Tag teacher pay

What We Need In Education: The Need for Education

Dusty 2 Comments

I’m feeling a little bitter this morning (Not better, bitter. Bitterer?), so I think the hopeful and thankful tone of last week is not going to happen. I had a dream last night in which I walked away from a student end-of-year celebration, thinking I’ve wasted my life, because I’ve spent it helping students instead of doing what I want to do. That’s not fair (When are dreams ever fair?), because I most definitely haven’t wasted my life, I haven’t spent all of my time teaching and helping students, and the time I have spent helping other people is well-spent, and I am proud of it. Still: I had a rough week this last week, dealing with classes that are ready to be done even though there are months left in the school year, and I’m ready to be done, as well; so I’m a little bitter.

But I already blew an entire once-a-week post on tangents and side issues instead of getting to the point, so I’m not going to do that this time. Unfortunately, I’ve also realized that I’m not sure my insights into what we need to do with education are worth all this buildup; which goes to show that I should spend more time getting to the point and also developing the point before I write and post these. As I said last week, things take time. And since I don’t have a lot of time — I am currently stealing time from three other things I need to do this weekend in order to write this — the quality suffers. Hopefully it’s still worth reading. I’ll try to make it so.

Now, I’ve already written about my ideal school, so I’m not going to do that again. Rather, this post is in response to the comment I have heard and seen more times than I can count in the last year:

Something has to change.

Something in education has to change. This year has been too hard on everyone, but particularly on teachers, who are leaving the profession in droves. I don’t know that I have an idea to fix that, because first, I don’t blame them; I’ve thought about leaving as well, this year more than most; and second, it’s already done: it would be better to try to retain the teachers we still have, and work to recruit new teachers, than to try to bring back the teachers who are burnt out and alienated and don’t want to teach any more. It’s certainly possible that they will come back voluntarily if we make the system better, and that would be good all around.

So that is the goal today. How do we make the system better?

Here are my thoughts.

The first and biggest problem with education in this country isn’t teacher retention; it’s inequity. This country has systemic inequity in the education system, and that has created large-scale inequity along racial and class lines, for generations. Which was, of course, the intended result and the reason why the unequal system was created in the first place. But after Brown v. Board of Education, when segregated schools were no longer legal, the systemic inequity continued, and still exists today, for one main reason: local funding of schools. Most schools are funded by local property taxes. Supposedly because that allows for local control, and for people in a place to have ownership of their local schools; but really, it’s so that the people in rich, predominantly white areas can have the very best schools for their kids, while the people in poorer areas — particularly rural areas and urban areas, where the property tax base is small and property values are low — cannot have the very best schools, and cannot close the gap either in funding or in achievement for their students. This plays out in a hundred different ways: teachers are paid better by the richer districts, which means they stay longer, and generally speaking the better trained and more experienced teachers will migrate towards the wealthier areas. Richer schools have more resources for technology and new curriculum materials, as well as for more programs of all kinds — tech programs, vocational programs, language programs, and so on. This funding problem only gets exacerbated with school funding proposals and referenda, which local districts often propose in order to pay for capital improvements and deferred building maintenance projects; poorer areas are unlikely to vote to raise taxes for local schools, where wealthier areas are more willing to pay more on top of property taxes when there is a need. So over time, the physical buildings in poorer areas fall apart, and become more expensive to maintain while also being impossible to replace; thus more funding is lost to just keeping the lights on and the building heated (or cooled), which also then impacts the funding available for all other needs, squeezing the poorer schools even further.

This truth, by the way, is the main argument behind the rise of charter schools, which allow families in poorer districts to escape the poor schools in their area; this of course doesn’t solve the problem, particularly because charter schools are underregulated and often shady. Trust me: I work for a charter school. And while my school is one of the longer-established and better schools, there are still issues that would not exist if it were a public school. And regardless, giving some kids an escape doesn’t help the kids who can’t get into the schools; traditionally those with learning disabilities, low achievement scores, language barriers, or lack of transportation (because charter schools generally do not provide transportation).

So the first thing we need to do, before anything else, before we discuss curriculum or school structure or even teacher retention, is to equalize funding. The easier way is to do it at the state level, which several states have already done; the only truly fair way is to do it federally. Collect all the money that currently gets paid in local property taxes, put it in one federal fund, and then distribute it to all public school districts in the country. I would say (not having any idea of the actual numbers) 60-75% as a baseline funding for all schools, with the additional 25-40% going to those districts most in need, those with broken down school buildings and ancient textbooks and no technology, and so on. The kids in lower Manhattan and San Francisco can make do with last year’s textbooks for a little while. This article in Forbes shows why this is a good idea for everyone. Even more, it’s just the right thing to do.

