother was unfairly rated unsatisfactory. I still have the documentation. New teachers need to be affirmed, assisted, and given time to grow and develop in their teaching ability, content knowledge, and classroom management skills. That is not what happened.

Furthermore, my brother was rated unsatisfactory in his teaching position at Northern High School and later at a middle school for matters that were not his fault whatsoever.

For example, at Northern, he was asked to teach classes with no textbooks, and no supplies. Since I had recently left my employment at Michigan Bell Telephone Company, I had “inside knowledge” which I shared with my brother on how to get the telephone company to donate used, discarded tools for his students to use in studying electrical. Some administrators were highly upset that my brother took the step to solve his problem by securing these tools which the school would not supply. The administrators said that what he did embarrassed them. They rated my brother unsatisfactory.

My brother abruptly was transferred to a middle school, where the situation was worse. He was to teach his classes in an unfinished shop. The shop was still under construction. He notified his administrators of the unsafe conditions. The very next day a student was injured when he playfully “chinned” himself by hanging onto a vise handle on his way into the classroom. That tipped the steel workbench over on himself, with such force that it broke the vice mounting bolts off. My brother was immediately rated unsatisfactory.

He was rated unsatisfactory again because his bulletin board was not up-to-date. That is nonsense. My brother received two full mailbags of materials from electrical companies, and used the latest publications as teaching materials which were placed on the classroom bulletin boards for student information and learning. I wrote a very strong objection to the bosses of the supervisor, suggesting that not only was the rating unfair, it was absurd. I questioned the qualifications of the supervisor as a bulletin board expert.

Over several years I wrote a number of constructive suggestions to the school central administration about how to properly follow due process and how to properly assist new teachers, instead of discouraging them. Once I was shown the Principals’ Handbook, and its contents clearly mirrored my constructive suggestions, so someone must have read my letters, though they never let me know.

My brother had spent hard-earned money, both his, and my parents, to obtain a college education to qualify for his teaching position. But he had to give up his dream of teaching. He was never in a position financially to go back to college to qualify for a different career. He should never have had to face such a difficulty. Because of unusual circumstances beyond his control and inept administrators and supervisors and department heads, he lost his teaching position. He has been under-employed ever since.

This anecdotal experience is not merely anecdotal, it reflects a serious plague in our educational system. The plague affecting our system is INJUSTICE.

As an experienced union representative for my high schools where I taught, I was able to encourage the teachers’ union to fight for binding arbitration for teachers so that the rights they have won in their contract could be enforced. Until then, an arbitrator could rule in favor of a teacher, but the administration took it as merely an advisory opinion which did not have to be followed. The union followed my suggestion, and teachers won the right to binding arbitration.

But here in Michigan, Governor Engler, a Republican, undid all the years of struggle I engaged in to secure both binding arbitration and other teacher contract rights by passing and signing in the middle of the night while the union president was out of the country Public Act 112, which removed the rights of teachers to collective bargaining in important areas of the contract, especially the area of teacher evaluation. This is a most striking example of INJUSTICE.

Apparently, people today are as uninformed as they always have been. They jump at the opportunity to attack teachers and unions. They are eager to undermine the livelihood of teachers. They claim teachers are paid too well. They argue teachers only work part time, so why get paid so much? They argue teachers have health coverage superior to their own. They argue teachers have exorbitant pension plans. They argue most teachers lack the necessary education to teach their subjects.

I taught English. I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site that I took enough semester hours (93) to equal a triple academic major in English. I specialized in writing, linguistics, and grammar. College is expensive. I figured I could learn about literature on my own by doing my own reading.

When my very first classes had many students who were far below grade level in their reading comprehension, I wrote my own program to close what is now called their “achievement gap.” You can read all about that at my other website, www.readingsteps.com, where I furnish the history and document the statistics that demonstrate my reading program works.

By the time I retired, though students still needed the help my reading program provides, I could no longer use it because I was required to follow the mandatory “Pacing Chart,” which the administration insisted was our “new Bible.” The “Pacing Chart” mandated exactly what was to be taught each day from the textbook. Never mind that the students could not actually read the textbook with understanding!

Of course, some administrators haven’t learned yet that not every student is ready to learn exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. This is especially true when the students arrive underprepared for high school work. Many students in inner city high schools are actually reading on a grade level from three to eight or nine years below their grade level. According to the standardized reading tests I administered to my own students, it was a rare senior student who read as well as eighth grade reading comprehension. Most read at fourth grade level.

How administrators suppose such students can read British literature for their twelfth grade course I can’t imagine.

Critics suppose that teachers should be evaluated on how well the students they teach do on “performance tests” (which at the state level are a joke) or standardized tests (somewhat better). What they don’t take into consideration is that teachers cannot be held responsible for the students’ level of achievement upon entry into their classes.

Teachers who are favorites of the administration may be given the better classes. Teachers less favored might have all “failure classes.”

Rating teachers on the basis of student improvement in achievement may be the height of injustice.

And those exorbitant teacher pensions? I had to buy mine. Money went out of my bi-weekly paycheck from the start of my teaching career until I retired. I had to shell out an additional four percent of my pay to qualify for one additional benefit with my pension. Most of the complainers could not live on what I receive, I’m sure. And they would not dial down their thermostat in winter to 56 degrees and turn the hot water on only one day a week to save on the oil bill like I have done.

Most of the complainers did not have to pay for six years of college or more out of their own pocket and start at a very low starting salary once they qualified for the job.

Most complainers don’t have to pay thousands of dollars, or even hundreds of dollars a year, to pay for supplies and materials their employer should provide. As a teacher, I did. I ended up writing my own materials to teach my students, because the school board and the local school did not furnish what was needed.

At my own expense I typed up materials for the course, assembled them into sheet protectors, and housed them in plastic Sterling Letter File boxes (I still have them all). I bought the highest quality sheet protectors available so the materials would stand up to student wear and tear and frequent abuse.

When I began teaching at Southeastern High School (in the news this past week because one eleventh grade student was shot while protesting against cuts in the fine arts department program) I was furnished a small cardboard box of textbooks to teach my history courses, world and American history. There were only a few books in the box. They were not even all the same title. It took me several years of scrounging textbooks during locker cleanup at the end of subsequent school years before I even had enough books to form one classroom set. And I had to guard those with care or they would “walk off.” Other teachers and students needed them too.

Now do you wonder why Detroit has a 70% high school dropout rate? That reflects injustice.

But in my classes, it was very rare for a student to drop out of school. Two classes I taught were “looped,” such that I taught the same students for all four years of high school. Only one student from those two groups dropped out over the span of four years.

Generally speaking, my students loved my class, and were most appreciative of the help I gave them in all of their classes.

Even my students complained of what they saw as an injustice when, over my many years of teaching, never once was I named “Teacher of the Year.”

What does all this have to do with Real Bible Study? The following verse by itself should make it clear:

Luk 10:7 And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire. Go not from house to house.