Christie to teachers union: You deserve a punch in the face

What a guy!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/chris-christie-to-teachers-union-you-deserve-a-punch-in-the-face/2015/08/03/86358c2c-39de-11e5-8e98-115a3cf7d7ae_story.html

Well, doesn't THAT sound presidential! Apparently for CC diplomacy is only a word in the "D" section of a dictionary.

He has a major issue with teachers and teacher unions and parents who support teachers and parents who support the teachers union. Some teacher must've called him a porker in the third grade and he's not letting it go. If he would do this to teachers and their union he would react this way to all unions. He's a bully. He thinks he a tough guy and he'll never be president.

Are there that many people who want to debase teachers? Yes, once people's kids age out of schools the reflex action is to say they shouldn't have to pay taxes, as if having educated people take care of you as you get older -- thinks nurses, doctors, EMTs, bankers, lawyers, cops, firemen, mechanics that can fix your car, and so on -- is not necessary. Really!

Maybe we live in a make believe world but at back to school nights around the US, do people go there and demand that teachers take a pay cut? For all the pseudo-economists who post here -- if you cut salaries and deny pensions and force everyone onto government health care as a last resort -- just how good a teacher do you expect to get? If the goal is to save tax dollars, then find realistic efficiencies. Gutting teachers is not realistic as the next generation of kids who go through the system get nothing. Go to Philadelphia and see what the future is like when you systematically cut education to the bone and more.

I just don't know how many people say that the key to a great life is to screw the teachers. I am a teacher and i do not make a lot of money. With all the extras for running clubs and weekend detentions I make less than I did before I was a teacher. So, before all the yahoos get on the board saying how teachers are destroying American and New Jersey and Maplewood and South Orange please resist the temptation to make a complete fool out of yourself.

Christie is very desperate and is going to keep making statements that can get him into 10th place on the Fox list for the first debate. He gambles that he has lost the teacher vote anyway, so maybe 1 or 2 people who hated school will join him in pissing all over the teachers and just might get called in a poll.

When he is ousted, eventually, from the race, he will have to come back here and then try to govern. Who will listen to him? He is lame duck, won't be president and no one will care at all about what he thinks. Despite his girth, gravity will shift to the legislature. By 2016 he will have far less influence in this state than he had when he started his run. Can't wait.

Then we will get a new governor who will promise to fix the pension mess for all public employees, get elected and then figure out a way not to fix the mess. After Florio -- perfect batting average of 0 governors doing anything useful to solve the pension problem or fix the transportation fund.

Jude, I've never seen anyone engage in teacher-bashing on MOL. I've never had kids, and I cheerfully pay my school taxes. Well, maybe cheerfully is too strong a word ...

There was an article in yesterday's WaPo or NYT about all the teachers fleeing Kansas because of budget cuts. Post here if you can't find it and I'll post the link when I get home.

kthnry said:
Jude, I've never seen anyone engage in teacher-bashing on MOL.

there's a wealth of bashing among these:

https://maplewood.worldwebs.com/profile/comments/u/pennboy2

ml1 said:

kthnry said:
Jude, I've never seen anyone engage in teacher-bashing on MOL.

there's a wealth of bashing among these:
https://maplewood.worldwebs.com/profile/comments/u/pennboy2

I stand corrected.

Jude, here's the article about Kansas teachers. Sad reading. I don't think it will ever get this bad in NJ.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/08/02/why-teachers-cant-hotfoot-it-out-of-kansas-fast-enough/

Why teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough

Teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough, creating a substantial shortage expected only to get much worse. Why?

Well, there’s the low pay. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average teaching salary in 2012-2013 (the latest year for which data were available, in constant 2012-2013 dollars), was $47,464, lower than the pay in all but seven states (Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and West Virginia), though not by much in most of them.

Last year, job protections were cut by state lawmakers, who have also sought to reduce collective-bargaining rights for public employees.

Then there’s the severe underfunding for public education by the administration of Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, so much of a problem that some school districts closed early this past school year because they didn’t have the cash to keep operating. This story by Huffington Post, quoted Tim Hallacy, superintendent of Silver Lake Schools, as saying:

“I find it increasingly difficult to convince young people that education is a profession worth considering, and I have some veterans who think about leaving. In the next three years I think we’ll have maybe the worst teacher shortage in the country — I think most of that is self-inflicted.”