Okay: once we’ve got that problem solved, the next problem is teacher retention. (Don’t be surprised: just because it wasn’t the first issue doesn’t mean I’m going to boot teachers down to the bottom of the priority list. I am a teacher, after all.) Now, part of this issue is a done deal: we’ve abused and undervalued teachers for decades, but ratcheted the abuse up in the last two years, and we’ve already broken thousands upon thousands of teachers. That’s all done. It’s going to be really goddamn ugly for the next few years. Some schools have already had to close for lack of staff, and that’s only going to happen more; all of those kids are going to be stuck going to school online for some period of time. Nothing we can do about it other than try to hurry to fix things starting from here.

So the two things we need to do to recruit and retain good teachers are: one, stop abusing them; and two, value them fairly. The second one is easy: pay us more. I’ve been a teacher for 22 years, and I’ve never been paid what I’m worth. Oregon came close, but they also froze my pay for four years after the Great Recession hit (Another reason to use federal funding as a mechanism for all school districts: it would help cushion the blow in the areas hardest hit by economic downturns. Let the districts where the American oligarchs pay taxes make up for the places where people are out of work. Oh wait — the oligarchs don’t pay taxes. Silly me. We should fix that, too. I have a suggestion.), so that wasn’t reflective of my value as a teacher. I moved to Arizona for good and understandable reasons — and took a 40% pay cut when I did. Eight years later, I’m still not making what I made twelve years ago. But at least the cost of living has kept going up. Yes, I have good benefits, and that’s an excellent thing; but also, teachers should be paid more. Simple. I’d like to see a 20% raise across the board; I figure we can fire 75% of the administration and make the numbers work. That’s not a dig at administrators, by the way, who are generally well-meaning people who work incredibly hard; but they would, in my opinion, serve education far better simply by taking up classroom teaching. I’d be happy to see every administrator cut for budget purposes offered a chance to become teachers. We’ll need their help.

In terms of ending the abuse of teachers, it has to begin with working hours. There is no reason whatsoever why teaching has to be a career that requires more than 40 hours a week. We don’t actually teach 40 hours a week, so it should be possible to get all of the work done within the standard 8-hour day — except for two things: teachers have too many students, and too many responsibilities. That’s the abuse. We are required to just keep working even when overburdened with students and classes; we are expected to give up any time that is necessary to have meetings or to complete paperwork and such — and then on top of that, we are socially expected to do things like coach sports, or direct plays, or take field trips, or run extracurricular clubs, all for free, and all for the sake of the children. Look: I’m a teacher. You want a coach, hire one. You want an activities director, hire one. You want a clown, hire one. I teach. That’s what I do. It’s enough. I used to teach 150-200 students at a time, which was absurd; at my charter school, that’s down to more like 100-120 — and it’s still too much. As a high school English teacher, I need time to read and grade essays, and to give feedback on their work; I think I could handle 75-80 students at a time, within a 40-hour week. Give me that, and I will do a better job with the students. It will be worth it, believe me.

And I still want that 20% raise, too. You all owe me for the literally thousands of children I have already helped while simultaneously skimping on my personal budget and worrying about being able to pay my bills.

Okay. Those are the first two things. Now let’s get a little more imaginative.

One thing that I’ve seen in the last year, which actually might give us a chance to take some of the pressure off of schools, is the fact that some students really like online learning. Some really thrive when they don’t have to come into the school building. I definitely think it has to be done right, but if it is, we have an opportunity to not only make up for some of the worst of the local inequalities, but also to solve a problem of getting good teachers to work in unattractive areas: let them live anywhere and teach students who also live anywhere, students who don’t want to come into local schools for any one of a thousand reasons. This will allow us to relieve the worst overcrowding, and to offer larger program options even to students in out of the way places, along with greater resource access for those who need it. Of course, this will require both national broadband infrastructure of a sufficient quality to enable students everywhere to access teachers everywhere, and also a national curriculum. Both are an incredibly good idea, by the way, though I know neither one is practically possible right now. So maybe put a pin in that for now. Having done it for the last two years, seat-of-our-pants online teaching is not better than in person, not for anyone, not even for those kids who prefer it. But long term, it’s genuinely a good opportunity.

But that’s just an observation, based on the students I’ve been working with for the last two years. Let’s get to my ideas. Ready?

Idea #1: Age Is Just A Number

My friend and colleague Lisa has been teaching adult education students (In addition to teaching a full load of high school students. Because she doesn’t get paid enough.) for the last couple of years, and one thing she has frequently commented on is that they are much easier to work with. Because they want to be there. I ranted last week about how absurd it is that we insist on deadlines for education, that we require all students to start at the same age, and that we then require them all to finish at the same time, having all learned at the same pace. And there is literally no reason for it.

So my first idea is this: let people come to school whenever they want — and don’t make them come to school when they don’t want. If they want to drop out at 13, let them. I’ve written before about my friend Carlos’s brilliant idea of a half time in education: Carlos, like me, was a good student through elementary and middle school, and then a terrible student in high school — and then a good student again in college. Because that’s when we wanted to learn, when we wanted to be there. The teenage years for me, educationally, were useless, as they are for thousands and thousands of students. This is much of the problem that my colleagues and I are dealing with right now: because we have students that don’t want to be there, who don’t want to learn, and they are deeply frustrating and terribly draining, requiring extra attention and effort from everyone involved just to deal with them.

