I agree. If you want to signifcantly increase teacher pay then you cannot have the pension obligation increase along with it. The transition would be a little messy but not all that difficult. You can effectively monetize teacher’s pension benefits and put them in a 401K, you can leave them with a small pension if you want and just monetize the rest (let teachers that are within 5 years of retirement work out the remaining five years for their regular pensions or something liek that) and then just start the new system.
Paying for these pay increases is going to be difficult unless you are open to the idea of raising taxes of having federal funding for education in the form of block grants.
Considering the extremely large class sizes in places like Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, why do we need more teachers rather than better qualified higher paid teachers?
But that’s not what we are talking about right now. We are talking about laying off 20% of the workforce and shoving the kids into bigger classes.
And while I think there is a lot to be said for better teachers/bigger classes, there would need to be some fundamental changes in the system to make that work. For one thing, discipline problems would have to be handled differently. My impression is that the school culture as a whole is much, much less tolerant of acting out in those countries. In the U.S., it’s not 40 well behaved children in a room, it’s 30 well behaved children and, in many cases, 10 absolute hellions who cannot and will not be removed for anything short of actual assault (and not always then). Now, a talented teacher can go a long way towards managing these situations, but as long as school cultures are tolerant–or treat behavior problems as always the fault of the teacher–bigger classes are a problem.
I also really think you’d have to reduce teaching loads, at least in writing heavy courses. I can handle 200 economics students more easily than 100 English students just because the grading is infinitely easier. There are no essays in economics. So while bigger classes are not that big of a deal, bigger student loads overall are.
Getting free baby food is in no way any sort of reward for taking on teh obligation to feed that baby. At most it reduces the cost of having that baby but unless you start eating that baby’s food, there is no reward.
Which is ironic given how fat American children are. I wonder if we’re putting too much emphasis on after-school sports, especially team sports, and not enough on actual physical education classes. That was certainly the case at my high school. Any actual instruction was phased out in middle school in favor of just throwing a ball out and having us play a game. All the boys’ gym teachers in my HS had the attitude that their real job was to coach after-school sports and teaching was a distriction (I was actually told “It’s not my job to teach you anything”.
Just about the only activities they did was to either go outside and play football or stay inside and play basketball. God help you if you didn’t already know how to play. The girls’ teacher was much better. She made a real effort to do varied activities (including things like aerobics and even an attempt at circuit training the adminstration shut down), and actually provided instruction. Whenever we were allowed to pick activities I chose her’s. Mostly I was stuck with the boys though and skipped class as often as I could. Especially on football days.
There was other stuff I disagreed with too. Like making the art students by all their own supplies or not funding the academic team (our advisor had to beg for a van, and we warned that even if we one the local competion we couldn’t go onto the next level because it wasn’t in the budget). While this was going district was spending several million dollars on a brand new sports stadium with football/soccer field and track, more seating, and a full field house. Ostensibly it was for the entire community, but as soon as it was finished a fence went up and any use by non-school groups was prohibited for insurance reasons. To say nothing of all that instructional time wasted on those stupid pep rallys, class games, or “motivational lectures” from a random proathelete who happened to be from the area.
The newpaper article you cite indicates taht tehre are fewer female teachers there than there are here at every level compared to OECD countries.
“While the Korean average ratio of female teachers at elementary and secondary schools was 74 percent of the total and 51 percent, respectively, as of 2004, the OECD’s average was 78.3 percent and 58 percent.”
80% of all public school teachers in America are female.
You make it sound like a corrections officer::prisoner ratio. Yes, discipline is much less ofa problem in these countries than it is here. They seem more concerned with the kid’s future and less concerned with his ego. I don’t think people blame teachers for discipline issues, I generally blame the parent. If the kid comes home from school thinking that California was one of the thirteen colonies that fought in the revolutionary war, I blame the teacher; if the kid has discipline problems I blame the parents.
A new report (pdf) talks about the need to increase teacher status in the US. One thing caught my eye:
The page they source for this has no source for their claim. And it’s true that it’s limited to high school teachers. All the same, it’s a tremendous difference from the BLS paper erez linked to earlier–and the claim of 50 hours a week is much more in line with my personal experiences. I’m really curious about where the teachers are who can get by working less than 8 hours a day–does anyone know where that is? I mean, what kind of class load would lead to those hours?
