I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that people like the idea of extending the school year because more school sounds like an easier solution than better schools. That’s not to say you can’t have both, but the problems with the education system are complex and making the school year longer sounds like the easiest possible way of addressing them (or not addressing them).
Do those teachers support doing that with no increase in pay? Or are they expecting a 25% bump in salary?
I think the students should get the summer off, but the teachers should be expected to work a full year with 3-4 week’s vacation, just like the rest of us. They can spend the time without kids working on new teaching material, taking refresher classes, participating in evaluations of the previous year, coming up with individual performance plans for the students who are lagging, etc.
We keep pointing at the kids as the reason American education is lacking, but in reality it’s the quality of the teaching. There are a lot of great teachers, but there are also a lot of bad ones who can’t be fired, and they’re holding back the kids.
Here’s an even better idea: Since teachers are hard to fire, how about a system where the teachers get evaluated, and the bottom 10% have to go to ‘summer school’ and work on their own performance improvement plan to improve their teaching skills?
It’s easier to agree with you than argue with everyone else. It doesn’t sound any different than throwing more money at the problem to me. No one has given a rational reason why longer school years will result in any benefit to anyone except people who need child care services.
As a working parent, I would hate that. Having to find someone to watch the kid four times per year rather than a two month stretch for camp and vacation would be a pain in the butt.
Honestly, I believe that, over the course of a typical school year, teachers work a similar number of hours as 9-5ers work over a full year. You have to add in all of the extra work teachers do, grading hundreds of assignments a week and doing significant prepwork in their homes. They’re not the overworked sad-sacks they might want you to think they are, but they also aren’t cruising with no work and awesome pay either.
I’d go with a solid stretch of vacation each quarter, rather than putting the vast majority of days off over the summer months.
I also don’t think that teaching is the primary factor. It’s the students, or the student’s situations that affects things most. In my district, we have poor black students alongside wealthier white students from Kindergarten to 12th grade, and there’s a HUGE racial gap in test results. Same teachers, same classrooms, but different students and different home lives, you get different results.
Or better yet, how about this> How about actually paying them very well in order to get the best people teaching our children without having to sacrifice the big salaries their intelligence and ambition would get them elsewhere.
Yes, but most teachers aren’t paid like 9-5ers. They’re paid like salaried employees who work much more than 40 hour weeks. The pay is actually awesome if you consider they are working half the time of their contemporaries in the private sector. They would be very highly paid if it was a full time job with the 2400 hours a year typical of salaried employees, and their salary was doubled.
None of my family lives on this continent. If it weren’t for long summer breaks, I would rarely or never have seen my grandparents, or my cousins, or my aunts, when I was a child.
Oh, like all employees, we love the idea of increasing our work hours with no corresponding increase in pay! Please please: we’re practically volunteers. The good ones anyway, we’re saints; the bad ones are parasites. You know the song.
Of course an increase in teacher hours should be compensated. That shouldn’t even be an issue.
Absolutely true–with one caveat.
The research I’ve seen suggests that kids with involved parents actually increase their academic skills over the summer, and slightly stagnate for the first couple of weeks back at school. The kids with uninvolved parents decrease their academic skills over the summer, and slightly play catch-up during the first few weeks back. If we can decrease the length of the breaks, maybe both effects will be lessened, and we’ll be able to decrease the achievement gap.
Sam, that’s a great idea for ALL professions. Let’s do it for doctors, too: who wants to be treated by the bottom 10% of all doctors? Same thing for lawyers, police officers, and senators.
The problem with doing so, of course, is that it doesn’t serve the ridiculous anti-teacher rhetoric of the right.
I am all about improving the quality of teaching, but your proposal seems to be: longer hours with no additional pay, and more firings. Given the situation where excellent teachers often leave the field for lower-stress, better-paying jobs, I think your proposal is pretty terrible.
Nonsense. Straight out of college, with a generic degree, I was earning more as a writing subcontractor for IBM than I earn now, six years into teaching with a specific degree and National Board Certification.