So don’t deal with them. Don’t make them come.

Part of me wants to advocate for the European system, where students can choose to take a vocational track and then finish school at 16 to enter the workforce; but that would still put years of frustration on teachers and students and families and everyone involved with those kids who just don’t want to be there. So I’m going to go with this: let them stop going to school whenever they want to (I do think we should have a base education level required, say 8th grade). Let them stay home and play video games if they want; let them go to work if they want. And then, ten years or twenty years or fifty years from now, when they want to go back to 9th grade, let them. Because there is not one single solitary reason why 9th graders all have to be 14 or 15 years old. Grouping students by their birthdays is insane; if I needed to actually prove that (I don’t, because give me one good reason why we do it. I’ll wait.) all I have to do is point at community colleges, where I sat my 19-year-old just-out-of-high-school self next to people of all ages, from 20 to 80, and all of us learned together.

Now: I realize that ending mandatory school leads to a serious potential for abuse, and also losing education due to simple apathy. Teenagers, when given the choice, will all elect to sit at home and play video games for the rest of their lives, and that would be bad for everyone. Well, first, of course, not all teenagers would do that: many of them want to be in school, want to learn, want to progress towards their life goals. And second, many of the ones who dropped out to play video games would decide to go back within a year. You should have heard them complain about staying home during the pandemic. You should have seen how happy they were to be around each other at school again when we came back. But admittedly, many students would drop out for no good reason — and there would be far too many families who would remove their children from school in order to make them work. And also far too many students who would be driven out of education by unjust treatment at the hands of racist or sexist or variously prejudicial and biased schools.

So here’s what we do about that.

Idea #2: Pay students to come to school.

When adults look to go back to finish an interrupted or shoddy education, pay them. Give them the chance to become more educated, more productive, and better citizens. When kids go to school and learn, pay their families. Want to give parents who don’t value education a reason to make sure their kids stay in school and learn? PAY THEM.

For too long we have relied on the abstract ideal of “Education is good” to serve as motivation for students to learn. It’s never worked well, as I can attest personally. It has fallen apart completely now: one of my classes told me, clearly and without hesitation, that they would rather underachieve and learn less, because it meant they would have to do less work. I asked them if it would shame them, make them feel stupid, if they did poor work; they said it would not. “Education is good” is not motivating. Because for most kids, it’s simply bullshit.

Bullshit walks. Money talks. Pay them.

We can talk about paying them more if they get good grades (Though I would also like to suggest we eliminate grades), but I think that allows for the possibility of corruption and kickbacks to teachers who will hand out As for profit. Simple attendance will be a good metric. If we also then give teachers and schools the genuine ability to remove students from the classroom, for discipline and behavior problems, or as a sort of wake-up call if they are not progressing — you know, “Stay home for a week and study more, then come back” — then there is an immediate financial incentive for the family to help solve the problem. This is currently lacking, and it’s part of the reason why schools are struggling: we do not have the support of parents any more. I want to say it’s because families don’t value education, but I suspect it’s simply because families are struggling.

So pay them. You want to say that capitalism and the free market are the key to innovation and motivation? Awesome: let’s put that theory to the test with schools.

Imagine if a single parent with two or three or four kids could actually earn a living wage just by going to school with their kids. By ensuring that their kids go to classes — which would be far easier if they were in the same building, or if they were close by in the local high school, or what have you. The whole family could sit down to do homework together, because everyone would be in the same boat, and everyone would have an incentive to study and improve in order to stay in school and continue earning the wage. If we extend this wage into community college, we could actually help people move out of minimum wage employment, without asking them to do the impossible by adding education to a full load of work and family needs; they could quit their jobs, or cut back hours, and go to school, for money. We could provide the bootstraps by which people could lift themselves up.

This is going on longer than I intended, and I suspect just these two ideas are enough for people to start thinking about (Hopefully nobody really needs to think about the need to achieve funding equity for every student in this nation, or the need to pay teachers more), but I want to make just one content/curriculum suggestion. Again, I have a thought for an overhaul of the entire system of subjects that we teach in schools; check my school plan post linked above; but there’s a more general suggestion I want to make before I close this up and post it.

Idea #3: Education For Life

As I said, the idea of education for education’s sake, while I happen to agree with it, as I believe that education is valuable for everyone in every circumstance, is too abstract and too disconnected from daily life to be motivating any longer. Schools and teachers need to accept this, and to adapt to the current view, which is: experience teaches better than school.

