Huh, I’m always hearing about how wonderful teachers are, such an important job. For the most part I don’t hear a lot of “disdain”.
I also hear a lot about how tragically underpaid they are, but in my town a new teacher starts at $70,000, and salary.com places the median high school teacher salary at around $50,000. Not exactly bupkis.
Every year a couple kids in horrible schools go to Ivy League Universities. Does that tell you great teachers created them? Maybe they get there in spite of the terrible inner city teachers? Or maybe the impact of teachers is over rated.
Blaming teachers is easy. Who else can it be? We all know involved parents are a big help, but kids with active parents go bad too.
It seems that terrible environments are to blame . Living in an area that education has no respect is not going to let you succeed. But most poor ,black inner city kids know they have no futures. They are doomed to scramble all their lives loving on the outskirts of society . School is just in the way eating up their time. They can not compete , and they know it. So what teacher can fix that?
Seriously? Then you haven’t been paying attention to Republican talking points over the last decade or so. Their ire is most often directed at teacher unions, but it very frequently spills over into hatred for public school teachers in general. Although I haven’t seen it, many of the reviews of Waiting for Superman talk about its portrayal of public school teachers as inept and uncaring.
This is heavily state dependent. Where I live, a new teacher starts just under $30,000, and this is for a job that requires a 4-year degree plus (in the UNC-system) either a minor or two additional years of school. For folks like me, who come to teaching as a second career, that two years of additional school is significant. For comparison, the median wage in my city is a little above $17/hour, and this includes wages for people with terminal degrees and people with nothing past ninth grade. That’s not exactly bupkis, but it’s closer to bupkis than to a decent salary.
And it doesn’t get much better, or at least lately it isn’t: salaries have been frozen for the last two years. In addition, the minor merit pay available – $1500 for being at a school that makes significant growth on test scores–has been eliminated, meaning that there’s been a pay cut for teachers the last couple of years.
And yes, we get two months of vacation, so you could in theory bump up our pay by 20%. Except that this vacation isn’t optional: if you bump it up by 16%, you need to immediately institute a 16% pay cut due to a ginormous furlough. Finding decent summer employment isn’t easy: based on my past experiences of searching for summer employment, what I could find wouldn’t even cover my kid’s daycare.
North Carolina has very low salaries, granted. In 2008, our outgoing governor proposed a budget with a 7% salary hike for teachers, to bring salaries in line with the national average. It was defeated, for reasons I totally understand. Things are really tight right now.
But in the long term, the situation is untenable. If you want good teachers, you need to couple more stringent standards with better incentives to become a teacher.
Here’s an interesting article from the National Education Association about how Finland has skyrocketed to the top of the educational heap. Take a few minutes to read it.
That was an interesting article. The steps they’re taking seems like obvious no brainers, nutrition for kids, professional development for teachers etc. The one thing I would think has had the biggest effect would be getting rid of the test culture that we seem stuck in here in America.
If we could just make that one leap we might be surprised to find that some teachers we assumed were bad were actually just handcuffed to bad methods.
I still don’t subscribe to the great myth of the underpaid teacher though. As far as I can tell they work hard and make a modest living just like a lot of other people who do valuable work in their communities.
To some degree I have to agree that the cry of teachers being (on average) underpaid is way overstated. There are plenty of people with a masters degree that would be delighted to make what the average teacher makes. While the front end salary in the first few years is often somewhat meager (as it is for many professionals) a teacher’s salary and benefits (which are often substantial) packages generally give them solid middle class incomes in most places, and if they stick with it long enough this gets well into the range of upper middle class incomes.
People with masters degrees are a dime a dozen. The notion that people with a masters degree in the liberal arts or a masters in teaching should expect anything more than a middle class level salary in the supply and demand of the modern job market went out in the 90s. It’s not a rational expectation for an intelligent person to have.
Two points:
Edit: okay, three things. Your last line about an expectation for an intelligent person to have has a nice little implied insult in it; that could be knocked off, you know. Of course when I went back to school for my certificate I examined the salary schedule for the state and the nearest school districts. I didn’t expect that magically I’d get paid a decent wage. I knew what I was getting into. Let’s not strawman this. I’m not angry at unmet expectations; rather, I’m advocating for a change that will benefit me personally. I’m asking my boss–taxpayers–for a raise. And I’m giving my reasons. More generally, I’m encouraging my boss to tighten up the requirements for teachers, and then to pay me accordingly, on the assumption on my part that I’m just that awesome and could pass any upped requirements that were implemented.
It’s just supply and demand. Teachers are reasonably intelligent people, but they are not brainiacs like engineers or doctors. A Masters degree in teaching is just as time consuming, but in real world terms it does not require anything close to the level of intellectual rigor required to be an engineer or doctor, or in many cases a lawyer.