Compare teachers to other folks with specialized four-year degrees, and the pay is terrible. If you want to adjust for the number of days worked, by all means do so–but then give us the chance to work comparable numbers of days. I would freakin LOVE to be paid to work for an extra month or so every year, and use that extra time to design lessons.
The main reason I hear for it is that during the summer break, kids forget much of what they’ve learned from the previous year. I was a middle class kid in honors classes, and I remember how in almost every class we’d have to spend the first few weeks relearning things from the previous year. I can imagine that for some classes they might have to spend even more time relearning old material. If the teacher didn’t have to spend that time at the beginning reteaching material that the kids had already learned and forgotten, there would be more time to explain the new material and go more in depth.
There are disadvantages to making the summer shorter, and it’s not going to fix all the problems with schools, but I think it could help.
Again, based on an hourly rate teachers are doing comparably. And I have no objections to teachers working full time. As a matter of fact, it is probably a disincentive to teaching as a career to have only part time jobs available. Even without extending the school year per student, additional teacher hours could be used in many ways, including smaller class sizes with more flexible scheduling.
I hear these things too, but I’ve never seen real evidence of it. I also hear that students forget everything from one semester to the next without any break in between. Teaching for comprehension would certainly be better than teaching for memorization until the tests, but it isn’t necessarily related to a longer school year as I see it.
Kids forget what they learned two months ago when they’re in school also. This isn’t a problem with the long break, it’s a problem with one-to-many, one size fits nobody instruction that doesn’t encourage understanding what you learn.
You may argue that the lack of work in the summer makes up for it–but not to this huge extent.
And teaching done well is a high-stress occupation, not at all comparable to computer programming. If we want to attract professionals who can provide meaningful instruction to meet the needs of all kids from wildly disparate backgrounds, we need to recognize that it’s not an easy job, and pay accordingly.
Why is anyone talking about a pay increase for teachers? The number of school days would remain exactly the same, only the off-times are staggered.
The OP suggests we need a longer school year, a phrase that generally means more student-contact days. As long as I’m not asked to work additional hours for the same compensation, I’m a strong advocate of year-round school concept; I’m similarly a strong advocate for increasing my number of working days, as long as I’m paid accordingly.
I am simply arguing that the hourly rate is comparable, and your figures demonstrate they are starting at a better rate than those other professions. The starting teachers are making more than half the amounts of those other professions, but only working half the hours. I’m not justifying that system, or saying that teachers should be happy working part time, or should not make more money if they work more hours. But comparing the starting hourly rate of a teacher to a typical 9-5 worker is not a fair comparison.
And I’ll repeat, I have no problem with teachers working the same hours as most salaried employees and receiving comparable annual pay. I believe it would result in better teachers.
Nope. The public school teachers I know aren’t making a large salary to begin with. Sure, they get a lump of time off in the summer, but they are working 60 to 70hrs a week during the rest of the year. Outside of class hours, they are developing lesson plans, correcting homework and tests, having office hours for students, chaperoning prom, selling tickets at the football games, directing the student play, etc…
I just checked one friend’s schedule for the year. Taking out holidays/spring break, they have 38 weeks of teaching/training/conference time. Taking out holidays and vacation time, I have 46 weeks of work time. Let’s say I work 45hrs/week. That’s just over 2k hrs/year. Assuming my friend works 60hrs/week, that’s almost 2300 hrs/year. So 15% more hours, 30% less annual pay. No, it’s not comparable.
I don’t have the source handy, but I’m going off a report indicating most salaried employees were working around 2400 hours per year. Teacher have scheduled tiime a little over 1200 hours per year. But they do put in plenty of their own time, just not another 1200 hours. And I don’t think teachers work an average of 60 hours a week during working weeks either. Looking at the hourly rates and actual hours spent working, teachers seem to get paid comparably to other jobs requiring the same skill and education level.
I don’t see why this is even an argument. There is no doubt that teachers get paid their rate for less hours per year than most salaried employees, and as a result don’t make as much as much money annually. I never stated otherwise.