Would you accept it if your boss wanted you to work 20-30% longer days with no extra pay?
Or is this just a “lets shit on the people who teach our kids” post?
I beg your pardon?
How is the factual statement “No teachers union would ever accept this” in any way shitting on teachers? Can you envision a future labour agreement where teachers actually voted to end their summer vacations?
Ch’yeah right.
Well, I can envision *past *ones where they have. Since they have, in many school districts, already done this.
No, it’s not. The computer programer is making 16% more than the starting teacher (or 14% less, if you run the numbers the other way). The difference looks minor because you’ve reduced it to an hourly wage. But a 16% salary difference is meaningful.
Are you looking at the student day to determine the teacher day? At my high school (in Texas) kids go 9-4, but teachers are required to be there 8-4:30, which makes for an 8.5 hour day. The teacher school year is also, by law, 187 days and the student school year is generally 180 days. So that’s another week and a half you may be missing.
Put that all together, and we also have almost 1600 scheduled hours.
I also want to add that I think it’s irrelevant; for no other profession do we talk about how hard or long people work to determine what they “deserve”. The only thing that matters is surpluses and shortages. If there are districts out there where they are regularly turning away talented applicants that they’d love to hire but have no room for, they have a surplus of teachers and are paying too much. If, as is the case in my own district, there are many positions that can’t be filled at all, or if they are filled it’s with someone that no one is very confident will be willing or able to do the job well, and if there is a high rate of turnover, especially of your most skilled workers, then there is a shortage of teachers and they should be paid more.
I can’t figure out where you’re getting your numbers. I work 8:30 - 4:30, so 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. That means I’m working roughly 2080 hours a year. Dividing my annual gross salary (before bonuses and not accounting for other benefits, which are considerable) by this figure gives me an approximate income of $62.50 per hour.
My wife is a teacher at one of the best-paid school districts in the state. She works 7:30 - 3:30, so 8 hours a day. Teachers work exactly 180 days, so 1440 hours a year (well over half my hours). Dividing her gross salary (she does not get a bonus) by these hours, I get an income of $51.40 per hour.
She’s been in the same district for ten years, and again, her district pays teachers better than most of the state. I’ve been in my job for approaching six. And my hourly income is more than $10 an hour higher than hers.
ETA: Incidentally, I left out various paid holidays in my gross accounting of my total hours worked in a year, because I’m lazy and don’t want to do the figuring. But take those out, and my hourly rate increases. Holidays are already figured into my wife’s accounting, because she works exactly 180 days no matter what.
Day camps are NOT, I repeat NOT free time. All the activities are scheduled. There is no ‘relaxing.’
Kids don’t need a ‘free summer.’ I totally agree that they need time to relax. That can be done in 2 or 3 WEEK breaks instead of a 3 MONTH break. You would still have time to go on vacation or whatever and the kids would get MORE breaks just shorter ones.
Despite your use of CAPS, I didn’t see where you addressed my question of why kids who don’t suffer from having a summer off should be forced to give up that summer. And I highly doubt that you could classify the day care activities as being as stressful as school.
ETA - no NEEDS a free summer, but isn’t it nice that we can provide one to our kids before they enter the grind of life? Why take that away for a premise that so far, no one has provided confirmation that it does what it says it does. Christ almighty - leave the kids alone!
So just to stack on the anecdotal evidence, my wife came from a district in California where they also worked year round and took about a month in the summer, a month in the spring and a month during the holidays. Every teacher I spoke to in her school (approximately 15) loved it since it gave them more time during the year to travel, rather than having to squeeze everything in during the summer or the hideous travel time of two weeks at christmas.
Mark
Have you been in a system that only has short breaks? How do you know that your kids wouldn’t benefit?
My kids could certainly use a longer break in March or April. The long haul between Christmas and the end of June is pretty tough on them.
To me, this is a selfish position. There are plenty of kids who are struggling in school. I feel that not having a huge break in learning for these kids would be beneficial to them. While it would be nice if parents could fill that gap over the long breaks, some of us have full time jobs and do not get 10 weeks of vacation to do so. Even at an hour a day, every day, we still didn’t keep our kids at the level they were at the end of June. And there are plenty of parents who aren’t willing to do that much for various reasons. (The biggest reason I have seen is that they aren’t educated enough to educate their kids not that they aren’t willing to spend the time.)
Maybe we should do a study of this and see what we get out the other end? See if the kids are happier/have learned more? That’s what I want to see.
I am also finding articles that say that the long break is worse for underprivledged kids.
And that it reduces the number of sick days teachers take.
Indeed. The January-April slog is pretty awful for a lot of kids (not to mention teachers–but we’re adults and paid to be there, so I won’t whine about it outside of this parenthetical comment). Breaking that up with a 2-week break would really help a lot of them.
As for the question of summer activities, here’s roughly how I understand it going down (note that these are massive generalizations and of course there are lots of exceptions):
RICH KIDS and kids with academically-focused parents: summers are spent going on family vacations to new spots, visiting museums, doing whatever the local library is doing for kids’ reading programs, art projects in the home, summer camps, volunteering, and so on. Kids maintain their exposure to new ideas and new skills and often return to school at a higher level than when they left.
POOR KIDS and kids with non-academically-focused parents: summers are spent watching a lot of television and playing a lot of video games. Very little reading occurs at home. Academic skills atrophy.
A couple of years ago, our district presented us with a bunch of research showing the summer reading loss and consequent increasing educational gap. Their solution was to lengthen the school day by half an hour. Parents and teachers alike revolted, since the research does NOT show that a lengthened school day (absent significant other items, e.g., additional planning time, parent buy-in, stipends, etc.) does any good. Now our district is looking carefully at year-round school, something that I think would be great.