Now, that isn’t true. Experience does teach, surely, but it teaches very concretely, with two obvious downsides: one, it doesn’t allow for higher-level thinking, thinking outside the box, thinking of new ways to do something by drawing on areas of knowledge not obviously part of a specific endeavor — for example, my brother studied music composition in college, and then went to work as a computer programmer; his experience as a computer programmer, combined with his knowledge of music, is what made his current project possible: a new way to make and record electronic music. If he hadn’t studied music, he wouldn’t be able to do what he is doing now; his experience as a computer programmer would essentially only allow him to program computers. I have a dozen different areas of knowledge that I draw on to teach English: history and politics and economics and science and music and pop culture and role-playing games and so on. This argument combines with the second problem with experience as teacher: it takes time. Of course everything takes time, but learning ideas in a classroom, concepts from a book or the internet or what have you, and then extrapolating those ideas into specific circumstances, is a far more efficient and effective way to figure things out and get things done than simply to live through every circumstance once so you know what to do the second time. Everything I’ve said as examples of the value of education over experience could all be achieved through experience, of course — but that takes longer.

The third problem with experience as a teacher? It hurts more. Sure, you learn how to ride a bike by falling down; but learning from a textbook doesn’t scrape your knees and crack your skull. (I’m aware that riding a bike is not a good example of something that could be learned from a textbook, but the point is still valid. Learning from the school of hard knocks involves taking hard knocks; think of it as having to go through the pain of having a terrible boss, and being abused and put upon because you’re the new guy or the intern. Experience teaches you through suffering. School does not. At least, it doesn’t have to.)

All that being said, it is hard to see the value of learning the subjects we learn in school. Because we have no idea how they apply to life. And I don’t mean as students: teachers have no idea how most of our subjects apply to life. We know how we use them: we teach them. It’s important for us to know history and algebra and grammar. But when students ask the very fair and reasonable question “When are we ever going to need this?” we most often have to fall back on one of two answers: later on in your education, giving rise to that terrible lie we’ve all had thrown at us: “You’ll need this in middle school!” followed by “You’ll need to know this in high school!” followed by “Your professors in college will require this!” when the skill in question is writing in cursive, and actually none of us need that, ever.

Or the other answer: shut up. Learn it because I said so.

This has to change, too. Teachers have to actually figure out how the content and skills we teach translate to value in real life. We need to be able to justify it to our students, and to ourselves. And if we can’t justify it: we should stop teaching it — or at least stop requiring it. Frankly, higher math, much of history, several of the sciences, and quite a lot of literature should only be taught as electives. Unless, that is, we can find a way to connect it to the real world.

I think we can. I teach dystopian fiction because it connects to the real world. I teach argument because it is a necessary skill in the real world, and the same with rhetoric. I tell my students that the ability to read and understand poetry will be applicable in their lives: but that’s pretty much bullshit. But it’s bullshit only because I haven’t found a direct connection to the real world for the poetry I teach — because I haven’t tried. Could I find one? I think so, yeah.

I know where I would start looking. I have a friend who is a poet. I have another friend who is a lawyer, but who is a passionate devotee of poetry. I would ask them.

I would ask other people too: and then I would have those people come in to talk to my students about poetry and why poetry is useful for them. And I would take my students out to see them at their work, in their lives, and see where poetry — or algebra, or geometry, or computer science, or Spanish — is useful in the real world.

That’s the last thing we need to do. We need to stop allowing schools to turn into ivory towers. The separation between schools and the “real world,” as if schools are not in the real world, as if teachers and students are not real people, as if somehow the purpose of school is separate from the real world, is why people don’t trust the education system, and why students don’t care about learning: because they don’t see the point of learning stuff they don’t know when they will ever need. And that’s a fair criticism. It’s annoying as hell when they’re arguing with me about what I want to teach them, especially considering how much I love my subject; but it’s a fair point. The stuff I teach them should be useful, or else I shouldn’t teach it.

So I and other educators should work with the community. Bring people in to schools, bring students out of schools into the world. As much as possible. Field trips, guest speakers, guest teachers, internships, anything and everything. This goes back to the point about letting students leave school if they don’t want to be there: school is boring and feels pointless. So we need to make school more interesting, and to make sure that everyone involved knows the point. If we can talk to people in the community who can explain how they used what they learned in school, then not only will students see the actual value of learning something (And while that may be limited to the one specific engineer, say, who uses geometry every day, which would only interest students who want to be engineers — until we bring in the professional billiards player, who uses geometry in every shot. And the muralist, who uses geometry to plan out the project before putting paint on the wall. That’s why we have to bring in as much of the outside world as possible: to show the incredible variety of the world, and the people in it, and the countless ways that education can connect to it, and them. To show students those possibilities.), but also, teachers will see a new and interesting and current and vibrant way to teach the skill. We’ll have a reason to teach the skill, and not just because it’s in the required curriculum, or it’s on the test. Part of the reason school is boring is because teachers are boring, and it’s because we teach abstract skills for reasons we don’t even understand, and can’t even explain; that’s why we default to saying “You’ll need this in next year’s class,” or even worse, “Because it’s on the test!” We’ve forgotten the reason for education, and it’s destroying education. We do not educate people simply for the sake of education: we do it because education is how people get better at life. So let’s make use of that. As much as possible. For God’s sake: education is for life: so let’s bring life back into education.

Students need education. Everyone needs education. But we have to understand why people need education before we can give them the education they need. Maybe my ideas aren’t the way to get this done: but we have to do something.

