Hot Lunch Tray

Who am I you say?  Oh, well, I am the blog owner.  Although from the infrequency of my posts I can see why you might ask.

I was weeding out my GoogleReader feed and was struck by the abandoned blogs I was watching.  Blogs with names indicating the author might be (or attempting to appeal to): of an older generation, those overwhelmed by technology in education, or those looking for ways to keep up to date on education &/or technology.  Hoping these folks have not died, stopped trying to use tech in education, or are even still in education – then why abandon a blog?

What makes people with a desire to share their thoughts abandon that practice?

What makes teachers abandon any practice?

I think part of my job as an eLearning Specialist is to speak up for the teacher that is busy working in their classroom.  They should not be asked to enter data twice, in two different places, or not have access to the data in its entirety.  These are the types of things I bring up in meetings (while teachers are teaching) which may in fact, make me mildly unpopular.  I bring these things up because I was frustrated by practices which I thought caused me to abandon some good ideas because of the sheer time involved, you know, when I should have been concentrating on teaching.

So, I temporarily abandoned this blog due to the birth of my second child.  That’s the story I am sticking with too.

But, are there any other reasons ideas are abandoned in education?

I have worked with educators who thoughtfully abandoned selected standards.  I have been part of Child Study Groups or IEPs where courses or action where changed in how we approach helping children.  And no one does those things lightly, so when is it good and when is it bad to abandon something?

One reason to abandon a practice might be if you have found a better way.  Hopefully those blog owners I deleted from my feed found an alternate way to share and/or express themselves.  But I fear many in the education profession become overwhelmed and feel forced to abandon practices which might add to our general knowledge as educators.

Are you helping them keep those practices we recognize as best or are you a part of an educator abandoning a best practice?

I have just transitioned to a new laptop and was mindful of the steps I took when customizing my new computer. I thought it was interesting to see what I “had” to do “first.”
Here is the order so far:

1. Open IE to download Mozilla Firefox
2. Use Mozilla to download Safari browser
3. Use Mozilla to download Chrome
4. Hide IE from my desktop, I’ll use it for testing, but not until then, even then I’ll have to check if our district image has given me IE8 or IE9
5. Download iTunes
6. Move my iPhone and iPad to this computer, noted I will need to investigate iCloud soon too
7. Download FileZilla Client
8. Set top four bookmarks for work, so when I return from maternity leave I have the addresses in my preferred browser (can you guess?) Firefox
9. Download Jing
10. Installed NASA Spacescapes desktop images to my desktop

Ahhh, it’s like a homecoming now.

What would your Top Ten moves be on a new computer?

11. Create email signature!

I could not care less what celebrities think about anything, call it a personal bias.  So the first time my Sirius radio station was talking about how Jon Bon Jovi blames Steve Jobs for killing the music industry I didn’t care.  Now the second time I heard the same story I was in a more reflective mood.

I was at first surprised that an artist was complaining.  I would expect the record industry to be more likely to complain, such middlemen are the obvious losers in this situation.  When the world started to flatten allowing people to access digital content in new ways the Recording Industry Association of America organized musicians to testify against file sharing.  Lars Ulrich testified to the US Senate and later banned me and several hundred thousand Napster users in 2000.  While he did express some mixed feelings, he stopped short of regretting the move.  In a quote attributed Lars (via an unsearchable LAUNCHcast article): “We didn’t know enough about the kind of grassroots thing, and what had been going on the last couple of months in the country as this whole new phenomenon was going on. We were just so stuck in our controlling ways of wanting to control everything…” speaks to what I think Jon Bon Jovi might later think about his nostalgic waxings for vinyl, album covers and his temporary memory repressions of CDs.

But on second thought I can see some parallels between the fear that Jon is expressing and what I see teachers sometimes try to say about technology.  Teachers fear students will lose the art of writing, speaking, paying attention, etc. due to technology.  Those that fear that type of transition are not as worried about the future generations, but losing touch with those future generations without that common experience.

Just as music will never go away, learning will never go away.

I bring Lars into this because (well, I am still a little stung) if this is indeed his quote it captures the fear: ‘…We were just so stuck in our controlling ways…’ It’s that the real issue for both Bon Jovi and some of our teachers?  The comfort of the way we experience either music or learning seems pretty good, so why upset it?   May I submit to you that  just as Steve Jobs filled a need in the market the teachers that are willing to move closer tot he manner in which students wan to learn will be more marketable.

What do you think?