*Some *day camps are well-organized, structured, educational, etc. Some are, indeed, baby-sitting services with little more than construction paper and markers. We’ve had experiences with both, and our kids vastly prefer the first, the kind without so much freedom to be bored.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t give up our camping, with time for them to learn how to play with sticks and rocks and make up their own games, for anything. I would pull them out of school, if need be, to provide *some *unstructured playtime. But, as I said before, 2 weeks is all they can take of that before the whining kicks in and they’re ready for computer programming camp or dance camp or improv camp or ecology camp or…
[emphasis added] Where in the world did you get this notion? Are you under the impression that teachers only work when there are students present?
I’m in favor of paying teachers more. So long as they get on the merit system so that we can keep and pay good ones more, and fire the lazy bastards who show up for a paycheck.
I can’t get on board with the union mentality that ALL teachers, even the ones who read the newspaper in gym class are worth as much as the calculus teacher we all learned life lessons from.
Of course! Think about how easy some people have it- actors only have to work an hour and a half to make a movie, musicians when they are playing a set, realtors when they are showing houses, cops when they are making an arrest…
Annnnnd now that I’ve read the 2nd page, I see that this has been touched on already.
I was going to write this, but LHOD beat me to it:
I’m getting real tired of the argument that teachers work SO hard, and put in SO much time outside of class. This is the norm for highly paid white collar workers - not the exception. My wife is a health care manager, and she spends most of her evenings catching up on the work she couldn’t do during the day because she was in meetings or putting out various fires.
In my job, I’ve been asked to travel on short notice four times so far this year, spending over a month away from home. How many teachers have to do that?
As for programmers - many of them put in so much time that companies are starting to install cots in their offices so programmers can catch a nap. It is not uncommon to see a ‘death march’ before release in which the developers are asked to work 12 hour shifts for weeks or months at a time. If a critical bug is found in a released software package, often developers are expected to work long days until the bug is fixed, and to do so on short notice. One of my co-workers had to cancel a family holiday this year because a release schedule slipped into his holiday time, and the company couldn’t afford to have him leave.
In addition, career software developers have to spend a lot of time keeping up with changes in the industry. I can’t count the number of APIs, programming languages, new hardware designs, development methodologies, and other issues I’ve had to learn over the years - mostly on my own time.
But let’s not forget two forms of compensation that teachers get that programmers and other highly paid professionals often do not: Job security and pension.
Do you know that HALF of all programmers will be out of the field by the time they are 40? And of the remaining half, half of those will be gone by the time they are 50? As you get older in the programming biz, it becomes harder and harder to keep up with the young kids straight out of school who don’t have families and who have fresh educations in the latest theories and tools. Those who don’t keep up in their own time often find themselves marginalized, and eventually leave. Or, they re-invent themselves and move into software sales or management or some other related profession (which often requires going back to school or retraining or taking a cut in pay).
The average software developer can be expected to change jobs 4 or 5 times over his career. When factoring in lifetime earnings, you need to account for the downtime between those jobs, and the cost of moving to new locations and the stress of never being secure in your job.
The average software developer has lousy pension benefits, simply because they don’t stay with one organization for their entire career. And private sector pensions are generally a pale shadow of what teachers and other public employees can expect. If the programmers are working contract, they may have no benefits at all.
If you really want to compare teachers with other professions, you have to assign a value to job security, and you have to assign a monetary value to the extra vacation time and to the pension and health care and other benefits teachers get.
Oh, one more thing - when looking at average teacher’s salaries, you have to account for the fact that teachers are spread out through the economy in small towns, medium towns, small cities, and large cities. Most other white collar workers are in the large cities. You don’t find many software developers in a town with 2,000 residents, but you’ll find a school. Pay for teachers in those areas brings down the average, but the cost of living is also lower. So if you want a fair comparison, you should be comparing teacher’s salaries against other white collar jobs in the same city. How much do teachers make in Silicon Valley?
In the end, there’s an easy way to tell if teachers are overpaid: Is there a shortage of people wanting to be teachers? Or is there a glut? If there’s a glut, it would tend to indicate that salaries are too high. In my area, there’s definitely glut - so much so that the teacher’s union advocated to force day cares to hire only people with degrees in education, to offload the pressure of all the people looking for teaching jobs and not being able to find them.
I’ll believe that teachers are not being paid enough only when you can show me a place that has been advertising for teachers and unable to fill the jobs. By that standard, perhaps programmers should actually be paid more and teachers less, because around here there are an awful lot of open positions for software developers, and waiting lists for teachers.
Whether teachers are over or under paid isn’t really the point, though, is it? This all started with a discussion of a longer school year. Is anyone seriously going to suggest that a contract signed for X hours and Y salary should be valid for X+Z hours and remaining at Y salary?
Whether you think they are underpaid or accurately paid (and I don’t see anyone suggesting that teachers are overpaid), more hours should mean more pay, right?
Link. The US Department of Education keeps a list of areas with teacher shortages because you can defer your student loans for 36 months if you teach in one of these areas. There is a PDF link to the list at the bottom. Even now there are teacher shortages, and in times of full employment there are tons. Sure, nice suburban districts have no problem finding American History teachers, but try finding someone who can and will teach calculus (or even pre-calc) in your “town of 2000”, or can and will teach French in an urban school or can and will teach eight severely autistic kids even in the nicest of suburban enclaves.
I also want to add that it’s a teacher shortage if you aren’t getting teachers of the caliber you want: tons of applicants doesn’t matter if they are incompetent, even if they are being hired because it’s the best that can be found and someone has to fill the spot.