If you’re addressing me, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I am not by any means saying an uneducated parent or a non-English-speaking parent or a poor parent or a single parent is necessarily a bad parent. I’m saying it’s unrealistic to have a classroom of 40+ kids, of whom 80% fall into one or more categories that makes them more difficult than the average American kid to teach, and expect miraculous results. I believe smaller class sizes would make a huge difference. I believe that having appropriate instructional materials and a bearable atmospheric temperature would make a huge difference.
And if I were a teacher, I’d be pretty damn pissed off at a unilateral 20% increase in the school day that added exactly zero instructional time. I imagine quite a few teachers also have their own kids in school for whom they will now have to make additional after-school care arrangements.
What a complete and utter disaster. High School education should NEVER be run as a profit engine, well sorry what I mean there should ALWAYS be a “free” state run system that can run alongside the private system as it does in Australia. I send my kids to a private school but I know that if couldn’t afford it there are state alternatives that are pretty damn good.
When I didn’t have kids I had no issue with my taxes going towards schools, I saw it as beneficial to society and I also went to school at some time as well. So in short there should always be a decent level of state funding for schools, it is as critical [probably more so] as roads and other infrastructure.
So do I have sympathy for the Teacher’s Union? Yeah.
Just because not all students are able to be taught (and I don’t know if that is true, but let’s roll with the premise) doesn’t mean that NO students are able to be taught.
At the elementary school level in particular a child’s teacher is the adult that they will most often come into contact with other than their parents. In some cases more than their parents. This person is responsible for more than simply teaching addition and subtraction, but for modeling what it is to be a responsible adult, and this is true even if you think it should not be the case. It is impossible, due to the sheer amount of time children spend with their teachers, for a child to not be profoundly effected by them on more than just an educational level. Do you really want the average McDonald’s level worker doing that job for minimum wage? I don’t really trust them to make change for me let alone model adult behavior to 8 year olds. That’s before you get into the question of knowledge of subject material, and the energy and willingness to try to herd a bunch of kids all day long, or the ability to actually communicate lessons in a way that will be age appropriate and effective. The calculus changes, a very little bit, when you get into middle and high school, but elementary school teachers should get paid a hell of a lot more than they do.*
Teaching is an important and complicated gig and not many people that I have met (including, sadly, several teacher) are capable of doing it with even moderate competency. Get rid of the bad teachers if you are able to find a fair way of judging who is a bad teacher. The current complaint is that the system being used for teacher evaluations isn’t accurately reflecting the quality of the teaching staff and has little to do with money, as far as I can tell.
But, why SHOULDN’T teachers get paid a salary that is at least competitive with other white collar professions that require a post-graduate degree?
*I am also of the opinion that all teachers need to be put through a lot more hoops than they are in order to get into a classroom. I would like to see something roughly equivalent to the Bar exam for teaching, but then you have to pay teachers accordingly.
You refute your own argument when you put “free” in quotes. Clearly, it is not free. It is paid for by people who use it, and people who DON’T use it. And it is not forced to compete. Maybe in Australia the government is capable of running effective and efficient systems without the competition brought by market forces, and that’s cool, and I salute you for it. But in the US, and especially in Chicago, the government is utterly incapable of such a feat.
Yeah we do have competition and very active debates around education. Education is seen as a right and IMO it should be at least until the end of high school. University Education is more problematic as there is normally a good return for the individual although there is an argument to be made that the country benefits greatly so everyone should pay a bit.
A user pays model is problematic in that even if you don’t directly benefit your society does.
One of the sticking points seems to be over the authority of principals; the teachers don’t want them to have hiring and firing privileges. This seems odd to me. I’ve never had a job in which my* immediate supervisor *didn’t have that power. “Job Security” shouldn’t mean “I can never get fired.” As for the evaluation part of it, I admit I don’t know enough to form a valid opinion.
But I do know that the longer the strike goes on, the more Karen Lewis will get to stick her smug, smirking face in front of the news cameras every night. I honestly believe she’s getting off on this, and that doesn’t bode well for a quick resolution.