In education money is a finite resource. Choices in procuring technology, training and / or professional development subtract from a school districts budget.  Then technology purchased, training and or professional development paid for, is wasted money if not implemented in ways that impact students in the classroom.

Training in technology then is exponentially important in managing a district’s limited resources.  If the district has purchased a substantial amount of technology and is providing training and/or professional development to its teachers then students in class must be impacted proportionally to the amount of resources used. If no implementation of equipment or training occurs it is wasteful.  Equipment has already been purchased, training is paid for; money that could have been spent on children’s learning in proven traditional manners is spent on unutilized equipment and training.

Professional development in technology is more high stakes than professional development without technology.  Combining technology and professional development elevates the cost.  The cost of purchasing, maintaining equipment, updating software and training, elevate the visibility and importance of efficiently training teachers in technology.

And you thought getting someone to buy you technology was tough. The first things cut are teacher professional days or the purchasing of new equipment.  Try getting technology and training/professional development together!

If you are teaching you had some control over your teaching assignment.  You choose the level to be certified in, you chose your major in college or the certification tests to complete.  Even when there is a move in assignment generally you are consulted to some degree (here’s hoping anyway).

But imagine a job where you were hired for your high degree of competency in managing people and your in-depth knowledge of educational pedagogy, your familiarity with educational case law and your general people-friendly personality and then a topic sneaks up on you in which you feel you are tremendously ill-prepared. Let’s say you are hired to be the head of and district/county department or the superintendent him/herself. And Then . . . they expect that person, who is probably a veteran teacher, to suddenly be ‘up’ on all the technology we are being bombarded with today.

Edtechdigest pointed me in the direction of COSNs Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent; if you have a personal connection with someone in a place of educational leadership share this download with them: Five Themes and Action Steps for Technology Leadership.

Education lags behind every other major industry in using technology effectively as a tool for productivity, learning, communications and creativity.

I like the inclusion of what I consider to be essential and influential readings/reports with the Themes/Action Steps:

The Horizon Report, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, ISTE Nets, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, A Whole New Mind: Why
Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, and Empowering Students with Technology.

Look for documents such as this with texts so visibly referenced and refer them to the highest educational office with which you have contact.  This is the type of educating that any person in the school can do to help prepare our decision makers for the tough choices in technology they will surely encounter.

If you have a network in your system that you can pass such items to that is great, but if not start thinking about how you can start one to crowd source this large amount of learning the world is asking of our educational leaders.

This morning I was starting my morning on Twitter as usual. I noticed someone put a question out there, asking to be convinced. The topic related to something I vividly remember tweeting a few months back. I found it in my posts and copied it as I tweeted it out and sent it this person.

Now, you may already know where this is going.

I think this person ended up mad. I had no intention of making this person mad, but there it is. So, let’s analyze the series of assumptions that led to this misunderstanding if we can all agree that this is not a desirable outcome of Twitter:

+ He accessed his PLN looking for a deeper understanding, a wider variety of opinions on a topic.
- He referenced a skewed news piece.
- I assumed the news articles views were his views.
+ I wanted to add to the information to which he had access.
+ I had access to my old tweet complete with link to other article on topic.
- I copied the old tweet in it’s entirety without reviewing the article to make sure it was appropriate.
- The tweet was okay as a tweet, but not (hindsight) a PLN reply.
- He blogged about my reply to the tweet, not my content, but the tweet.
+\- He sent me the link to his blog as his response. Appreciate him telling me had blogged about it, but it made me feel bad. I hadn’t meant to cause any hard feelings.
-/+ I replied to his blog, attempting to be neutral.
? I am blogging about it now.

Bottom-line, we both were stinkers on this one whether or not we intended to be.

BIGGER bottom-line? Everyone needs to be intentional about what we tweet, decidedly neutral when we respond, and tweet with a benefit-of-the-doubt mentality whenever possible. We are each others best resource, we can’t be this tough on each other.

It has been obvious for some time now that national politics was  too personal.  After the Tucson shooting politicians seemed to reign themselves in, embarrassed by how out of hand they had become with personal attacks and finally ready to evaluate the tone they generated with mere words to the public.

What has happened to all that blame though?  It is still churning through the public and if politicians were the source of it, that source will need some time to start modeling more positive and less personal attacks masquerading as newsworthy. While we hold our collective breath for that to happen, the blame du jour is teacher unions, for all the uneducated in broke states across this country and as we compare to China. It is a fascinating thing to listen to people talk about the effect one particular teacher had on them, but then dismiss the entire profession.  Teachers collectively may be disparaged as lazy, overpaid, or inept.  It seems the public likes individual teachers, but not large groups of them.