Doing something will mean a lot of work — which is also why I deserve that raise, along with everyone else who takes on this task. But we have to fix the problem. And if we don’t, if we ignore the problem, then nothing we do will matter, because the whole system will collapse entirely. It’s already teetering. Parts are already falling off. We can keep applying ineffective bandaids — or we can try something new.

I say we try something new.

What do you think?

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I don’t get paid enough.

I know that’s not a complaint unique to me, and it’s not one unique to teachers. But it’s the truth: I don’t get paid enough. The job is appallingly stressful, and also poorly paid compared to other careers with similar requirements as to education and credentials. 11.1% less than comparable careers, according to this article. In the past, this was compensated for by the benefits, which were better than most other careers offered; now, of course, that is no longer true. Teacher benefits are not any better than most other careers, or not much; and it still doesn’t make up for the pay  gap — that article actually shows that teacher pay is 18.7% less than other careers; the 7% boost in benefits that teachers average is what brings us to almost ten percent lower pay.

Almost.

But none of this is news, neither to you nor to me.

What was news, though, was this. Turns out, I’m paid WAY better than I thought.

I got this — letter — in the mail. It describes my compensation.

This is strange for a few reasons.

First, because why is this in the mail? Why wouldn’t it be an email?

Second, because — I already know my compensation? I signed a contract for the year with a number on it; that number doesn’t change. It’s a year-long contract. That’s what I get paid. There isn’t any change to my compensation in the letter. (There is a single notification that they will be increasing their 401k contribution. But that’s buried in the 5th paragraph, and doesn’t apply to me since I don’t donate to a 401k so they don’t match.) So why send it?

The letter says (And I would include a picture, but I don’t actually want to throw the school I work for under the bus; even for those who know what school I work for, this post should not and will not have their name on it, so as not to make this inappropriate for an employee to post. I thought about redacting names and addresses and such and then posting an image, but the company logo is in the background of the compensation chart. Is that why they used letterhead? To prevent me from doing exactly this? Whatever: the letter is addressed to me, it’s my property; I’m going to share its contents, at least in  part. Consider it part of my compensation.) “The leadership is pleased to provide you with your annual, personalized total compensation statement.”

Notice it doesn’t say why they’re pleased to share this with me. I’ve worked there for five years, my wife has worked for the same school for three years; we’ve never gotten these letters until this year, when we both got one.

It goes on to say that my compensation package includes a benefit program “designed to furnish you with protection against financial devastation due to illness, disability, loss of work, retirement, or death.” As a rhetoric teacher, I find the order of the items on that list fascinating. The letter also says that my compensation package includes the contributions made directly by my employer. A strange statement: contributions to me? Of course. Contributions to a third party? How is that my compensation? Is this like one of those deals where you donate to a charity in someone’s name and call it a Christmas gift?

The letter says that some of these benefits are mandated by state and federal law, but “most” are provided by the company because “your wellbeing is important to us.” Then they encourage me to review the statement and share it with my family, so that they are aware of the benefits that apply to them. Seriously? You think my family doesn’t know what benefits I have? You think if my family doesn’t know, it’s because I forgot to tell them? They do, actually, because it says, “Often our day-to-day responsibilities distract us from truly knowing and understanding what protections we have and the value of that protection for our loved ones.”

So they think I don’t actually know what my compensation is. Not my TOTAL compensation. Including contributions made by the company. Well, let’s turn this bad boy over and look at the graph on the back!

Here’s what we see: a header that reads “Cash Compensation and Benefits Summary,” over a passage that reads: “The amount of your total compensation is much more than what is indicated in your yearly earnings statement. In addition to direct pay, your total compensation includes the value of your health care insurance, disability, life insurance, retirement benefits, and government mandated benefits.”

Oh it does, does it?  See, I was under the impression that my compensation was what you paid me. Money that goes to the government doesn’t seem like my money, somehow. I also like how they’re taking credit for what the government mandates. “And also, we didn’t murder you. Not once. That’s 365 days  of no murder, every year. You’re welcome.”

Regardless, here’s where the breakdown starts. And it’s immediately weird, because it has my salary (That would be the “direct pay,” which all other compensation is in addition to) as $48,585. Then it adds the $2,200 I earned for being Highly Effective on my last evaluation, to hit $50,785. But the odd thing is, my contract salary is actually $46,785. And that includes the $2200.

Well, they must be including some of the value of my insurance and so on.

But no, because the next row is where we hit the insurance: my contribution ($6,557.98 annually for employee+spouse for medical, $609.96 for dental, $67.08 for vision) next to the company contribution, which is $7,386.02, apparently. Now interestingly, when you add up my three contributions,  which this form does not do, you get $7235.02. That is a lot closer to their number than the single number that theirs is listed next to, which is just my medical contribution. Why, if I were the suspicious sort, I might think they intentionally put their largest possible number next to a number that is not as large as it could be, so that  their number seems relatively higher.

Good thing I’m not the suspicious sort.