This June, a three-member district court panel ruled that parts of a new state school financing law violated the Kansas Constitution by allowing inequitable distribution of more than $4 billion in annual education funding. It ordered the state to give $54 million back to the public schools, though that part of the ruling was stayed indefinitely by the Kansas Supreme Court which quickly took up the issue. Now, the state’s entire funding formula for public education is up in the air.

And there’s more. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Kansas Board of Education decided in July to allow six school systems — including two of the largest in the state — to hire unlicensed teachers to ease the shortage. (Let the irony sink in for a minute.) Specifically, the newspaper reported:

The measure will waive the state’s licensure regulations for a group of districts called the Coalition of Innovative Districts, a program that the Legislature established in 2013 based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council.

(Yes, ALEC, an organization that writes “model legislation” on a variety of topics that conservative legislators use in states to make new laws that promote privatization, strikes again. Under this legislation, districts can ignore most laws and regulations — including union contracts — that other public schools in a state must follow.)

Some Kansas educators and others tried to dissuade the board from taking this action, including James Neff, a chemistry teacher from Manhattan United School District 383, which the Capital-Journal quoted as saying that there is more to teaching than just knowing subject material. He was quoted as saying, “A subject matter specialist is just a subject matter specialist, but a teacher is something different.” Apparently not in Kansas.

Peter Greene, a teacher who writes the Curmudgucation blog, described it this way:

Kansas has taken a bold new step in making their schools Even Worse…. Kansas has entered the Chase Teachers Out of The State derby, joining states like North Carolina and Arizona in the attempt to make teaching unappealing as a career and untenable as a way for grown-ups to support a family. Kansas favors the two-pronged technique. With one prong, you strip teachers of job protections and bargaining rights, so that you can fire them at any time for any reason and pay them as little as you like. With the other prong, you strip funding from schools, so that teachers have to accomplish more and more on a budget of $1.95 (and if they can’t get it done, see prong number one). The result is predictable. Kansas is solidly settled onto the list of Places Teachers Work As Their Very Last Choice. It’s working out great for Missouri; their school districts have teacher recruitment billboards up in Kansas. But in Kansas, there’s a teacher shortage.

According to new data released by the Kansas Department of Education, at least 3,720 teachers left their jobs either by going to other states to teach, retiring or leaving the profession altogether, the Associated Press reported. That, the AP said, was substantially higher than in previous years. KCUR reported in this story by Sam Zeff that Kansas is becoming such a hard place for teachers that many are crossing into Missouri to find jobs. The story says in part:

A billboard along the Kansas Turnpike eight miles east of Lawrence reads: Independence Missouri School District. Hiring teachers for 2015-2016….

In 2011, before huge tax cuts were enacted, only 85 applications for Missouri teaching licenses were filed with a Kansas address. In the next three years, as school budgets were slashed, those applications doubled. During that same period, applications for Missouri teaching licenses from Arkansas and Iowa remained steady.

How did all of this happen?

A 2014 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in part:

Tax cuts enacted in Kansas in 2012 were among the largest ever enacted by any state, and have since been held up by tax-cut proponents in other states as a model worth replicating. In truth, Kansas is a cautionary tale, not a model. As other states recover from the recent recession and turn toward the future, Kansas’ huge tax cuts have left that state’s schools and other public services stuck in the recession, and declining further — a serious threat to the state’s long-term economic vitality. Meanwhile, promises of immediate economic improvement have utterly failed to materialize….

*The large revenue losses extended and deepened the recession’s damage to schools and other state services. Most states are restoring funding for schools after years of significant cuts, but in Kansas the cuts continue. Governor Sam Brownback recently proposed another reduction in per-pupil general school aid for next year, which would leave funding 17 percent below pre-recession levels. Funding for other services — colleges and universities, libraries, and local health departments, among others — also is way down, and declining.

And, at the moment, there seems to be nothing breaking the fall.

Thanks for the article. I did see it in the Times and it is really said. i have no idea what Republicans are thinking by destroying education. Sooner or later the backlash will be severe. Do people in Kansas really want their schools to implode? How does that improve their economic position -- eventually people will want to leave places where the schools are awful and who will buy their homes? People moving to states where schools are awful usually have to send their kids to private schools -- wouldn't you? Maybe the Republicans want Charter schools and privatize education to the hilt. Beyond that, I am flummoxed as to how destroying schools makes people better off.

