Posted on 09/20/2015 8:11:40 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
What's behind the drop off in African American teachers? The answer is more complicated than you may think.
While the percentage of minority teachers has risen in the US, the number of black teachers has declined between 2002 and 20012 in nine cities, according to a recent study by the Albert Shanker Institute.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
It’s a lot harder to try to teach in an environment not conducive to learning, so they eventually lose their idealism and try to get into suburban schools where they don’t face such difficulties. Pretty simple, really.
Thank you for saying all that. People don’t realize. I mean, if teaching is such a cushy job, why don’t more people want to do it, eh? Like right now. I’m heading for the laundromat with about 170 essay intros to grade. That’s every single weekend.
I teach special ed. No curriculum, no budget. I can either do paperwork, and dot the "i"s, cross the "t"s, OR teach. There's so much paperwork, you literally cannot do both anymore.
Black kids are way more likely to assault teachers than white kids or Asian kids. The black teachers are directed to inner city schools in the belief that black kids have to have black teachers, leading to greater odds they’ll be assaulted.
I can't wait to retire, really. I can do it in six years. I'll be living on a pittance, but that's okay. I'll pick up a second career. Bartending, maybe.
“Other correct answers include, “They don’t want their own children condemned to the educational hell-hole in which they themselves work and they cannot afford private schools.””
That article was obviously heavily influenced by the teachers unions. Very biased in favor of higher pay for teachers and anti-standardized testing.
Two of my favorite questions are these:
First question: “why do you want to pay teachers higher salaries?” Answer: “if we pay higher salaries, we’ll get better teachers.”
Follow up question: “If you get better teachers, what are you going to do with the ones you have now? The one’s that aren’t good enough.”
Teachers average roughly 1250-1400 hours at work. That compares quite unfavorably to the 2000 hours per year typical of other FTE's.
In my district, the average pay for 1260 hours per year is $42,500. That compares to an average $46,000 for 2000 hours in this community. That's NOT being underpaid.
I heard -- and still hear -- teachers whine all the time about how many hours they have to spend outside of class preparing for the job. Guess what? Welcome to the world of being a professional. Most successful professionals spend 10-15 hours per week more for various kinds of uncompensated overtime. Get used to it. It's what professionals do.
Evidently, these black teachers are smart enough to know they don’t want to teach in urban areas.
...............
That would make them racist, if they were white.
Try telling that to my wife. Nurse Practitioner, taught biology as a lifestyle decision. Said it wasn't worth it and went back to nursing.
Teachers average roughly 1250-1400 hours at work.
Lets see, 90 days of school per semester plus one week before the classes begins and one week after classes end. That gives 5 + 90 + 90 + 5 = 190 days @ 8 hours per day = 1520 hours per year.
First question: “why do you want to pay teachers higher salaries?” Answer: “if we pay higher salaries, we’ll get better teachers.”
Follow up question: “If you get better teachers, what are you going to do with the ones you have now? The one’s that aren’t good enough.”
☺
Related question: Administrators & "associations" are tasked with hiring the best people and, respectively, raising the caliber of their members (yeah, right). Is it time to begin clearing out the dead wood in those two groups before an uncontrollable forest fire breaks out?
[mutter, mutter, mutter..."Never happen!", says the old grouch, "never happen".]
Here in NJ our public school teachers are our upper middle class, and none of those I know do anything you describe. I also work by a school, and we watch the exodus at 3:01 every afternoon. No other job pays so much money for so little results; they fear competition for a reason. They are unemployable in the private sector. What you are calling “uncompensated time” is in fact the work they throw in critics’ faces, so it IS compensated; in the private sector (where we are expected to pay those teachers) we actually have unpaid overtime...
Check out this salary info on NJ teachers from the Asbury Park Press: http://php.app.com/edstaff/search.php
When they started releasing it years ago (as public information) it carried Christie into office and made those teachers pariahs. Oh, and they don’t do any work outside of their 30 hours per week. They work less than half the year (between 180 and 182 days), and part-time hours each day.
You don’t know how much work they are taking home. I know I spend several hours every weekend grading papers and entering the grades in the system on my laptop at home.
I know they are taking nothing home, and emails sent to teachers are answered during the next school day. Like tokens at my job, it is easy to claim they are working when it is impossible to verify/quantify the work.
But maybe you'll be able to fool someone whose family didn't spend an aggregate of 40 years in the life...
Wow. That's an absolutely crushing burden.
Try talking to a professional software developer sometime; and don't be too hurt when she laughs in your face about "several hours a weekend," constituting a brutal workload.
Software developers always work 40 hours a week, minimum. On a "death march" during the last three to six weeks before a major deadline, they often work an additional 25-35 hours per week. Unlike many teachers, they aren't covered by contractual overtime [and they aren't covered by the wage law], which means not only do they not receive comp-time or time-and-a-half for working those extra hours, they aren't compensated for them at all. [And God help them if there's a major glitch post-release, when they may have to work literally around-the-clock to push out a hotfix to tens of thousands or millions of customers.]
Most sales people are paid only a fraction of the additional time they have to spend in travel. Yes, they pad their mileage and charges against per diems, and their employers let them get away with it because the padding amounts to pennies on the dollar, and we know it.
Trade surveys say that people in executive management and sole-proprietorship with time-in-service under 20 years spend an average of 52 hours per week on the job. That's more than an extra week of work every single month of the first two decades of their careers.
As I said in my original post: What you are complaining about is the price of being a college educated white collar professional. ALL PROFESSIONAL PEOPLE SPEND EXTRA HOURS ON THEIR JOBS ONCE THE WORK DAY ENDS.
You aren't being asked to do anything except what everyone else does. And you're only being asked to do it for 183-195 days per year.
Those paras who do the grunt-work average $10-$15/hour [and they must have bachelor's degrees], and freely admit they accept the crappy pay so they can be home with their kids during the summer and shortly after the school day ends. [For many paras the most important part of their compensation is healthcare, not cash on the barrelhead.]
I’ll say to you what I say to everyone who thinks teaching is an easy job: if it’s so easy, come do it. And keep doing it. Stick with it. Do it for 30 years. Come on, it’s a breeze. And we especially need people like you, who know everything.
And let's pay you based on their test scores!!
I know - there is no amount of telling people to "scaffold" their lessons that can compensate for that. Worse yet, all the kids know.
Yes. So often, slow mental abilities travel hand-in-hand with stunted emotional development. So you aren’t just dealing with an intellectual capacity problem. You’re dealing with a child whom you want to teach adult skills. The child doesn’t want to learn adult skills. The child wants candy.
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