Are you not getting what I’m saying? I’m agreeing with you, AND I’m pointing out that many of our teachers are currently unsatisfactory, AND I’m saying that we need to increase the rigor of the profession, AND I’m saying that part of doing so will mean increasing the remuneration for teachers.
Being a good teacher, incidentally, requires a tremendous level of intellectual rigor.
Absolutely true, but that’s a separate proposition from the degree. Being an excellent anything usually requires a high level of intellectual discipline.
That’s true. But, while the teaching degree (for folks returning to school) takes nearly as long to achieve as a law degree, the coursework is far, far, FAR less rigorous. I have some serious horror stories about classmates, some of whom went on to get their degrees. One example:
For a rather inane exercise, we were asked to share with a classmate one fact we knew about the Revolutionary War. I’m a smartass (in case you hadn’t gathered), so I said to my classmate, “Which revolutionary war? There have been hundreds of them.” My classmate panicked, so I relented and said, “Probably the American Revolution.”
“But I don’t know anything about the American Revolution!” she said.
“I’m sure you do.”
“That’s like–who was president then?”
I stared. “Uh, there wasn’t a president. That was kind of the point.”
“Was it Washington? He was the first president, right?”
I dunno. Maybe people who don’t know what the constitution is can make it through law school, and that sort of equivalent to becoming an elementary school teacher who doesn’t know who our first president was. (And don’t get smartass on me about John Hanson, young whippersnapper).
But it seems to me, and I’ve read research to back it up, that because of the low wages and lax entry requirements, teaching is an especially appealing profession to people who lack intellectual rigor. It also appeals to people who are passionate about teaching, of course, but the group of people who are passionate about teaching and who are pretty smart is cut significantly by the low wages. If you want smart, passionate teachers, you’ll want to make it a more attractive profession.
If you’re content with teachers who don’t know who George Washington is, of course, the system ain’t broke.
(And I have plenty more stories. Ask me sometime about the end-of-semester project on four countries: Italy, Jordan, Columbia, and Africa.)
The Repubs are trying to bust teachers unions. They will drop the salaries and benefits in the future. They will try to kill public education and have charters . Schools will be for profit with selling of stock and high pay for upper management. It will be a business model. It took them a long time to bring schools down and they are getting close. They have moved the public against the teachers and the school system. It takes a while but they get the job done. They control the message.
The problem, at least in our area, is not the teacher salaries themselves. It’s that the salaries are going down because of budget cuts while at same time teachers’ workloads are going up, partly because of budget cuts but also because of huge increases in paperwork requirements since the advent of NCLB.
The effect of budget cuts on workloads occurs because class sizes are increasing and because special subject teachers (music, art, PE, for example) are being layed off.
It’s the combination of lower pay for more work that has the teachers around here grumbling.
My old lady is a teacher, and I listen to her.
I asked her once what was the one thing she could change that would make her job better. She said “the parents”
Other factors I can see, this year she is forced into this new crappy reading curriculum(big $$$$$$$$$ to buy this crap). It tells you exactly what to say, when to say it, gives all the tests, and it really kind of sucks. They have a test every Friday, and a Unit test every 6 weeks or so.
These tests that they HAVE to give are horrible. You can tell they were designed by some PHD that has never had the slightest interaction with a child, never taught a child and has no clue about the real world.
These are 3rd graders. I’ve looked over quite a few of the tests while she was grading them. Reading comprehension is based on these little short stories, and a lot of them are horrible. Written very very very badly. I’ve had to go back and read some 4 or 5 times to figure out what the hell they are even talking about. One story even suggested that you should go down in the basement with the janitor.
The questions on these stories are pretty rotten. They are multiple choice, and written horribly. Trick questions the whole way, no 2 are the same, lots of negatives thrown in in weird places. And the answers, on a lot of them could be several, but only one is right. Confusing even for me, and this is 3rd grade stuff.
If you got rid of the poorly written short stories and simply reworded the questions, so they made sense, the kids scores would easily go up 10-20%.
Another reason for crappy kids, they don’t separate them. You’ve got the dumbasses in with the smart ones. Trying to teach them the same stuff. Bored smart kids cause trouble and frustrated dumbasses cause trouble.
No administrative support. Administration is there simply to make themselves look good. You can’t discipline some students because the parents complain, and if the discipline sticks, they go downtown to complain, and the administration looks bad. An assault, supposed to call the cops, district wide policy, can’t do that, hush it up, no discipline, downtown doesn’t know and the administration looks good, and the kid does it again and again and again, and keeps getting away with it.
The biggest fight this year was with the lunch lady, and of course no administrative support.