Privatizing education benefits hedge fund guys and multi-national corporations.There's big money to be made in K-12 education. Republicans don't give a ***** about kids/families/education.

So this is the same guy who decided to launch his presidential campaign at a high school.

if in the governor's view, it's bullies who should get a punch in the face, who is more deserving than Chris Christie? He could even use it as a fundraiser. I'll bet you could get a million New Jerseyans to pony up $100 to give the guv a good shot to the chops. I'd get in line for that.

This isn't as big a deal as the media made it out to be IMO as the 'punch in the face' phrase was said by the interviewer. Christie did err by taking the bait -- he should have said something along the lines of "well I don't know that anybody deserves a punch in the face, but I'll tell you who deserves a kick in the pants, and that's...."

All that said I dislike the NJEA more than Christie at this point and that's saying something as I can't stand Christie anymore. Christie's high point as governor was back ~4 yrs ago when he stood up to the NJEA.

Funny how he chose to punch the teachers union and not Donald Trump, who crazy enough, is doing way better in the polls than Christie. That should really tell Christie something about his brand of bullying.

Christie can't have it both ways. He can't expect NJ to crank out well rounded, highly educated students if he continues to ish on the teachers. He's unlike any parent I've met. His children attend private school (as do mine) but I've given many years to public school, its boards and its committees. Just because my children no longer attend public school doesn't mean I don't care about public schooling. Public schools got them into their private schools.

Christie is doing everything in his power to destroy education in NJ. He defunds schools. He builds unregulated charters. He pisses on teachers and then he gives them more on their plates with the NJ Ask, Common Core and now PARCC. This is one of the many reasons we decided to send our kids to private schools.

How is Joe Coppola doing since the NJEA forced him to resign

Trump is a sideshow who will flame out...any candidate who thinks of him/herself as a serious candidate in it for the long haul (as Christie, right or wrong, thinks of himself) wants to engage Trump as little as possible IMO. So while Christie erred in not dialing back the punch-in-the-face phraseology, he would have been a total idiot had he answered with Trump.

Student_Council said:
This isn't as big a deal as the media made it out to be IMO as the 'punch in the face' phrase was said by the interviewer. Christie did err by taking the bait -- he should have said something along the lines of "well I don't know that anybody deserves a punch in the face, but I'll tell you who deserves a kick in the pants, and that's...."
All that said I dislike the NJEA more than Christie at this point and that's saying something as I can't stand Christie anymore. Christie's high point as governor was back ~4 yrs ago when he stood up to the NJEA.

you are correct that the interviewer introduced the "punch in the face" phrase in their conversation. But the origin was from Christie's own words, in which he talks about punching bullies in the face. So I'm not sure how he could have walked back the aggressive phrasing without compromising his "tell it like it is" image.

nan said:
So this is the same guy who decided to launch his presidential campaign at a high school.

SMH!

nan said:
So this is the same guy who decided to launch his presidential campaign at a high school.

Teachers' unions are only slightly less unpopular than CC. Politicians can do well by critcizing teachers' unions. Of course, CC, unlike Scott Walker, has nothing to show for his bombast.

ml1 said:

Student_Council said:
This isn't as big a deal as the media made it out to be IMO as the 'punch in the face' phrase was said by the interviewer. Christie did err by taking the bait -- he should have said something along the lines of "well I don't know that anybody deserves a punch in the face, but I'll tell you who deserves a kick in the pants, and that's...."
All that said I dislike the NJEA more than Christie at this point and that's saying something as I can't stand Christie anymore. Christie's high point as governor was back ~4 yrs ago when he stood up to the NJEA.

you are correct that the interviewer introduced the "punch in the face" phrase in their conversation. But the origin was from Christie's own words, in which he talks about punching bullies in the face. So I'm not sure how he could have walked back the aggressive phrasing without compromising his "tell it like it is" image.

Still, the ed leader's suggestion that Gov.Christie was literally threatening to punch female, child-helping teachers in the face is utterly ridiculous. Her credibility as relates to intelligent discourse is lacking, imho.