The largest group of teachers the public can imagine often is a teacher’s union.  According to Walt Gardener via Education Week, the rise of the unions in this country correlates to the growth of the middle class and the demise of unions correlate with a lower wage for the middle class.   Chuck Berman of the Chicago Tribune implies that unions are the reason that bad teachers are still working in schools.  It appears later in his article that teacher quality should be judged on students test scores.  People outside education may equate a “good” teacher to good test scores, but those inside education know that teachers that are highly effective at making that connection with a student are often assigned at-risk students.  That type of student may have a deficit of years and will likely not be able to test at grade level regardless of the quality of the teacher or instruction.  Mr. Berman erroneously assumes teachers that are good at making connections with students will have students in their class that always produce high test scores.  If he is allowed to play out his litmus test of test scores evicting teachers he will most likely rid Illinois schools of the very teachers he praised at the onset of his article.  Luckily there are unions, that slow such processes which might gut the school system if public opinion was able to be carried out without check.

Even if we overlook the public misunderstanding of what makes a good teacher and how to measure that.  We need to examine if unions are the hurdle that keeps the public from making education better.  If unions are the problem then one might expect to see non-union states with stronger educational achievements.

First study this map of union membership by state from InfoPlease:

If higher union membership produces lower educational achievement then the darkest states here (California, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and New Jersey) should all be at the bottom of the ranking of educational achievement.  WHiel the least unionized, the lightest, should be at the top.

Next, go to StateMaster.com and look at that map and list.  You find that the least unionized states are mid-pack at best.  And three of the highest unionized states are in the top ten; mixed results.

If unions are not the cause, maybe instead of adding to the frenzy of blame in education we could collectively pause and start to look for the real reason education is not as good as we know it should be.  We should not wait for politicians to model for us a more reasoned approach to solving problems, we should start to solve it from the inside before we are dismantled from the outside.  If people can still remember at least one good teacher we know where our real capital is, our teachers.  I think we as a profession are starting to organize ourselves, across geoboundaries, and I am optimistic that can result in something great before the public shuts us down.

In the course of my job I was recently interviewed by an educational department of a company that writes its own magazine. At some point a person asked me if the students, as “digital natives,” were more engaged by teachers, the “digital immigrants,” who were now using technology to teach them. A leading question you say? Well, sure.

But can we talk about what every teacher should be saying to that type of question?

That as professional educators, teachers who understand the art and science of instruction, we must create substance to the learning that does not just rely on the cache, the novelty of the technology being used as the tool.

Do otherwise intelligent people believe that by solely adding technology to a lesson the content is transformed?

Possibly so. I often see IWB used to display worksheets, scans or recreated in MS Word.  Other schools with iPods only using them as glorified flashcards.  And computer labs can be turned into drill and kill factories for reading/math software programs.

I think the fact that people are willing to try the technology is a positive.  If they are trying anything at all, I believe they can be helped to integrate technology correctly.  I think there is a certain trial and error learning curve that needs to be expected in these introductions to classrooms.  I also will tell anyone who listens that unless classroom teachers are given support, in the form of time and materials, why would they change?

So, matching the technology to the task becomes of paramount importance.

Consider that different schools often have different resources.  These resources include the hardware, sometimes the software/infrastructure, and the most covert element is the leadership.  I say the leadership is most covert because it is just one person, that can change and can grow into his/her position, but drives not just the management of the physical resources, but the management of the element of time.

How about we engage our students through good teaching?  Lets engage our students in the process of learning; that could be with or without technologies.

I read a twitter post recently that referenced this article: http://tinyurl.com/2ftkz7c entitled, “SMART Boards Becoming Classroom Staples”

I have a few issues to raise with this article, I want to explore the idea of what we expect as a return on investment from interactive whiteboards (IWBs) and put up for discussion the general idea of what a large display should do in classrooms.  I have this conversation with @ugaodawg often and he has helped me to examine what my core beliefs are about large displays (further proof your PLN is strengthened by someone who challenges you).

