Texas should allow school districts to furlough teachers

Texas state representative Florence Shapiro of...Image via Wikipedia
Houston Chronicle:

School districts should be allowed to give teachers unpaid furloughs and cut their salaries to help deal with a funding shortfall that one estimate says could cost 100,000 jobs, a leading state senator says. State Senate Education Committee Chairman Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, said the layoff projection could be whittled if school districts could take less drastic steps, an area she said loosening state restrictions could help temper the effects of a budget shortfall.

Under starting-point state budget proposals filed by legislative leaders, school districts would get $9.3 billion to $9.8 billion less through the next two years than under current funding formulas to cover enrollment increases and a projected drop in local revenue due to lower property values.

One expert has estimated the higher figure could cost up to 100,000 school district jobs in Texas through the next two years.

“One of those burdens that we have placed on our school districts is that they cannot decrease your salary. They can’t have furlough days. It’s not allowed in the law. The only option is to fire,” said Shapiro. “We need to give them the ability to lower teacher salaries.”

...

Superintendents are pushing for flexibility that would allow them to furlough employees, if necessary, on non-instructional days.

...
The teachers unions are not so sure about flexibility. I would give it to the districts. I would also give them flexibility on class size. The current maximum is 22 students per teachers. I don't think I ever had a class that small in school. At UT I had a few small classes, but I also had several with between a hundred and a hundred fifty students. I liked the big classes. If they were lecture based, I don't think they made that much difference, and in law school the professors used the Socratic method and made it work. While it is true that some students may do better with individual attention, that is not true of everyone and we should give the districts the flexibility to make adjustments that will allow them to operate with the resources available.
Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more