Just before May Day, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster and state schools chief Molly Spearman had some consoling words for working parents who would soon need to deal with the effects of thousands of South Carolina teachers deserting their classrooms on May 1 in the pursuit of more cash provided by taxpayers. But McMaster and Spearman only deserve half a hooray.
It is about time someone in authority spoke up for parents and children who are the victim of teachers showcasing their demands by shirking their duties. However, actions would speak louder than words. Actions to penalize immoral—and potentially illegal—job actions in public schooling have been few and far between.
Not only do the teacher sickouts, walkouts, strikes, and mass takings of “personal days” inflict burdens on families, they also result in disruptions in the continuity of instruction, which cause many students to lose focus and fall behind.
Teacher walkouts can easily create a temporary family crisis, as parents scramble to secure a safe place for their children to go to during school hours. Ultimately, many parents can’t take time off from work, forcing them to pay for babysitters—if they can find them.
Do parents have to suck it up and take these hits to their children’s well-being? No, they don’t.
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What a joke of a post. Individuals have a right to assembly and protest about working conditions. Just like the families that are supposedly burdened. Geez
Tossing a child into a strange school in the middle of lessons that they may have already covered or have no preparation for is a bad idea. There is a reason that parents try to wait until summer to relocate.
Also, I see no plan to transport the children to the private schools. It won’t help to give out vouchers if the kids can’t get there.
How will you prevent overcrowding in the schools that remain open? Private schools will just say no to additional children. Where will the rest go?
This is an extremely poorly thought out idea.
Since most families are comprised of two working adults, who would do the home schooling?
The reality is teacher lead classroom instruction is an archaic, ineffective, cost-inefficient relic of the past. The vast majority of subjects can be taught via virtual technology with superior results. In most cases, classroom instruction serves the interest of the teachers and not the students.
The merits of virtual instruction are many, the deficiencies few if any, the same cannot be said of teacher lead classroom instruction.
On homeschooling, you have many delivery options. One many military families overseas use is virtual classroom. Essentially that means the parent is not the teacher and simply enrolls their child in a virtual school that is attended in their home or wherever. Ergo their is no time commitment from the parents.
As an aside, one of my co-workers spouse home schools in the cubicle next to her at work. There are now 7 people on her floor that bring their children to work with them to home school. The company has been very accommodating in that regard. They set aside a conference room for the kids to set up in, and the parents stagger their breaks to check in on things, and also have video monitors. These folks are all in IT and the company sees it as a way to encourage STEM, especially in young females.
We did a more traditional approach to home schooling.
It’s also time to evaluate the courses being taught in today’s schools to determine which ones are basic to educational needs, and how many are just “social media” useless liberal crap.
When this is done money can be saved by firing the unnecessary “teachers” of the junk courses, and that money used to raise the pay of the essential ones.
That’s nice for the employees of that company, but that is a rare exception. Most businesses do not allow employees’ children to accompany them to work. There are only 18% of families with a stay-at-home parent (Pew analysis of the last Federal census).