I dont know what school system you are talking about, but here in Lauderdale County, our class sizes have doubled. We have just been told we will be losing more teachers next year (tenure teachers) and class sizes will be even higher. This is not fair to the teacher and especially the student. YES on paper class sizes are suppose to be 16 k-3rd and so on with high school classes no more than 20, which by the way if you read The foundation of Education which our state receives funds for this, they send money to our state 1 teacher unit per this many students. But our gov riley signed a bill that stated local board of educations in "extreme circumstances" could choose to cut teachers and use that money elsewhere. Where else would be more important than keeping class sizes at least managable so that students would have a fighting chance to get individual help?
as far as AEA I agree that most of us was not around before the tenure laws and I have heard horrible stories about this. Lauderdale County is already so political in its hiring, it scares me to think if we didnt have tenure laws how political it would be in their firing. It would not be based on a teacher's performance but like she said, who's neice needed a job or who owed who a favor. There is nothing wrong with AEA fighting for our rights. We are already scraping the bottom of the barrel now trying to hang on. There is a bill right now waiting to be voted on that teachers would have to work till age 60 no matter how many years they have in, (exactly how is this going to save money?) and new teachers will not have alabama retirement but 401ks...but besides all that...if your wife is a teacher, you know that we have not had as much as a cost of living raise in years, our insurance keeps going up making us make less, we use our own money to buy supplies for our classroom, and if we get a 6% raise or whatever somewhere in the future it will hit the paper like some big deal, but wont mention that we havent had a raise in however many years. Then it will get those people out talking about how good teachers have it..yea right