We drop down a few rows of zeroes, because I don’t have life insurance listed on here (Which is also odd, because in fact, I do have life insurance  through the company, as does my wife. Maybe the value of that explains the discrepancy in my salary. But you’d think that value would go here, and also, since the life insurance policy is, if I recall correctly, for $50,000, I’d think they’d stack all $50K onto my total compensation. Maybe they could offer a murder program so I could collect on those benefits. Anyhoo.) or long term disability or HSA contributions. Then we hit the Social Security and Medicare contributions. Mine are $3885.05, and the company’s are the same.

See, here’s that Charitable-Gift-In-Your-Name thing. It’s real nice that the company gives money to the government — also known as “taxes” — but I don’t see how that’s my compensation. It’s not money that I owed the government. I paid the government what I owed them. You could argue that I will get that money back from the government in my SS and Medicare benefits, but we all know that’s not necessarily true. So I question this being part of my “total compensation.”

Hey — it must because this is a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, so really, the taxes the government collects? That’s my money. My compensation.

Then we hit a subtotal line, where they put my contributions at $11,120.07, and my employer’s at $11,271.07. (I’m really just curious now about that extra $151.) And then comes the final math and the grand total. Ready?

“Cash compensation,” $50,785. Benefits, $11,271.07. Total, $62,056.07.

Hold on. So not only are we including the company’s contributions to Medicare and Social Security — you know, paying their own payroll taxes — but also, we are NOT subtracting MY contributions to the same government funds? Nor my payments for my medical insurance? So the money I pay to the government, and to the insurance company, which I never get to spend, is somehow still my money? And the money the company pays to the government, which I also never get to spend, is also my money?

Here’s what I really want to know. I want to know why the administration can’t comprehend debits and credits, first of all; but really, I want to know why they sent me this paper. To make me think that they pay me better than they do? Even though I see what’s on my check and what’s in my bank account? Is this so that if anyone questions their budget numbers, they can claim this is what they actually pay me — are they hiding money somewhere, and using this letter to blur the numbers? Is this so that teachers will think that we already get a big enough piece of the pie, and thus we won’t demand more money? Because they’ve magicked another $15,000 into my compensation? I can accept their contribution to my medical insurance as my compensation; I gain a benefit from that, namely medical insurance. But that still only puts me at $54,171.02 (The actual $46,785 on the contract I signed plus their somewhat dubious number for company contribution to my medical insurance).Where’s my other eight grand, homey? DUSTY NEEDS A NEW PAIR OF SHOES.

This upsets me. Partly because they think I’ll believe this nonsense. Partly because they seem to be imagining me not only buying this wholesale, but then proudly sitting down to share this with my family so they can see just how much bacon Daddy brings home. Partly because this is the kind of shit that gets out into the world and gives dumbass anti-teacher conservatives their ridiculous arguments about how well-compensated teachers are. “Hey, I wish I made $60,000 a year!!!” I’m just surprised this paper doesn’t also say, “And look, you get summers off! And you only work until 3 in the afternoon, and most of your job is just playing with kids, right? Am I right?”

No. You’re not right.  You already pay me less than what I’m worth: don’t try to dazzle me with this malarkey. It just gives you one more reason why you should be apologizing to me.

You already have enough of those.

 

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, I’m embarrassed: apparently my groundbreaking new idea for a school is — a Montessori school. And here I thought I was so clever. I guess it’s true that there are no new ideas, that everything’s already been thought of, and all we can do is change the wording or add a digital clock to it. (That’s an old joke now, of course. Who even has clocks any more?)

Well, this morning, I’m going to say the same thing I said when I realized that my first novel was strongly based on other books I’d read: So what? So what if the idea isn’t mine: I make it mine by spending my time and thought on it. I shape it, convert it, change it, even if it’s only a little bit — whoever first put digital clocks into stoves and coffeepots is responsible for making me aware of the time more than any damn clockmaker — and then it is no longer the story it was, it is the story I made it. Shakespeare didn’t come up with his stories, either — but he told them better than anyone else ever has, before or since.

(In case you’re wondering, my first novel was intentionally based on Harry Potter — 11-year-old boy with a sad home life finds out he’s one of a group of magical people — but about a third of the way into writing it, I also realized that it was a multi-layered narrative about a lonely kid, with a father but no mother, who reads books and tells stories and has vivid dreams of himself being a hero in a magical land called Illusia. Ever read The Neverending Story? Yeah, me too.)

So let’s get back to the matter at hand: my Montessori-rip-off dream school. In Sunday’s post I described how the school would work: students take individual units from subject-matter teachers, advancing to the next unit only when they master this unit, but able to schedule their units in any order and at any pace they like; and they graduate when they complete a set number of units. There will be more to graduation, because school is not (or should not be) solely about classwork, but today let’s focus on the most important part of this school of mine: the teachers.

