kitchen table math, the sequel: parents need a union, part 2

Saturday, March 17, 2012

parents need a union, part 2

I saw a comment from March 2011 (on the occasion of last year's Celebration of Teaching and Learning) remarking on the number of accusations of "teacher bashing" compared to "parent bashing":
Joe Nathan 24. Mar, 2011 at 2:34 pm #
John, when is questioning and challenging legitimate, and when is it “teacher bashing.” I ask because the term “teacher bashing” is used constantly.

What I also see a lot of is criticism of parents for doing a bad job, and students for being apathetic, disinterested, difficult to teach, rowdy and on and on. But I don’t see anyone using the words “parent bashing” or “students bashing.” Why not?

Seems to me that many educators regard any questioning or challenging as “teacher bashing.” The term is used constantly. A quick google search found more than 1.6 million references.
That got me curious.

Status of "teacher bashing" meme today:

Google search for the phrase teacher bashing sans quotation marks: "About 6,330,000 results"
Google search for the phrase parent bashing sans quotation marks: "About 3,790,000 results" (the first couple of pages have nothing to do with schools or foundation executives bashing parents)

Results with quotation marks:
152,000 for "teacher bashing"
22,800 for "parent bashing" (and, again, parent bashing is not something done by school personnel or education foundations)

Parents need a union.

And a meme.

1 comment:

LSquared32 said...

I dunno. Judging by your report last week on what the teachers union was saying about teachers, I'd want some sort of guarantee that it would be a better union than the teachers have.