Just out of curiosity, what part of Colorado are you from/referring to? You've got a very interesting perspective, partly because of the unique situation you've been dealt in life, but I'm just curious what area you are referring to in Colorado. I know the issues even from school to school within the same district vary substantially, much less from district to district and state to state.
First off, there's no doubt I'm biased. My mom has been a public school teacher her whole life, and I have yet to meet many professional men or women who work close to as hard as she does. When my siblings were growing up, my mom quit her job teaching to take care of the kids and my dad had a steady income then. When I was 6, my dad lost his job and then struggled with unemployment for the next 13 years. He ended up going back to school for his masters in that time and has finally found a temporary job now within the last year. However, for the large majority of my time growing up, my family survived on a single public educators salary while paying for three sets of college tuition (brother, sister, and dad). There was a ton of pressure put on my mom to be the provider, and with that kind of salary, it was not easy.
There is a huge misconception that the teachers work day is about 8 in the morning to 4 or so in the afternoon at which point they are no longer legally required to be in school. For a small minority of teachers, this is the hours they hold, for almost everyone else it's not. It was a rare occasion if my mom ever made it home before 7:30 and sometimes she could be at school until 9 or 10 at night, in addition to hours on the weekend that she regularly put in, despite getting no extra pay for it.
You talked about the technology Lexia and as I'm sure you know, there are literally thousands of new technologies, programs, and curriculums just like it that could potentially reshape education if only it were implemented. It's also true that these technologies often take hours and hours of training and learning to understand how they can be used in a classroom setting. However, the issue is not that teachers do not want to learn these technologies simply because it changes the normal way of teaching they are used to, they actually can't learn these technologies because the demands of their job are ever increasing, their hours are getting longer, and they simply do not have enough time of their own to spend learning these things while their pay remains the same and no compensation or motivation for doing so is provided. To say that funding is not the issue of American public schools today, is a gross misunderstanding of how the education system is working. The school that my mom teaches at (in Fort Collins, a relatively better off district financially than most in Colorado actually), funding has been cut so drastically that the only people who can be afforded to work there are two teachers per grade (its a K-5 school) one principal, two office secretaries responsible for the entire schools clerical work, two janitors, a librarian, three teachers of specials (art, PE, and music), and one teacher certified to deal with disabled students specifically. The school is responsible for around 300 students and also houses the entire district's EBD (emotionally behaviorally disabled) program. Every single employee at that school is doing the work that four people would have previously been responsible for. I volunteered there all through high school, and I spent close to 10 hours a week simply running copies for the first grade classrooms. All of the other teachers had to do that work at some point in their day on their own. My mom was working 12 hour days 5-6 days a week, and that was the amount of time simply to maintain a school like that, much less to expand and learn new technologies, curriculums, etc.
The reason teacher unions are so vital in education today is because teachers are being demanded of so much more than ever before, and usually in ways that the vast majority of the public has no idea of. I have to agree with Ben that No Child Left Behind has been a major contributor of this, and in my opinion, one of the most harmful pieces of legislation to public education. It makes unrealistic demands of the education sector, while providing no means, explanation or methods of meeting such demands. The analogy I most agree with, is that the government, state, and local school boards are essentially telling the schools, you can't have as much money, you cant have as many employees, we are going to make the curriculum more rigorous, and we will leave it up to you to figure out how to improve results with fewer resources. Oh, and if you fail, it will now be your salaries at risk, not anybody else's. You can't tell me that's a reasonable request, and I think it's pretty easy to see how now a simple request like "learn the new Lexia technology" is increasingly unreasonable and creates an exponentially larger burden on every teacher. That to me, is the essence of what teachers' unions are fighting for. As it is, teachers don't even have enough time to do their jobs properly as I've described, much less be able to take the time to fight for their own working rights and legislation that directly affects them. It's just not reasonable.
Teachers and their unions are not always perfect, and their are a number of token examples that people like to point to as to why they are to blame. However, I simply wish to make people aware of the kind of demands being made of them, and also the types of resources provided to them, both of which teachers have very little say or control over.