That’s right: the teachers are the most important part of school. They’re not the only necessary part, because without students, a teacher is just a crazy person talking to desks and walls and making PowerPoint presentations in the darkest hours of the morning; but teachers are more important than students because one of us can provide for dozens and scores of them, and because one student is more easily replaceable than one  teacher. And if you are a student  and your feelings are hurt by that, deal with it; I said you were necessary. In an abstract sense, you are the heart of the school, because without you there is no reason to have a school; but the teachers are the bones of the school, because without them the whole thing falls apart into a puddle of inert goo. With a big beating heart in the middle of it, flopping around like a dying fish. Hope you like that image, students. (We need each other. I hope we all know it.)(I also hope that anyone my age clicks on that link and knows instantly why I picked it.)

So teachers: here’s the most important thing. At my school you will work only four days a week. There’ll be a full salary for those four days, and no required duties beyond them — though I will ask the teachers if they are willing to work more in exchange for more money, any extra duties will be entirely voluntary, and entirely compensated. I don’t know anything about school budgets, and where all the money goes; but I do know that every penny I could scrape together beyond the necessities like utility bills and rent and upkeep and insurance, every penny goes to the teachers. We’ll fund-raise for new books; teachers already do that, anyway. But the salary will be as high as I can possibly make it, partly because you deserve it, and partly because I need good teachers to handle this gig, because they’ll need to deal with a mixed-age class that changes every two weeks or so, and that sounds pretty nightmarish. (I also have a plan to make that easier, I hope.)

I’m a bit torn on salary increases: because I kind of want all teachers to be paid the same. There would be cost of living increases, of course, and like I said, there would be extra duties available; but I’m not sure that paying teachers more for experience is the best way to go. New teachers have a much harder time, so I would want them to be compensated well, and I know that paying experienced teachers more tends to push for more teacher turnover, which I don’t want. At the same time, I know that experienced teachers tend to be better teachers, and I would  want to reward that and retain them. I’m open to suggestions. For now, I think there’s one high, flat rate for all teachers.

I expect the teachers to teach within a single subject area. I think that’s better, because  we all have preferences and areas of expertise, and that’s what I want the students to have access to. The younger grades may get confused by multiple teachers, and they may miss the chance to bond with a single loving adult; but I want them focused on learning, not on how much they love Miss Johnson from first grade. Ever notice that? When my students talk about upper  grade teachers they’ve had, it almost always focuses on the subject, did that person teach them, did they learn anything; but elementary teachers, it always seems to be, “Oh, I loved Mr. Braunschweiger!” “Mrs. Colgate? I couldn’t stand her!” It’s the person, not the subject. I don’t like that. Now, I don’t expect first graders to plan their units and select their new schedules; I’ve got no problem with the units for the younger grades being directly prescribed by the teachers. But I want them to get used to seeing individual teachers as the experts of specific fields.

Within those fields, I would want the teachers to design their own units; some administrator (And all of my administrators will be former teachers, in genuine content areas, with several years of experience, preferably at different levels) will make sure all the standards are being touched upon, but I want the teachers to design the curriculum.

The curriculum will include English, social studies and humanities, science, math, languages, art, and Career and Technical Education. That’s right: no PE. I plan for there to be physical activity, but I see no need whatsoever for an ex-jock to yell at kids who don’t like playing baseball. THAT’S RIGHT, GYM TEACHERS, I’M LOOKING AT YOU. AND SAYING “NO.”

There will be no inservice. There will be no required professional development: I want teachers who love their subjects, and will learn more about the subject because they want to. I want teachers who will get better over time because they believe in the value of education and want to do it well; I don’t think that I need to stand over them and watch them do what I tell them to do, and then check a box. There will be observations in the classroom, but they will be frequent and always informal; basically just me coming to watch people teach well. If I see someone doing something I think is poor teaching, I’ll either talk to the teacher about it, or I will ask the department to look into it, and they can decide if the teacher needs help fixing a problem. Otherwise there will be no formal evaluations, no rating system, and good Lord, no merit pay.

I think that’s everything; the extra duties, and the bell schedule, and my PE replacement, and all the specifics about classes and graduation requirements, will all come in future posts.

How am I doing so far? Any teachers want to come work in my school?

Money Talks

Dusty 2 Comments

Image result for red for ed

[Read Part Two: But You Get Summers Off]

[Read Part Three: Walking Out]

I don’t know how much what I’m about to say needs to be said. This blog is full of book reviews and liberal political ranting; the majority of my readers are people I know personally, which means they’re mostly teachers and liberals and readers (Oh my!), like me. I feel pretty confident that most people reading this already think that teachers should be paid more. But I want to take it one step further, because while most people seem to think that teachers should be paid more, somehow we’re not; so there does seem to be a need, here. My hope, therefore, is that people who don’t realize how vital this issue is will learn something that helps push them towards what I think is the right answer; maybe you all will even share this or some of the ideas with your own people, and then others might learn something or be pushed towards the right answer.

For myself, I need to do this. Because, you see, I teach in Arizona, and in two days, thousands of Arizona teachers are going to walk off the job and out of their schools in order to try to win the same argument I’m going to talk about here; and I won’t be walking out with them. That makes me feel terrible. So I need to do what I can to support them, and one of the things I can do is argue, and write, and then share this. So here goes.