First, to critically read the article,

… can’t imagine teaching without SMART Boards, even though she did it for 25 years

Notice that the subject of the article is talking about making her job easier, not necessarily making learning easier.  In a sense that is okay.  There are two types of educational technology use: Type 1 make it faster or more convenient to continue teaching and traditional ways and Type 2 results in new ways of teaching students ways that could not happen without that technology present (Maddux & Johnson).

connected to the teacher’s computer

My only point here is that the teacher is still a bottle-neck of control.  If this is the only computer in the classroom that may have to be the case, but consider how students might view the IWB differently if it was not in fact “the teachers” computer?

upper-level math teacher at Knoxville High School and certified SMART Board instructor, says SMART Boards are changing the way teachers do their jobs and widely diversifying the learning environment for their students

I am currently prejudiced against IWBs in secondary classrooms, there I said it.  Let’s agree to come back to that point.

Here again we are talking about making the job of teacher easier. It is a Type 1 technology.

50 percent of it is a help to the teacher, and the other 50 percent is student participation and their engagement

Not focusing on the 50% that helps the teacher, let’s examine the student participation and engagement.  The article refers to one-at-a-time interactions such as logging in to take a quiz, helping a substitute teacher ‘play’ the lesson, the multi-sensory stimulation.  I have a couple of thoughts on this.  Is it really appropriate for high school students to be taking a quiz while the rest of the class sits at their desks?  I mean this in the sense that the lone student at the board is not likely to feel as comfortable taking risks and may actually dread that type of experience.  Developmentally that age student with that intricate of curriculum might not be the perfect storm for one-at-a-time quizzing in front of the class.  The rest of the hype here has the potential to fade away in a few years and if it doesn’t reveal a compelling reason for switching to this technology will just be the expensive whiteboard which may also be the reason you can’t get/afford any other new technology. This is a perfect non-example of developmental appropriateness and return on investment.

Knoxville has 72 SMART Boards, one in every classroom, and while … considers … a leader in using the board, …maintains that nearly 70 percent of other teachers, including KHS history teacher … …, are just as enthusiastic about their boards as she is.

This raises two questions with me.  First, did all teachers get the IWBs whether or not they were enthusiastic?  How can a HS Math teacher train a K-12 system appropriately?  There *have* to be differences in the way K and HS use this tool.  And if these were just given to all classrooms, what is even worse, is that there *have* to be people not using them any different than their overhead projector.

…uses the board nearly every day, whether it’s creating a virtual field trip through Paris for her world cultures class, illustrating the movement of battles for her United States history class, or even just for vocabulary lessons and class notes.

Check them off with me: teacher-created/centered or student-created/centered? If these are not student-created/centered, then could they have been carried out with something less expensive?

as interactive with the students as possible … know how to use the SMART Board and are getting that sense of ownership

This is what I want to hear, that students are using the IWB to create.  I want to hear that students are the primary users in every class, because otherwise a lot of money has been spent on a teacher tool.

It gets them to pay attention, and it’s just that visualization for our visual learners. It’s right up there on the board, and it makes my life a lot easier.

Easier for whom?

she is able to save the day’s lessons to the SMART Board and leave directions for the substitute or have a student help, making it so she can maintain a presence in the classroom when she is away.

Type 1 use, making the job of teacher easier.  Type 2 use might be if students taught the lesson the next day instead of the absent teacher still the center of the lesson.

she’s able to draw shapes, lines and parabolas with her fingertip. In an advanced math class Wednesday, she used the TI-83 Plus function, displaying a graphing calculator on the screen that’s identical to her students’ calculators, and walked them through the problem, inserting the variables as her students followed along. In the past she would have walked to each student and helped them individually.

Okay, the teacher is able to do all those things. Great.  She is now relieved from individually interacting with the students. Oh My.  This may just be the person writing the article adding this emphasis.  Picture the last high school math class you took.  The teacher walks you through the problem and asks if anyone has any questions.  Bueller? Now what if that teacher walked to your desk and asked to see you do the problem?  This model may be more developmentally appropriate in another setting, but not HS.

teachers are more organized

*insert your own comment here*

able to take students to a website as a class, rather than having them in a computer lab situation where 20 students quickly find themselves in 20 different places

Refreshing, a case against differentiation.  No, seriously, I understand the point, but again these are HS students.  Assuming there is still a lab left to go to and they are not just using their own devices to get there it isn’t all that terrible that different kids are at different places.  I think this could also be solved with a classroom management strategy.

the kindergarten and first grade classrooms not only have SMART Boards, but also SMART Tables.