1st) It took over a month, one kid in my old lady’s class, allergic to milk, documented from the previous 3 years. For breakfast, which is served in class, give him 2 juices or a juice and soy milk. “NOPE, need a doctor’s note”, there are already 3 on file from the past 3 years. Got the new doctor’s note, needs to be cleared by the nurse, then it needs to be cleared downtown. Now the order can go in to the lunch lady. Now the lunchlady needs a few weeks to clear the purchase order downtown to get soymilk, which is already standard and in the school. And during this whole pile of BS, she couldn’t even get an extra juice for the kid. The administration told her to go wander around the school and look for trays outside of classrooms that hadn’t drank their juice. So she asked them if she should leave her portable… and kids… to do so. She was told under no circumstances to leave her portable, but to somehow wander around the school looking for an extra juice.
2nd) They have to fill out paper work on how much the kids ate of their breakfast. They all ate it, check mark at the top, arrow to the bottom. The lunch lady didn’t like that and ended up in her classroom with kids screaming at the top of her lungs that my old lady needs to learn how to fill out paperwork. The principal even called her down to the office to tell her that she needs to fill out the paperwork properly.
Has the principal ever cared a stitch about the quality of the teaching? No. Just keep the lunch lady happy, and keep any and all news and parents from going downtown.
Education of the students isn’t even on their radar. Help with a discipline problem, they couldn’t be bothered. A student that needs a bit of extra help, they don’t want to hear it. Kid gets a bad grade or you actually discipline one of them, and the parents complain, you’re in for a giant whirlwind of shit, and more BS paperwork.
I’m really surprised that teachers even give a shit at all, nobody above them cares (most parents don’t care) and will throw them under a bus in a second to make themselves look good.
I can tell you the Thai educational system is a complete travesty. The vast majority of students who are not wealthy enough to attend a private school and must depend on the public school system simply could not cut it in many Western schools. Even many university-educated Thais have never cracked a book in their life, for school or for pleasure. My wife is a product of the public school system here, but she is an exception. She actually was a good student, going on to receive degrees from the top two universities in Thailand and another one on scholarship in the US. But she is an exception. We know of other exceptions, but for the vast majority of students, the situation is a complete shambles.
I meant if you could only meet either the teachers or the parents, without asking them about the student. Having to judge based solely on their demeanor and competence in their relative roles, do you think the parents or the teachers will correlate more with the student’s performance?
Head Start does more than that. For example:
I do think programs like the ones I mentioned (among others) do try to “fix” parents as much as it’s possible to “fix” a person.
I don’t think you are paying attention then.
Where do you live? I have never heard of a public teacher starting at 70k. Do you have a cite for that figure?
Unfortunately not much of that research can identify objectively with any degree of certainty how it is that some teachers are more effective. I wish it were otherwise, because it would make my job a lot easier–I evaluate teachers.
I’m quite familiar with the research referred to above. However, for the majority of cases, you cannot truly know what makes any teacher more effective without sitting in his or her classroom for a least 20 hours a week, at least two weeks a month, over the course of a term. Principals and researchers alike just won’t do this. They don’t like to get their hands dirty. They usually are the people who got out of the classroom as soon as possible–or maybe never even served in classrooms.
When people in public policy start throwing around expressions like “bad” and “good teachers,” they usually can’t tell you what that actually means in concrete terms of real-time, classroom technique and application.
Yeah, the warehoused Resource Room kids. Meaning the kids who don’t really have anything, but are just in Resouce Room b/c it’s a dumping ground.
We are looking for a “lone gunman” …but as with everything, there’s no one reason for crappy schools. I do think that we need to offer a bunch of schools which would offer a whole bunch of different methodolgies. Education is not a business. It’s very hard to find a methodology that works for EVERYONE. I also think we need to revamp the practice of solotaire mainstreaming (the kind where a kid with a disabilty is the ONLY one in their class or even school. ) It should still be offered…BUT most kids with disabilties aren’t being served well by their neighborhood schools. (b/c even most sped/Resource Room teachers aren’t trained to teach more then garden variety LDs)
Incidentally, does what you wrote contradict astro? He doesn’t say that all teachers are equally effective; rather, he claims that the efficacy of teachers is miniscule compared to the effect of the home environment.
I think the word “miniscule” is hyperbole, but I do agree that a great teacher whose students are dealing with drugs, alcohol, violence, and checked-out parents is generally going to see lower test scores than a mediocre teacher whose students have involved parents and stable home lives. We need to hold teachers accountable, but just as you don’t hold doctors accountable based solely on the percentage of healthy patients they have, you shouldn’t hold schools accountable based solely on the percentage of on-grade-level students they have.
I don’t think teachers have the disdain of society, they have the disdain of SOME conservatives and Republicans but not society. The pay issue is something that can be addressed.
Well, to be fair, Democrats are trying to bust teachers unions as well but they want to do it by raising salaries and bebefits while reducing job security.
Public educatrion enjoys tremendous public support in this country, but in a lot of urban areas, the current model doesn’t seem to work and the biggest barrier to changing that model is frequently the teachers union.