James Fox

Education:

Then, If they had a teacher's union when I went to school, it was a well kept secret. I was dragged to several PTA meetings in the early evening (Mom didn't trust me home alone...she had a home bakery going, and I loved to eat). Anyway, at those meetings it was the parents who did most of the talking, and the teachers who answered the questions about what was going on at school.

I was personally tutored when I had trouble learning, I was whipped with a willow switch in the first grade, paddled with a paddle in the sixth when I was bad.

My teachers were dedicated, slave driving taskmasters, who loved me so much they took personal responsibility for my education. They knew their subjects and had no agenda except teaching, and that should be credential enough for any school.

Now colleges are accepting kids who have to take remedial classes before they can do any college class-work because they can't read or write. What on earth happened that could have created this shambles of the education system? Answer:

The National Education Association (N.E.A.) kept a low profile until the early part of 1970 when it started flexing its muscle. The N.E.A. war-chest for lobbying has many politician's hands sweating. In 1975 The California branch of the N.E.A. was born as the California Teachers Association -- then in 1977 the N.E.A. took control of the P.T.A. and opened offices in Washington D.C.

Gray Davis in a stupid attempt to reform education presented AB 1X. "Peer Review" which cannot work in a union atmosphere. Lets face it, if you were a 5th grade teacher and you had test scores to grade and your job depended on the accumulative results of the grades, what would you do? And you, the 6th grade teacher...you've known the 5th grade teacher for 12 years and your kids play with hers. Her class is out of control, 52% are outright failing and the discipline has broken down. You have to write an evaluation of her performance as a teacher. What are you going to do? What will the union let you do?

When I thought there was no hope, the battle was lost, a tiny spark of reason started to glow within the Los Angeles school area. The second largest school district decided that it was time to put the money where it would do the most good. They decided to link salary to achievements.

Officials from the Los Angeles School District are calling for a link between teacher salaries and student achievement in a new contract. The proposal could mean $7,000 more per year in additional income for Los Angeles School District teachers who develop specialized academic skills and work at schools where test scores rise by a specified amount. The union is furious! And I'm so happy, I could just sh..! If this catches on, our children might have a chance after all.

Why am I so happy? I'll tell you why. The children are going to be entering a competitive world when they leave school and their success and perhaps even their survival will hinge on future testing. So, the sooner they are subjected to being tested and graded, the sooner they can be assisted in their weak areas.

When the second world war ended, and thousands of G-Is returned to civilian life, many jobs were occupied by patriotic women who didn't want to return to the kitchen, so when I got to Detroit with a wife and an infant daughter, there wasn't a single rental listing in the Detroit Times. We camped "out" while I stood in a line, that stretched for three blocks, to register for unemployment and work. There were no jobs listed in the paper either -- NONE!

I spent so much time at the unemployment office, I made friends with one of the councilors. He was such a nice guy he let me come over to his house and wash his car and do all sorts of things for him, in return one night, about midnight, he called me and gave me instructions on how to get to a company that was going to be hiring in the morning.

I cleaned up, jumped on the streetcar and when I got there, I was 47th in line for the job. At 7:00 a.m. sharp they herded us into a large room and announced that we would be taking two days of written examinations and on the final day, the survivors would be interviewed. The tests covered every field imaginable the math included doing square-root by hand, writing analytical geometric equations, and they even had some elementary physics equations.