Saturday, June 28, 2014

How To Fail In Business(Without Even Trying)

By Jeff Simpson

Anyone with Business101 sense, or even Business 090, knows that it is incredibly cheaper to keep your employees than to have to hire new ones

Bottom Line

There is a high cost to employee turnover. The higher the employee turnover rate the higher the cost. Smart companies work hard to measure employee satisfaction and act to minimize turnover. It is cheaper to keep your current employees motivated and productive than it is to find, hire, and train new ones.


With keeping your employees, and keeping them happy, is rule number one in business, it is not a coincidence that the signature legislation of a career politician works to do the exact opposite?


School districts across the state say they are generally seeing higher rates of teacher turnover and elevated levels of retirements since the passage of the law. Teachers and administrators say the turbulence is, in part, caused by the uncertainty and disruption they face in the wake of Act 10 and other sweeping educational reforms. If the trend continues in the long run, educators say the quality of instruction in classrooms will erode.

In the Wausau School District, the number of resignations in its teaching staff has more than doubled in the past five years. In 2010, the 15 teachers resigned from the district, 2.3 percent of its total teaching staff, said Jeff Gress, the district’s director of human resources and employee relations. In 2012, the number only increased to 18, or 2.7 percent. But in 2013, 38 teachers, 5.6 percent, left the district, and so far this year, 35 teachers have resigned, 5.1 percent. Gress expects more teachers to quit in the coming weeks.

Why would our Governor, in the most important industry in our state(public education), start his career doing something so blatantly incompetent?

That's easy!





15 comments:

  1. Nice slight of hand!

    You go from making this about turnover in the private sector or retirement in the public sector!

    Of course, when someone talks about running schools like businesses, you would be the first to object -- it ain't so, you proclaim.

    It is a good thing when people are healthy enough to retire and do it -- especially in education.

    Ask any youths you meet who knows more about technology -- their teachers or the students in school?

    We know what that answer would be. Bringing in new teachers, fully-certified and competent, is not a bad thing. Especially when some choose to retire while they were still healthy enough to enjoy it.

    Mindless drivel about public schools isn't helpful. Teachers, unlike the private sector, get little or no training on-the-job other than perhaps a mentor (who isn't available during the day) and a once-per-month group session.

    More importantly, taxpayers are spending huge amounts of money on technology in schools that simply doesn't work or isn't used -- new teachers are overwhelmingly run out of school districts within their first three years and the unions do nothing for them.

    This is why there isn't support for teachers unions even across teachers!

    The only way to bring more technology into education is to bring in more teachers ready to do it.

    I know its a slow news week and you can't speculate endlessly about criminal investigations given the prosecutor himself publicly threw the damper on that.

    But your education rants are not reality based -- in Milwaukee Public Schools, teacher retirements are a GOOD thing.

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    1. You cite so many cliches, most of which aren't factual. Just the same drivel repeated over and over as if that would somehow make it true.

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    2. Anonymous at 7:15am,

      You just don't get it!

      The reason many of these teachers and other public employees often worked thirty or forty years or more was because they loved their work. Then Scott Walker came along and made them scapegoats. He took away their voice in the workplace, and took away 12-15 percent of their take home pay. Many school districts and public employers have now become vindictive employers since Act 10.

      That it why so many of these DEDICATED public employees have made the difficult decision to leave the work they love sooner than they had planned.


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    3. And your an expert on this subject how ???

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    4. There is no convincing folks like Anon 7:15/8:57 of another viewpoint. They are products of Scott Walker's divide and conquer strategy, and no amount of reason or facts will convince them otherwise. It didn't take courage to do what Scott Walker did - it took a majority in both houses of the legislature, and marching orders from ALEC.

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    5. @ 7:15 When was the last time you've been in a school? When was the last time you shared a 1/2 of your banana with a kid because he/she was hungry? When was the last time you were called a name be a parent because you are calling home to ask for help with the student's behavior issues? What degree have you paid for to work for wages that have not gone up on the last 5 years? I don't use the district's benefit package, so don't blow that smoke either...

      You are an another Fox-wtmj sheeple. Get out and deal with the real world.

