shrug I don’t really have any way to respond to this, as I’ve never been a teacher nor a principal. What I will say is that it seems to be an article of faith on this board that upper management is incompetent. In my work experience, that simply hasn’t been true. I seriously doubt it is true in the education field as well.
Other than starting a few days earlier than the students and cleaning up their classroom after the last day of school, they get every one of those days off that the kids get, and you know it. (Not counting teacher work days.)
I’ll work more mandatory unpaid weekends in one calendar year than an average teacher will in ten. I will also not be able to use those hours to count toward pay increases.
I know you don’t want to accept it, but I do in fact know all about the life of a teacher. In addition to my (ex) wife, my sister and her husband are teachers. They just got back to work after spending the summer in a rented cabin on a lake in Maine.
BTW, my ex was Teacher of the Year in Colorado several years ago.
Thread touched on the central problem, then glanced off it. The central problem is the consumer mentality, treating the school like a business and kids/parents like customers. A very wise person once explained to me that the kids are not the customers, and the parents are not the customers. Society is the customer. Most kids don’t like going to school and most parents think their kids should get good grades as long as they demonstrate some effort and don’t hit anyone. You can’t satisfy those kinds of expectations and also produce graduates who are going to be useful to society. Can’t work.
Posters arguing about teacher workload are talking past each other. Yes, good teachers put in 40+ hours a week, spend their own money on supplies, take classes during vacation and coach the Lego team. Shitty teachers read magazines all day and go home before the last bus is out of the parking lot and make the exact same money.
I don’t claim this is any kind of universal solution, but my kids go to a nonprofit charter school run by a board of parents. Subpar teachers are not tolerated. We got rid of both first grade teachers last year. We don’t have time to be running a teacher training program; there are plenty of motivated, competent teachers who applied for the openings right away. Some parents were treating the school head disrespectfully and a newsletter went to the parents stating that this also would not be tolerated. You don’t like it, send your kid to the public school, where the superintendent is actually called the “CEO,” drives a Cadillac paid for by the district, and watches 50% of his students quit before graduating.
A couple of posters have touched on it, but the problem is classifying everyone in the teaching profession in one group. There are teachers that I had growing up that should have made 6 figures and been given any tool that they asked for. Others shouldn’t be working at McDonalds.
The teachers’ unions get flak because they insist that all teachers be paid equally whether the Chemistry teacher or the Gym Teacher, the great teacher, or the one who has students take turns reading aloud from the book.
And those of you in this thread who are/were teachers and considered yourselves good ones, it should have been on your shoulders to stand up to the fucking unions who treat you like factory workers instead of the professionals that you are. Demand to negotiate your own compensation. Get rid of the jack offs in the profession.
The first complaint I hear is that it is too hard to formulate a merit pay system and then it just dies at that. I believe that it should be near the top of our educational priorities to find a good merit system so that we can recruit, attract, and keep the best teachers and SEND FUCKING PACKING the jack legs who read the newspaper and let the gym class play kickball.
The unions stand in the way of that and simply whine for higher pay for ALL teachers. I can’t support that. Pay good teachers more and get rid of bad ones. It works for every other profession.
Smartest post of the thread so far. Very well said.
I think this is really the heart of the matter. When I was in high school a diploma was something you earned, but you could make an ok life without one. You could take shop and home ec and auto repair and then move on to a job as a..whatever, plumber or cook or something, but you could do it.
Not everyone from my senior class went to college either, many just got jobs and started their lives. You can’t really do that anymore, these days you need a college degree for almost any job and a high school drop out is doomed.
So, some parents and students (and principals) might be thinking -if we need this thing then you have to give it to me, because I’ll sink like a stone without it. So maybe my kid didn’t do very well in this class, but you can’t flunk him because he won’t survive that.
Education isn’t really about knowledge anymore, it’s just checking a box so you can move on to the next box.
Hey, I say the society is the customer part all the time. Maybe not in this thread, but usually in the ones where people without kids are bitching about their tax dollars going to pay the goddamn teachers. And do the teachers ever appreciate it? Not so’s you’d know… 
Why do you have a thread like this when all the teachers are at work?!
Couple things: All this blah-blah-blah about whether teachers are overpaid or underpaid is bullshit. It’s pointless to talk about whether or not a job “deserves” a salary. About the only thing you can look at is whether you have a surplus or a shortage of the kind of teachers you want. In terms of being able to find bodies to hire, there are lots of suburban schools who have plenty of applicants. If they are getting the quality of teacher they want out of that, they are paying enough or even overpaying. If they are not–if there are tons of applicants but most are incompetent or lack knowledge or whatever, then they aren’t paying enough.
I know for a fact that many, many urban and rural schools cannot find even bodies to fill certain slots, or have resorted to bodies that are terribly unqualified. Those jobs are underpaid by definition.
If enough qualified people are not willing to do the job for the pay that is offered, pay is certainly not too high. I mean, if McDonald’s can’t find enough qualified people willing to work for minimum wage, we don’t shake our heads at how ungrateful people are for not being willing to take the job–we say they need to pay more. Why is teaching different? And if it is impossible to improve teacher pay, improving working conditions would have the same effect.
