2 posts tagged “teachers”

Teachers underpaid?

Come on now.

I have fantastic benefits for myself, wife, and kid. Medical/dental/vision. I have the summer off if I want it. I have two weeks off during Christmas. A week for spring break. Nearly a week for Thanksgiving. Couple of days for Memorial Day. Holidays in every month except October and March. Paid jury duty for as long as needed. I get sick, I can take a day off. My wife delivers a baby, I can take a few days. Personal emergency? Day off. Doctor's appointment? Day off. All paid.

Oh, and if I do choose to work summer school, I work half days and STILL end up with a month off. I get a raise every year as long as I don't get fired. I can get a master's degree in basket weaving and my pay will go up.

Teachers underpaid, teachers underpaid, teachers underpaid.

Plus we all should get the same, regardless of what we teach, how we teach it, how hard we work at it, how knowledgable we are about our subject(s) etc. And of course, we should get more.

It's getting embarrassing.

Not to say that teaching is easy. Most teachers work hard, as far as I can tell. I'm fortunate to work alongside fantastic, motivated teachers who teach me a lot and have fun doing it. I enjoy teaching, and I love what I teach. I think my colleagues do as well. We put in exrtra hours, take work home, work on weekends, and we lug whatever happened in the classroom along with us, good or bad, whether we're at home, school, recreation, whatever. However, teachers don't have the market cornered when it comes to employees working late or taking work home. I will not presume to act as if my profession is put upon because we have to work outside our contractual obligations. In fact, if I had to presume anything, I would presume that working late, working extra, and working weekends is something that most hardworking professionals encounter once in awhile. And now we're back to summers off, weeks and days of vacation, all kinds of sick leave, fantastic benefits (and who gets that? Oh yeah, teachers), and I'm getting tired of hearing spokespersons, supposedly speaking for me, making me sound like a victimized crybaby.

I AM NOT UNDERPAID. Would I like more? Sure. Do I deserve more? Maybe. But I know for sure that I don't deserve to make as much as some teachers with my experience, and there are others with my experience who don't deserve what I make. And as long as the big wigs at national union headquartes fight any attempt to differentiate between educators, I doubt teachers who "deserve" more will get more. I'm a hard worker. Many teachers are hard workers. But we all don't work the same, and we are not all equally in demand, so to expect us to be uniformally paid on par with those in other industries who are in high demand is ridiculous.

Teachers know the pay and benefits before they start. No one tricked us. No one victimized us. We can leave any time we want, but on the whole, we've got a good gig going.I get a kick out of teaching. It's fun, it's never dull, and it's a chance to learn and increase my own education on a regular basis. AND I get time with my family. I've got very little to complain about, and I'm sure as hell not a victim.

According to NEA today, "inflexible 'highly qualified' teacher and education support professional provisions that hinder the recruitment and retention of qualified educators" hurts our ability to educate kids.

I'm not sure what's so bad about an inflexible "highly qualified" restriction for a "professional educator." I understand "highly qualified" is being used somewhat disparagingly in the article, but I also notice that their own "qualified educators" (parentheses mine) appear without the mocking quotation marks. So "highly qualified" restrictions keep us from getting QUALIFIED teachers, who for whatever reason avoid/can't handle/can't meet  the "highly qualified" criteria.

I'm uncomfortable with automatically assuming that the "highly qualified" provisions should be so flippantly dismissed, and I would really like to understand the criteria by which NEA is identifying those qualified educators. If NEA today were proposing that experts in a given field should be allowed to teach in public institutions even if they haven't completed a state credentialing program, then I might be interested in hearing more.

Unfortunately, I've read one too many articles bemoaning the fact that "qualified" teachers are being restricted from the teaching field because they are unable to pass basic competency exams like the CBEST (I'm not taking a crack at anyone who fails a test such as the CBEST, but I am AMAZED at the gall someone would have to have in order to FAIL the CBEST and THEN COMPLAIN that they are being restricted from the teaching  profession). Anyway, this whole "hinder(s) the recruitment" business smacks of lowering standards for professional educators. I'm not against rearranging how we assess expertise of teachers (in fact I think a good deal of qualified teachers are indeed excluded or turned off by the hoop-jumping gymnastics required to navigate credentialing programs that are ultimately lacking in academic rigor), but we cannot downplay the importance of subject matter expertise in public school teachers.