Because maybe our problem is that regional variations are so great that we’re essentially talking about two different kinds of jobs here.
When I decided to go back to school to get my certificate, by taking full course-loads over the summer and getting an exception one semester to take an above-normal courseload, I was able to get it all done in two years (4 full semesters, 2 full summers). That’s a tricky thing to do for a career-change: in addition to a full-time courseload, I worked 20 hours a week and my incredible wife worked a second job to make ends meet. I maintain that I’m a damn good teacher (humble to boot); if I didn’t have a calling to do this, no way I would’ve gone through that.
I think it’s relatively rare for our top students to feel a calling like that to teaching. If we do want to improve our schools, we need to appeal to self-interest.
Bless you! But I will say there’s a teacher element to discipline, a pretty big one. My first year I sucked at discipline: I wanted to be this gentle, nurturing spirit who guided children to the beauty of learning through softspoken requests. Kids who couldn’t sleep the night previous because of a shooting in their housing complex didn’t give a rat’s ass about my soft voice. I had to learn to project tough love in a major way; I had to get comfortable getting in a kid’s face and chewing them out in order to get some kids’ attention. Naturally that’s not my favorite tool to use, but without it, my classroom was a mess. With it, I can spend a lot more time actually teaching.
The difficulty would be that to put teachers on any kind of equitable footing with the rest of society, if you removed them from the pension system you’d have to put them into the social security system. I mean, as a private employee I have a 401k AND social security. Teachers, at least in this state, have an optional 403b and a mandatory pension plan, but do not participate in social security.
Well, perhaps I was being unfair to the parents and perhaps its a partnership between parents and teachers to try and counter the effects of an imperfect environment but I don’t think I would have blamed you for discipline issues even when you were fresh and naive.
Presumably the amount they end up with in the 401K would represent the present value of accrued pension obligations.
Most teachers I know are on social security but if you are not on social security then like I said, you don’t have to monetize the entire pension, you can leave a some percentage of the pension in place and monetize the rest.
Ok I see - that’s a pretty horrible way to create a rate-stat. They’re basing the fire-rate on total number of teachers and not tenured and non-tenured… I’m trying to get some data on the prevalence of tenure to add some context to that.
Hm. I don’t remember exactly what time school began and ended, but—when I was in high school, late 90s northern Kentucky—we had just switched to block scheduling. Four classes, about ninety minutes each (perhaps a bit under for class changes), a half hour lunch. Mine was a firmly middle class school without serious issues related to poverty or discipline, although there was enough of that.
So I suppose a teacher who gave absolutely minimal effort could’ve gotten away with fewer than eight hours on such a scheme, but I suspect that the vast majority put in at least that extra hour or so that’d bring them past eight. (Possible exceptions would include the world history teacher who gave no homework and spent the entire period watching a movie at least once every week or two. She would also randomly pop up with interesting tidbits like ”you know, I’m really craving some mayonnaise about now.” So she probably wasn’t the median teacher …)
Assuming a teacher did absolutely no planning for classes and no grading and no meetings and no extra duties, they could get by with a 30-hour week. But if you figure an hour a day for planning (a minimal amount–usually takes more), an hour or so a week for meetings, half an hour a day of additional duties (bus duty, lunch duty, hall duty between classes, etc.) and 90 minutes a week of assessment, you’re at 40 hours there.
Time spent with students is the main part of the job, of course, but there’s a lot more that goes into teaching.
Plus, from what I’ve seen, “half-hour lunches” are closer to 20 minutes, there are no breaks and it’s a particularly stressful 7-9 hrs since you’re “on” the whole time. Not that there aren’t other jobs with similar circumstances, but I think it these facts are overlooked for the teaching profession more often than not.
It’s definitely something I didn’t expect about teaching. When I worked office/corporate jobs, if I was having an off-day, I could start slowly: come in, drink my coffee, maybe kibbitz a little, maybe answer some emails or surf the web a little before getting into the meat of my work. As a teacher, no matter how sleepy or cranky or stressed I am, the Mr. Dorkness Show begins promptly at 7:45, and I better be smiling and energetic and forceful or else the day is going to go to the toilet by 8:00.
Food service required a similar amount of always-on time, but it didn’t really engage my brain: decisions were limited, and while I had to interact with customers, those interactions required very little energy. I’ve seriously never had any other job that took it out of me the way teaching does.