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  2. Wait a minute......Walker said Act 10 would reward the
    "Best and Brightest!" Why would teachers be retiring if they are being so handsomely rewarded? Perhaps being demeaned and denigrated by the governor and sold down the river to their neighbors and community might be a factor. Also the chance to earn an annual pay increase of 1% of inflation is a great incentive to keep teaching. If you think the best and brightest in college are heading for a teaching career....not in Wisconsin not with Walker's education policy that is "Divide and Destroy."

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  3. Bwah ha ha ha ha!

    Now you're proclaiming that school teachers are just like the entry-level employees at convenience stores!

    Your proclaiming that highly-qualified certified teachers looking for work, often with masters degrees and beyond, are unqualified!

    You really should stick to issues you know something about -- you make a fool of yourselves when you post nonsense about education.

    No one is entitled to a job forever -- especially when there are huge numbers of people looking for work. Rather than celebrate a productive career (on retirement) and an opportunity for a highly-qualified teacher, perhaps even a non-majority teacher, to step into the system; you want to make this about entitlement.

    No surprise -- you and capper regularly post racist rants that wreak of your own sense of entitlement!.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This particular troll outs himself with his repetitive, "Bwah ha ha ha haw" as well as a signature, misuse of homonyms (in this case "wreak" when he meant "reek”). He appears to be the same guy who spent every day all winter and spring on WEAU TV's (Eau Claire) news site, asserting teabagger talking points and shouting down anyone who disagreed with him. Therein, he used numerous screen names including, "Self Made," "Tetons," "Unions are the Problem," dozens of others. Ignore him.

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  4. You are a one trick pony in a b league one ring circus.

    When you want to bring your anonymous rants in here that are relevant to the topic feel free and ill respond.

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  5. At a recent Mary Burke meet & greet, my wife met a woman who works in the Special Education training program at the UW School of Education. She said that out of the fifty-plus slots in the program only sixteen people had signed up. In the past these slots would have been filled by now. This is a sign of the lack interest in a teaching career among undergraduates and that many current teachers don't feel that spending money to upgrade their skills and degrees is an economically sensible expenditure. This is what ACT 10 and the "teachers are the enemy" rhetoric of the Republican party is doing to Wisconsin education.

    Minnesota and Illinois are looking better and better for any teacher who is able to move there, while young people are understandably reluctant to go heavily into debt just enter a profession which is the subject of so much Republican hate propaganda.

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    1. Gareth is absolutely correct on all aspects of his comment. The number of teachers converting from a Wisconsin teaching license to a Minnesota license has gone up 500% in the last 3 years-that's 5 times the rate that existed prior to Act 10. Wisconsin teachers ARE fleeing to states where teachers are NOT demonized like teachers are in Wisconsin.

      Need more proof that the Wausau newspaper article was correct? I just checked WECAN, the statewide Wisconsin teacher jobs listing. As of today, there are nearly 2000 teacher job vacancies open in Wisconsin. There are MORE vacant teaching jobs today than there were in the massive wave of teacher retirements in 2011 after Act 10, leading credence to the reports that current teachers are fleeing teaching in general, or teaching in Wisconsin with the massive cuts to public education and the nearly universal animosity directed at teachers across Wisconsin.

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  6. As to Act 10 allowing vindictiveness here's a perfect example. A program was being combined and a veteran teacher was being released. A group of teachers attended the school board meeting and spoke in behalf of the teacher and suggested the board reconsider the change. The spokesperson for the group was told to report to the superintendents office the next day. She was told if they ever did that again it would mean a loss of their jobs. In a non-school case a 15 year clerical employee with no negative performance reviews lost her job when a new supervisor took over and replaced her with a friend of the new supervisor.

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    1. That makes for a very weak school board and administrator. What district was that in?

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    2. Actually Jeff, retaliation against employees who speak to School Board members is commonplace in MANY Wisconsin school districts. In my school district, the superintendent encouraged the Board to pass a rule that any Board member MUST have the permission of the Superintendent to enter any school, even for public events like basketball games, award ceremonies, etc... If a Board member gains permission to enter a school, the Board member is escorted from entry to exit by an administrator. The only information that Board members are to know is what they are told by the Superintendent.

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