There is NO WAY this person had 3 months of vacation time built up, including sick leave, and could travel on vacation as educational research. Cite the contract for that, it reeks of bullshit to me.
Full disclosure, I’m a teacher in Nevada and we’ve had our own issues. I don’t agree with going on strike, it doesn’t benefit the kids in anyway, but this bullshit about how greedy we are and this summers off is a crock.
Is it my fault that the government system for the school year is 9 months? I’m sorry, but your rage at teachers over our ‘summers off’ is a bit misdirected.
Some districts allow a teacher to take a 12 month pay scale, but most are 9 month. That means I’m being payed for work that I’ve already done for the year. I’m not making money by doing nothing.
All that certification and continuing education that I’m are required to do to keep my license? Summer. All the lesson planning and research I need to do because I don’t/can’t put in an additional 2-3 hours after school? Summers.
So, what should we be paid? In your, and anyone else’s, personal opinion? 35k? 40k?
Obviously making 60 grand a year, so 5k a month, and 2500 every two weeks before taxes, is too much.
How many of you, who need continuing education, pay for it from your own pocket?
The higher the pay, the more seniority you have. My district caps at 80k, with a Ph.d, and 25 years of experience.
All school districts negotiate a contract with the teachers and agree to it. Blaming us because we make ‘too much’ is because of the acceptance of the teacher’s offer.
Yeah, I agree with a lot of this. I support the teachers in the strike for the most part, but on the two remaining sticking points, evaluation and re-hiring, I think the CTU is overreaching.
The sort of job security they’re looking for seems ludicrous to me. Laid-off teachers should be first in line for interviews, maybe even given priority, but they shouldn’t be *guaranteed *a job. I can’t believe that *every *teacher at the former Crane High School, for instance, is qualified or prepared to teach at a top-flight school. The level of education required is just not the same. If a principal is going to be held accountable for his/her school’s performance, he/she should be able to pick teachers that he/she can work with. And let’s face it, a lot of the time that means personality as much as qualification.
On the evaluation front, it’s more of a mixed bag. I have a daughter at one of the selective-enrollment CPS elementary schools, one that has 100% of its students meeting/exceeding standards on ISATs and whatnot year after year. And every single year, they get complaints from CPS (and rejection of requests for resources) that they’re not showing growth. Um…growth over 100%? That’s one of problems inherent in using standardized tests to measure growth as the primary metric in evaluating schools and teachers. But, the CTU had a hand in developing an evaluation procedure that they later rejected; it seems to me that the changes they now want to make are to protect teachers deemed ineffective “only” after one or two years. Well…how many students should get to be your guinea pigs until you’re good at your job? I’m just not that sympathetic to this line of argument.
My son, who’s now a freshman in college, attended CPS schools the whole way through, K-12. I’d estimate he’s had 40-45 various teachers throughout his CPS career. Of those, I can think of six who were standout excellent teachers and four who needed to get out of the teaching business entirely; the rest were somewhere on the fair-to-good spectrum. In my experience, that’s roughly analagous to the range of job competency in the private sector, but it seems like the CTU doesn’t want to even admit that shitty, burned-out teachers exist.
All that said, it’s Emanuel’s, Brizard’s, Duncan’s before them, and to a certain extent President Obama’s policies that brought us here. Renaissance 2020, shuttering schools, and all that. I blame Emanuel for most of this mess; he came in all Mr. Tough Guy with the longer school day and changing the law on percentage of yes votes to authorize a strike and imagined that, like the City Council did, the CTU would just lie down and take it. While I think that Karen Lewis became determined to strike no matter what, I admire her tenacity on this. I think she’s about 75% in the right. Unfortunately, it’s that 25% that is keeping clusterfuck this from ending, so I think the tide of public opinion could turn against the teachers if it drags on much longer.
Just for fun, let’s do a little math. One teacher being paid 7.25 an hour X 30 students X 6.5 hours (7:45am-3pm with a 45 minute unpaid lunchbreak) X 180 days = $254,475 a year.
(($60,000/180)/6.5)/30=$1.71 dollars an hour per kid.
Looks like a pretty sweet deal to me. Plus they get an education and lunch.