Teacher Unions

After watching Waiting for Superman, I had a firm opinion on teacher unions, mostly because I had little background information on it. The film really opened up my eyes when it showed the life of many people living in poverty and their education opportunities. Most of the characters lived in poverty and had little choice on where to send their children to school. The public schools that they went to mostly had teacher unions teachers that have the position for a very long guaranteed time. As the film showed, these schools were failing the public school system, making teacher unions look disgraceful. At first, I did not think too much into this because I thought the film was giving true information. After reading Grading "Waiting for Superman", however, I think that the film was overgeneralizing teacher unions in general. There are always pros and cons of something and teacher unions are no exception. They can be bad when teachers are performing poorly and do not make an effort to increase productivity. Other teachers could copy the ways because they know that they could do anything they want and still not get fired. I think this applies to the Chicago teacher union strike. They acted this way because they wanted a huge raise, all the while not caring about their own performance in teaching. The same can happen when something good happens. Other teachers could copy the good ways, and then there would be a huge increase in productivity and public schools would not fail. Also, if teacher unions wanted to address something to the government, their voice would be heard because of their numbers, as opposed to if a single teacher wanted change in the education system. Overall, I think that the film was powerful and moving but should not be applied to all teacher unions.