If you have followed my logic this far, you might be willing to take this next leap with me.  We already spend more on lower elementary classrooms, with a lower teacher to student ratio.  The rationale is present.  I think we can expect to pay more in these classrooms for appropriate technologies, but expect some savings as a district by narrowing the range of grade levels to which we apply that solution. Are you still smarting for that SMART Table price?  Well, then at least consider that maybe the lower elementary grades are the *only* grades that should have an IWB at all.

I can have up to eight students around the SMART Table doing an exercise with money, and some might be doing a spelling game at the SMART Board, and they rotate

If you every want to know what Blended Learning is, visit an elementary classroom with some technology which can support a center/rotation/station.  This is how you use an IWB, groups of learners (at an appropriate age for risk-taking in a group) actually using the technology to create or interact with content. Do you need both? No, but you do need at least one.

but in the new year, they will convert to having a SMART Board in every classroom.

Any staff will have some hold outs, but they too will get IWBs in this district.  They will be the worst return on investment, they will be horrible for morale, they will be the next article in the paper when it is time to buy more technology and a bond/tax is being considered.  But they will get one too.

Now, I do agree an IWB is superior to the Mimio device mentioned, but maybe they could take the IWBs they currently have and reinstall them in all/select lower grade classrooms first and then outfit the secondary classrooms with the Mimios since they don’t sound like they have as intense student interaction?

How to Display?
Most of the items discussed in this article could have been carried out using a significantly less expensive large flat screen (TV) display.  As prices of these continue to plummet for larger and larger screens it is worth a look.
Does every classroom need a large display? YES.  The large display needs to be for consumption of whole group information.
Does it need to be an IWB? MAYBE, but only if it is developmentally appropriate and the students will actually interact with the IWB, otherwise  NO.

Who gets Which Type of Display?
Vrasidas and Glass suggest three ingredients that must be present for classroom learning to become meaningful: student directed learning, socially constructed, and continuous.   This supports the difference between Type I and Type II educational technologies.  Technology should be student centered; it is not instructional technology unless students are using it to direct their learning.  It should not be a one-at-a-time technology, but have some element of collaboration.

The way students are grouped across K-12 is not accidental; it is socially constructed in fact.  Schlechty points out that students in early elementary are less averse to academic risk-taking behavior than secondary students.  Partially due to this, teachers design instruction in a whole/small group setting.  Students are more focused on the approval of the teacher than of his/her peers.  This outlook on academic risk-taking behavior shifts in the secondary grades; students now care more about what one another think than what the teacher thinks.  The chance of a pre/teenager taking an academic risk in front of peers diminishes, making and IWB not student centered, non-collaborative, not interactive, and not as effective in the upper grades.

Schlechty also suggests that teachers overestimate levels of engagement.  Students are sure to look at the new, shiny IWB, but are they engaged?  How deeply?  And if this is used in a HS classroom for the “engagement” are those teachers trivializing the material?  Schlechty wonders if educators attempting to make content more interesting are trivializing it; valuing entertainment over educational value?  Good points, points that make me suggest a large display in the form of a flat screen TV.

Developmentally appropriate technology development assures future classroom/technology funding.  Technology only costs us money if we do not apply what we know about teaching to the circumstances of when to use which technology.  Do not give away your credibility as an educator just because it seems fair that everyone get the same technology, insist on the appropriate technology.

I propose that the younger the better when it comes to IWBs.  Realistically, I recommend K – 1 always, and older on an as-needed basis.  Another suspicion I have is that the lower the SES of the student complicates that recommendation; students with lower SES grow up faster, the sooner a student makes the transition from seeking approval of the teacher to seeking approval of peers.

If all staff get an IWB the message is that this is not something to be tailored to your student audience.  It also does not compel any action on the part of these teachers.  Since the IWB are standard issue there is not a perceived need to rise to any challenge, to take your teaching to the next level; everyone must be doing a fine job and will be encouraged to keep doing the same job now with this tool.  Better for educational leaders to be brave and try out pilot groups within schools or grade levels.

Do we judge on what they do or what they should do?  It is a belief of mine that with the proper distributed training over a good span of time teachers can be trained to use any tool efficiently (if they can’t that becomes an administrators job to relieve them of their position).   However, I deal with the reality of limited resources daily.  Training in technology is doubly important in managing a district’s limited resources.  If the district has purchased a substantial amount of technology and is providing training and/or professional development to its teachers then students in class must be impacted proportionally to the amount of resources used. So, the question that I do not know the answer to is, should only teachers that are already proving themselves receive these IWBs or should the offer be extended to teachers that “could” do it with the proper dedication and training?

