…and as for the person who said teachers should be paid little because of the intrinsic reward/it is a calling etc and other such clap trap.
If it works so well, why not do the same thing for doctors?
No? Then why for teachers?
You can get some people into a field because of it being a ‘calling’ and do well and paid/respected little…but you cannot staff an entire infrastructure with them. Most people want to be paid and respected for what they do.
Ain’t that the truth. We complain about the government employees we see in the classroom but their managers, the people we don’t normally see, can be as bad or worse. It’s a pain in the ass to document a bad government employee enough to actually get them out of the job. I know, I’ve done it. That is one job managers are paid for and all too often it just isn’t done. When we talk about bad teachers, we should be talking about bad school administrators who aren’t willing to do the work they are paid for. But they prefer we only talk about the teachers.
I don’t know what public union employees you’ve fired, but my wife is a hospital manager who has had to deal with bad employees, and it was NEVER easy. In fact, it was damned near impossible. Let me tell you how it works:
First, you have to document all the problems very carefully. Then you have to ‘performance manage’ the employee, to show that you took all steps possible to get the employee back in line again. Typically, what happens at this point is that the employee gets his or her back up and files a grievance with the union. This triggers a series of hearings at which the employee, his union rep, the manager, an HR person, and possibly a mediator sit down and discuss the issue. Accusations are hurled at the manager, threats are made, it’s very stressful and time consuming. And the invariable outcome of these meetings is that the employee is put on some performance improvement plan, and the record is reset.
After a month or two, the bad behaviors start again, and the whole process starts over.
I know of only one case where my wife managed to have a nurse removed from a unit, and that was an extreme case where the nurse was so emotionally disturbed that she was making enemies of other nurses, then actively interfering in their jobs in aggressive ways such as blocking the medicine cabinet to prevent another nurse from getting meds for a patient.
Do you know what the result of that mediation was? The nurse wasn’t fired - she was transferred to another unit. And the union’s condition for agreeing to that was that the nurse’s record had to be struck clean of all disciplinary information, meaning the new unit was getting a disaster and had no way of knowing it. And then of course your replacement nurse might just be some other unit’s bad apple, so nothing really changes.
So yes, some managers give up. It’s hard to blame them since they are also overworked and don’t have time for endless meetings and appeals, the result of which are ambiguous at best. And if they keep pressing it, the union will start agitating the other nurses, telling them to ‘fight back’ against management, and you can easily wind up with a unit full of sullen nurses working to rule and taking advantage of every rule in the very complex bargaining agreement to make management’s life hell.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the ‘rubber rooms’ in New York, which can’t even seem to fire teachers who have molested children. They simply segregate them from the kids and give them make-work while the endless series of union challenges and appeals take place - sometimes for years or even decades.
The average salary of a teacher with 10 years of experience in my province is $84,000. That’s for a job that has about 2/3 the working hours of most other professional jobs. Teachers also get far better benefits and retirement programs than other similar professionals in the private sector. I’m an engineer, and my retirement program is 1% of my salary X the number of years worked. So after 25 years, I can retire at 25% salary if I’m age 60 or older. The teachers in my province can retire at age 60 at 70% of their salary.
When you factor in those benefits, plus account for the extra vacation time, teachers are some of the most highly paid professionals in the province.
You seem to think that quality directly correlates with salary. Sorry, but that’s not the case in a unionized work force. In ANY work force, you have about 10% of the population that are high achievers, about 70% in the middle that do a decent job, and about 20% at the bottom that create 80% of the problems. In the private sector, that bottom 20% is eventually eased out to make room for new hires. There’s constant churn of the workforce regardless of age or seniority. Furthermore, the people in the 70% know that if they drop down into the bottom, they could be let go. So competition forces them to work harder and better.
In a public union with seniority rules, this doesn’t happen. The bottom 20% don’t go anywhere. You can hire the best, most award-winning teacher in the world, and if there are cutbacks that teacher will be dismissed while the lazy, burned out 60 year old teacher keeps her job.
This is the key problem with unionizing knowledge workers. Unlike assembly line workers who all bring roughly the same level of productivity to the job, there is a huge difference in productivity between the best and the worst teachers, nurses, etc. If your system doesn’t allow you to filter out the worst and retain the best, it will NEVER be as good as it could be. No matter how much you pay them.
In fact, such systems work in reverse: The best teachers wind up carrying the load for the slackers, so they actually get punished instead of being rewarded. And really high achieving people get frustrated by their inability to gain from their excellence. There’s nothing worse than busting your ass to help the kids, only to see the lazy bum down the hall get the same raises you do. So the best leave seeking opportunities to profit from their hard work, and the worst stay.
Yes, let’s take doctors. How would you like to go to a union doctor, hired by the government, who can’t be fired no matter how lousy he is? How good do you think the average doctor would be after 20 years in a system where you can’t get paid more for working harder or having greater skill, or fired for working less or not knowing which end of a scalpel to hold? What kind of people do you think would be attracted to medicine under such conditions?
