Posted on 08/14/2023 6:29:35 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Go further than that and divide it by the number of hours the teacher’s work per week. Then remember that teachers ( where I live get two teachers’s days off per month plus several half days for teacher prep and no longer have to work bus duty or recess duty.
Back in 1971, the NEA, meeting in Philadelphia, hired Saul Alinsky to do their union organizing for them. He changed the goal of the NEA, from providing the best education possible for each child, to teacher pay and tenure. The quality of public school education has been on a decline ever since. It is a statistically provable fact.
People often forget the benefits associated with the job.
In my smaller town (16k people) the teachers start in the $50’s and can easily get into the $60’s early if you have a Masters.
They negotiate their salary once a year.
Oh shucks, how could I have forgotten?
I taught in la for 28 years made thousands of financial mistakes now at 67 after not working 12 years net worth 2.5 mill
If teaching is such an easy job, with such short hours, I do not understand why more people do not go into that profession.
I don’t have time or sympathy for generals who can’t win wars.
I don’t have time or sympathy for teachers who can’t educate students.
Do the job satisfactorily or find a new job.
Some years ago, an Oregon school district offered to raise the entry salary for teachers. That was rejected by the union.
Not quite accurate.
My wife got into teaching for a brief period thinking it would be great pay-per-hour-worked.
She taught health sciences classes (electives intended to expose students to the medical field).
She found the opposite to be the case.
During her multi-year probationary period, she had at least one required meeting per week with her faculty mentor for which 30 minutes were unpaid due to being outside contract hours.
She also had at least one meeting per month with other "beginning" teachers 30 minutes of which were outside contract hours and unpaid.
There were the required weekly office hours amounting to 30 minutes unpaid per week.
Then there were the required weekly department meetings which added on another unpaid 30 minutes per week.
Then there was the required monthly faculty meeting costing her 30 minutes unpaid monthly.
Then there was a monthly countywide meeting which took at least two hours per month since the meetings were outside contract hours and she had to drive to a different school for the meetings (before the China virus).
She had a daily planning period but that would often be taken covering a class for which a substitute was unavailable.Such coverage was uncompensated.
She also had to perform unpaid student supervision. This could be before school, during lunch, after school, etc.
Once per semester she had to show up for several unpaid hours of "Meet the teacher" night.
Several times per semester she might be required to perform multiple hours of unpaid assistance for a variety of testing such as SAT, ACT, pre-SAT, pre-ACT, and others.
She had to be present and perform specific unpaid duties during the annual graduation ceremony. This was four unpaid hours per year.
She had to attend recruiting sessions at feeder middle schools once per year requiring at least 6 unpaid hours per year.
She was expected to be involved with the Health Sciences student organization including plan and accompany students on over-night field trips for which she only received mileage, meal and lodging compensation. This was at minimum 24 hours unpaid time per semester.
During the summer she had to attend training courses in a city 2 hours away. Depending on scheduling, this could burn an entire week for which her only compensation was course reimbursement, meals, lodging and mileage.
Now we get to time she actually spent preparing lessons for multiple different classes, grading assignments and communicating with parents. This was over-the-top. All her waking hours at home. The children and I had to take on her normal household functions during this time.
All of this and she had the ever present chance of an administrator randomly walking into her class to "evaluate" her performance. In the beginning it was about 5-6 random evaluations per year but finally became 3. After each random evaluation she had to sit with the administrator for at least 30 minutes unpaid and be told what she was doing wrong, no if's, and's or buts allowed by her.
She stayed at it 5 years while our two oldest passed through high school. Finally, she threw the towel in and went back to being a nurse.
She developed an intense hatred of voter initiatives to increase teacher pay since the system was so bloated with administrators, counselors, librarians, support staff, and many others who had not taught a class in decades yet whose pay was indexed to teacher pay.
No one on this thread should bash teachers and their pay without spending a full year in a classroom of 25 elementary students, each having their own special needs. You have to be able to teach, in a group, the low achievers and the high achievers. Simultaneously.