So if you think we have a surplus of fabulous teachers, it’s reasonable to argue that they get paid too much. But I find it odd that so many seem to think teachers are greedy, lazy, incompetent louts and that they don’t deserve their salary. What we are getting is what the salary is attracting. You can’t have it both ways.
Secondly, school cultures vary tremendously. I hate to see a teacher leave the profession because of one of the bad schools. I have never felt disrespected where I am. I mean, I am often frustrated with my bosses and coworkers and annoyed with parents and students. but I get plenty of support when the chips are down from both my principal and my parents.
Most Americans do have far too little time off. That should be rectified. We’d all be better off if everyone in the U.S. had six weeks of paid vacation a year. But that’s a separate issue that has nothing to do with teaching.
Oh man, the teachers in Sask have been getting so much shit right now while they’re negotiating a new contract. You go the local newspaper websites and people are just complaining about how much the teachers make and their 3 free vacation months and blah blah blah. I haven’t heard any white collar professionals bitching though - like lawyers and doctors. But teaching still isn’t as slagged on here as it is the US, I give you that. It’s still a respectable career here and nothing like NCLB will ever happen.
Actually, that statement is pretty ignorant. There are a lot of factors about “Special Ed” kids that can make them more resilient to common illnesses because they do not wash their hands as much as their “Non-Special” Ed kids. Yeah, sometimes they drop food on the floor, pick it back up and eat it, or pull something out of one orifice and put in their mouth (as long as it’s not from “back there”). But these are the kind of kids who have a better immune system than your typical kid or adult…barring those kids with diseases that affect the immune system. Now if you want to argue that all of the kids are making you sick because your immune system is compromised by all of the kids in general (which is more likely), then I can get on board with that. But of course, illnesses are pretty much held in check if you observe Universal Health Precautions. I do that with the Dev. Disabled population that I work with and I don’t get sick very often…maybe once every 5 years or so.
Case in point…my kid with autism. Does just about everything I described above and had only 1 cold in 10 years of life, and it was my wife who gave him the cold.
On average, they are no different than a typical kid.
We got off of it because the tangent was based on a point I made that was misunderstood or wasn’t clear enough. My intention with comparing students and parents to customers was simply to point out that other jobs have to deal with angry people. It wasn’t supposed to be a commentary on how we should treat parents or students. Just that other people have to deal with shit too.
And other people get to bitch about having to deal with that shit in their jobs. How about we give teachers the same latitude to bitch that every other career gets without constantly telling them to shut the fuck up?
Yes, let’s go get those bastards that constantly tell teachers to shut the fuck up!
Glad you see it my way.
Get rid of tenure (which I just got).
Get rid of summer vacation (which I just finished).
Give significant rewards to teachers that improve their skill sets (which I just did).
Recruit teachers from the upper third of college classes instead of the lower third (I was much higher than upper third, but I digress).
Pay teachers the wages of a professional (which has never happened for me, being in North Carolina).
I want to be a professional, dammit, and I want to have the high expectations and high rewards of a professional. Summer vacation is a terrible anachronism that hurts the students who are already most at-risk. We teachers don’t need it. I don’t want it. (Well, okay, if I’ve got it I’m gonna enjoy the hell out of it, but if you give me a choice, I’ll get rid of it). Tenure is unnecessary. What IS necessary is that I get paid a wage that I can support a family on. If I get away with working only a 45-hour week, I’ve done awesome: my weeks are generally around 50 hours, sometimes reaching 60. I want to be paid accordingly, and not feel like I need to piece an income together patchwork through after-school jobs, summer jobs, finding paid trainings, etc.
Treat me like a professional. Pay me like a professional.
Yes, other areas may have better pay. I can only speak to my state, where the pay is really bad.
Welcome to politics.
Whut? You equate kids all learning that 2+2=4 with assembly line Brave New World products?
It probably depends on where the teacher in question is working - I have a good friend who teaches at one of the SCs who has the whole summer completely off, and she took a paid year off to write a book.
Education isn’t the only area where so many people think like this, particularly about their children. We have this whole group that think that everything must be fair, that no one should be made to feel bad, that everyone has the right to do whatever they want within the legal limits. So, no, you can’t flunk this kid even tho he’s a twit, because then it wouldn’t be faaaaaiiirrr. And the parents might be stuck with him all their lives.
I didn’t mean it to be a slight against parents. I worked in a sped school for my first teaching experience. I had poo flung at me a few times and I was sick all.the.time. Your kid may not get sick, but it doesn’t mean someone else is immune to their bodily fluids. Sure, we all wash our hands and whatever, but it pretty much goes without saying that sick kids = sick teachers.
Anywho, we often had very sick kids at school because the parents had no alternative care for them and they worked. (These kids also had ‘behavioral’ issues and had been removed from public school.)
The five states where unions are illegal have the lowest test scores in America.
“Tenure” is a thing of the past in many of our urban areas, and there’s nothing that says bad teachers can’t get fired. Do you really not understand how union/teacher contracts work or is this just spew?
Please do tell me how to create a pay-for-performance model. So far, they pretty much suck, and they don’t raise test scores.