Would YOU want to be operated on by a doctor who acts surly to you, who refuses to be evaluated, who can’t be fired, and who has a rating of ‘lousy’ on ‘RateMyDoctor.Com’? Would you let your child be operated on by such a doctor?
And whose fault is it that teachers can’t advance and be paid more for being better?
And is it any surprise that you get sub-standard students going into education when it has been turned into a field where excellence is not rewarded and failure is not punished? What a shock.
Teachers don’t get respect? On what planet? Around here, I’m always hearing that teachers are our greatest asset and the mostest hardest working professionals alive, who all do it out of their boundless love of children and education.
And stop with the ‘being paid shit’ nonsense. I’ve studied this quite carefully, in both the U.S. and Canada, and if you correct for working hours teachers are above average in pay for people of their level of qualification. And that’s not including the non-monetary value of job security, early retirement, and other benefits. Teachers also generally have nice working environments and safe jobs. They don’t have to travel, and do many other unpleasant things that other professions face. Yes, they have their own unpleasant duties, just like the rest of us. But not more of them than the rest of us.
Gee, thanks. And in fact, my kid had a GREAT math teacher last year. And overall has had more good teachers than bad. My point isn’t that teachers are bad, it’s that there are a small percentage of TERRIBLE teachers in the system that do great damage when kids run into them, and the rules are set up so that these terrible teachers remain teaching as long as they want, and they earn just as much as the great teacher down the hall of similar time on the job.
That’s what drives excellent people away. That’s what drove ME away. I love teaching. I’ve taught at the corporate level, and in various private training scenarios, and I’m also good at it. I gave serious thought to making it my profession, but there’s no way in hell I would enter a job in which I could not advance on my merits. People who over-achieve tend to seek out careers that reward over-achievers. They don’t want to be union drones.
When my wife shifted from nursing to management, she actually took a cut in pay because the nursing union has carved out such a sweet deal for union nurses. And of course, she lost her job security and union benefits. But as a manager, she could rise as far as her talent and work ethic would take her, and she was tired of busting her ass to cover for lazy nurses who made the same amount of money she did.
As I pointed out earlier, Texas did away with teacher unions. They have the second worst graduation rate in the country. When the teachers can’t negotiate, they don’t become teachers. And since you have to get a tax increase to raise pay otherwise, that never happens, and thus the costs stay low, and most people don’t want to join.
You can give anecdotes all you want about how you will gladly work for $25,000* as a teacher just so you don’t have to deal with bad teachers, but most teachers aren’t like that. I know of a lot more people who wanted to be teachers but decided against it because of pay than any who decided against it because they were jealous that other people won’t work as hard as they do. And, until I’d been to this board, I’d never met anyone who thought being in a union as as bad thing. You take a pay cut to be on a union, because it means you have more power.
I honestly can’t comprehend how someone can call themselves a conservative and be for increasing the power of the government to set price points, rather than them actually having to negotiate.
*Actual rate around here. I checked before I decided not to become a teacher.
EDIT: And teachers work a lot more than 40 hours a week. You can pretty much double the class time. So that’s 4/3 the amount of work.
Sorry Sam…I stopped reading after you said $84,000 a year. I have yet to meet a teacher that makes over $60K and most make under $50K with many even under $40K no matter how much experience they have. The teacher of the year a few years ago…supposedly the best teacher in the U.S. with 30 years experience was making $34K and she was from MN a supposedly good state for pay.
I personally made $20K. That was over 20 years ago but I just looked up their salary and it is still under $30K.
Back then and even now I just get sick and tired of people quoting these strange very high salaries for teachers that I have never seen, experienced or even heard of. Don’t bother showing me stuff on ‘paper’…I need to SEE and TALK to these supposed 10 year, $84K teachers.
Sorry me old mucker, but you’re totally on the wrong track.
I have never read a word that Dawkins has written and find his obsession with religion a little odd.
Couldn’t care less what some people use as there own private definition of child abuse, or for that matter government bodies motivated by politics and their chances of being reelected.
If anyone allows their child to grow up in an increasingly complex and hostile world believing something that has been proved to be total and utter fantasy as real, then they are guilty of child abuse.
I couldn’t care less if people bring their kids up to be Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Jews or New Age Wiccans, but if they start telling them B.S. as science then thats another story.
That’s because conservatives use “loaded cost” with the employers part of SS, insurance, pensions, etc. Then of course people look at that number and compare it to their own actual pay and get outraged.
My company used to send out a morale booster once a year saying something like “you are actually costing us $xxxK a year, so STFU and go back to work”.
Look, and I mean this sincerely, Hamster King is completely right and there is nothing wrong abut his statement. The primary goal of the people who run the Republican Party IS More Money For Rich People. All other goals are secondary. And it’s very clear from the context of his statement that he’s talking about the One Percent, not middle class people. Your argument seems rather disingenuous at best.