Return on Investment?
While eBeam or Mimio (not truly IWBs) start at under $1,000 most IWB range $3,000-4,000.   Large flat screen televisions continue to dip in price (CNN Money, lower right).  If teachers can use a large screen TV they should do so.  I suggest the cost of an IWB is not justifiable unless the case for student centered creation, collaboration can be made.  Consider also the recurring cost of replaced bulbs, the comparison of hours on a bulb versus a TV, the cumbersome size of  the IWB for the teacher that is only using it his/herself.  I think you begin to see the IWB should be used in isolated instances.

Large TV Displays continue to Decline in Price

Johnson, D. L., & Maddux, C. D. (2006). Type II Uses of Technology in Education: Projects, Case Studies, and Software Applications. New York: Routledge

Schlechty, P.C. (2001) Shaking up the Schoolhouse. San Francisco: Jossey-Baas

Vrasidas, C., & Glass, G.V. (2005). Preparing teachers to teach with technology.
Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

The majority of the people involved in education are students.  To our detriment, sometimes we experiment on these students and they are temporary participants in our trials.  As we search for a silver bullet the cost is often at the learning of individual students; these students pass through our classrooms only once.  This is  not an ideal group to experiment upon.

The second largest group of participants in education is teachers.  Teachers either flirt with the profession and may teach as few as five years, or if they put any investment of time into the profession they are likely to spend 30 years in the classroom.  This seems a logical group to experiment with when compared to students.  They are willing participants, have some level of education themselves, and whether the experiment is successful or a failure a teacher should gain some knowledge from it.

The experiment should not only include incentives for doing their job better in a quantitative sense.  This will dull the intrinsic drive (ala Daniel Pink), mis-reward some, while reinforcing the failures of the most vulnerable .  Incentives will not reach the teacher as an artist who weaves the standards into an experience for the students.  There needs to be some other reward, some other incentive that allows teachers to do their job better, but without the erroneous penalties of not meeting some testing measure.

I have had the privilege of teaching in the states of Florida, Michigan, and Georgia.  This has afforded me the opportunity to compare and contrast what works and does not work in a classroom from multiple points-of-view.  No one place has it all in place, but some places have more of what works than others.

Unions are an old reform movement that has some lessons to inform our current reform movement.  Despite the clamour that teacher’s unions are the cause of ineffective teachers in the classroom, I can speak to what they did for me:

• My time was respected.  Since administrators had to pay me more if my co-teacher was not there for our class or bring in another teacher and pay him/her I had fewer times that I taught a co-taught class without my regular co-teacher.
• During my planning time I had content/grade level meetings.  However, I also planned.  On my planning time.  Revolutionary.  I was not asked to cover another class and finish my units, lessons, or grading/feedback at home on my own time.  I was paid to plan, and I did it better when I did it at school, on the clock.  Protected planning.
• There were fewer after school, non-paid functions I was required to attend.  That made it more meaningful when I did attend one.  Teachers were also more creative in using parents time wisely; moving to student-led conferences, combining curriculum and open house nights, recognizing quality over quantity.

I think unions force employers to not try and “get their money’s worth” in time, but in the quality of the interactions.  Non-union states seem to demonstrate their power over teachers time as evidence of the return on paycheck they are getting. 

What type of teachers does that attract?

Two of the states I have worked in have had to open employment up to non-educators during teacher shortages.  Non-educators are missing key pedagogical fundamentals that they will never be able to do much more than teach the way they were taught.  There is no room for change in that situation.

Do unions equal educational success? No. But they offer educators something that is simply denied them in many non-union states. There is a basic level of autonomy for teachers due to the presence of a union.  Autonomy enables  a teacher to not be overwhelmed with outside demands from outside the classroom; how many of those 5 years and out teachers might have stayed if they could have better coped with the outside the classroom issues?  Autonomy can be the catalyst to propel a dry lesson to an exciting experience.  Ask any teacher what stands in the way of making a lesson more engaging? Time.  If teacher had protected planning, a tighter structure to guide the use of their presence, more respect of what they do well – you could get better teaching.

If there is a correlation between teacher autonomy and teacher’s unions those opposed to unions should offer more teacher autonomy and remove the need for unions.  Be the lead learner and take what has been learned and include it in the next lesson.  Find the compromise of these two questions: What do teachers like about unions?  What can districts afford to give their teachers?  Teachers may not be in it just for the pay, offer them time and see what transpires.