Practically every teacher I know does not spend time working only during classroom hours. When they go home, they are correcting papers in the evening. And they have to be able to handle every behavioral problem they come across. Oh! And they get to deal with approximately 50 parents, many of whom think they would do better teaching the class than the teacher. And they can never be pleased.
All of that time off teachers get? They really need that time to recharge physically, mentally, and emotionally. Because they have to be at 100% during classroom time. They can’t walk outside to take a five minute break. They can’t choose went to go to the bathroom.
Unquestionably, teachers tend to vote for Democrats. And in many schools, the students are not getting or taking advantage of their education possibilities. But to bash teachers based on a superficial assessment and without personal experience is ignorant and meaningless.
See Post 49 in this thread.
It was the same in the schools I taught in. Poor attendance. Herds of students wandering the halls during class, trying to disrupt classes so that the students therein would learn as much as those who were out in the hall. Incessant interruptions in lessons due to discipline problems. Little attention being paid due to fooling around with cell phones.
Trying to call a parent, you'd have about a 25% chance of reaching one. Too often, you'd hear, "Doo, doo, DOO--this number is out of service!" To get the best contact number, you'd have to run down to the nurse's office and thumb through medical cards for such a number. On parent/teacher nights, it was generally the better kids' parents who showed up, not the parent(s) you really needed to talk to.
Few students did much homework or even knew what was going on in class. The habitual class cutters would rely on getting the notes from the few who faithfully attended class every day. They didn't care if they learned anything or not, their teachers were forced to pass them.
And yes, the administrators, eager to earn their $25K bonuses for good passing stats, would pressure teachers to pass even students who didn't even attend class or even change their grades behind the teacher's back. Graduation was therefore a complete farce, discharging thousands of illiterates into society ill prepared to do much but take a menial job or turn to crime to support themselves.
Yes, there are some bad-apple teachers. But the vast majority of them were dedicated individuals sincerely trying to impart knowledge to their students. And most, including myself, spent hundreds of their own money to buy basic supplies for the classroom which the district should have purchased, but did not. Now, they are too busy buying bi-lingual textbooks and hiring bi-lingual teachers for the illegals instead of providing for the taxpayers' kids' needs.
There are about 5x52=260 working days during the year, excluding holidays and vacations. So 185/260=0.71. Not 0.50.
Wrong. See Post 49 in this thread.
Almost every job contributes but not every job pays the same. Just the way things are. Just the way they have always been.
In Oklahoma, if you want to pay teachers more eliminate the many very small independent screwl districts each with its own full administration from superintendent on down. Consolidate them, eliminate the expense of the individual administrations.
Teaching children isn’t rocket science and the only changes that cause problems are imposed by the gooberment people who need something to do to prove their relevance or are busy bodies controlling other’s lives.
There is not one thing in basic education that has really needed to change in at least the last 70 years I have lived. New developments in technology maybe, new historical events but basic skills of reading, writing and math remain virtually unchanged.
There have been more problems created than solved by teacher’s unions and particularly education “professionals”.
“In my neck-o-the-woods, teachers by contract work 185 days a year.”
In my neck, they only work 180 days a year. That’s a part-time job by any reasonable definition. There are 249 “work days” in 2023. Subtract another 20 days for PTO and the average person working a full-time job work 229 days a year.
My wife said those "teacher prep" days are another example of fraud. She actually dreaded most of the "early release days" and "teacher workdays" since the time was burned away with the most boring, meaningless, mandatory training sessions.
See Post 49 in this thread.
See Post 49 in this thread.
Concur. Wife is a math teacher. Try teaching math to kids who don’t want to be there. They don’t do their assignments, lie, act out, skip class. They put more effort into getting out of doing the work than they would expend actually doing the work. And they’re surprised when they’re told they can’t do extracurricular activities because they’re failing the subject.
And I won’t go into how cliquey teachers are. Don’t be the new girl.
And at the end of the day the system blames the teacher.
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