Let’s talk first about what teachers make. I started teaching in 2000, in San Diego County in southern California; that year I made about $36,000 before taxes. I also got good health coverage, though I didn’t need it at the time, and about $4000 was contributed to a pension account in my name. However, as some of you know and the rest can imagine, San Diego County is quite an expensive place to live, and so that first year, I needed to take a second job over the summer to make ends meet: I went with the obvious one, and taught summer school. Six weeks of extra work, and I made $25 an hour, 7 hours a day. Not bad. That year I was able to purchase my very first car, a 2-year-old Chevy pick-up with 74,000 miles, and we found a decent 3-bedroom house to rent. (I should note: I am removing my wife from this almost entirely, because her income has been extremely inconsistent: some years she made a lot, some years not so much. She’s an artist. The point I’m trying to make is this: it shouldn’t matter. I’m a highly trained and capable professional. I should be able to pay for a lower-middle-class lifestyle for two people with no kids and no expensive habits. Don’t you think?) We were able to pay for most purchases, but when surprise bills came up, they went on credit cards. Luckily, not that many bills came up, and we didn’t purchase very many things. No large entertainment systems. No extra vehicles. We took one vacation, an overnight trip to Disneyland. We did buy pets, I’ll admit. The bunny cost us $20. The dog was the big ticket item: $150 for him.

We moved to Oregon in 2004, partly because we hadn’t been able to save anything substantial, despite the fact that I kept teaching summer school, and got a $1500 raise every year (Teachers generally have a salary schedule where we step up every year for some number of years, and then every couple of years, and then we top out after 15-20 steps. You can also get raises if you get more post-degree education, which shifts you up a column.), and we knew that we’d never be able to afford to buy a home in San Diego’s real estate market. When we moved, I was up to $42,000 a year pre-tax; my new position in St. Helens, Oregon paid about $35,000. Back to square one. I had to take out the retirement money because four years isn’t long enough to get vested into the California retirement system, so we rolled it over into an IRA. But there was a problem: the cost of living in Oregon wasn’t actually much less than it had been in California, and my monthly paychecks weren’t enough to cover our bills. I had to change from 12 monthly checks to 10, which meant I didn’t get paid over the summer. No problem: I would teach summer school.

They didn’t have summer school.

So we cashed out my retirement money, and that got us through the summer; about half of my total retirement savings from California was left. The next year I got a raise, but still not enough to go to 12 monthly checks (Please note: this is now my 6th year teaching, and I didn’t make enough to pay for two people with a very modest lifestyle, no kids, no expensive hobbies. When my lawnmower died, I bought a push mower.); fortunately, that year they ran a summer school, and I taught it. Allow me to point out: this was a second job. I know people make a lot of teachers getting the summers off, and we do – that’s one of the main reasons why I started teaching, because I wanted to use the summers to write my novels – but we work 50-60 hours a week during the school year. Especially the first few years, because everything is new and takes ten times as much planning (Especially when, like me, you get handed new never-before-taught classes and you have to make everything up from scratch.). You also don’t get to sleep, because everything makes you nervous or angry or both. Everything. I threw a book at a kid my first year because he was rolling around the classroom in my desk chair. (Don’t worry, I missed him.) The summer isn’t really vacation, it’s all the hours you lost over the school year, the only time you get to relax and do fun things, or spend time with family, or sleep. The average school year is 36-38 weeks long (My current school has a 40-week academic year with two extra weeks of professional development for teachers); even if we don’t count the work we usually do over summer on lesson plans and such, the hours are comparable: a regular office job is 50 weeks, 40 hours a week, which is 2000 hours a year; a teacher works around 53 hours a week, on average, for, let’s say, 38 weeks, which is 2014 hours per year. So having to teach summer school is exactly the same as having a second job right after your 40-hour-a-week job: you don’t get to take advantage of your hours off, you never really get to rest. It is not easy.

So I taught summer school that second year in Oregon, and it helped; but not enough, because we had bought our very first house, which saved money on rent and allowed us to start building equity, but it also meant we had new bills. So that we’re clear: we did not go crazy with this purchase; we bought the ugliest house in the best neighborhood, and in April of 2005, it cost us about $140,000; we didn’t have a down payment, but there was a special deal offered to teachers that covered 100% of new home mortgages. So that year we had to cash out the rest of my retirement money to make it through the summer. And I had no idea what we were going to do the third year.

The third year in Oregon, I found out that my district had been shortchanging me: they had calculated my column on the salary schedule as though my credits were quarter credits, when most of them were semester credits, which should have moved me up to the third column (Bachelor’s degree +45 graduate credits instead of +30, because I did two and a half years of graduate school after my BA. Teacher training, not a Master’s program, but it counts.). They gave me the difference in one large check: that and the new step I got that year meant we were able to cover the summer gap, with the summer school work. The following year, my fourth year teaching in Oregon, the step was just barely enough that we could shift to 12 paychecks: and for the first time, I could pay my way with just my teacher’s salary. Mostly. We still couldn’t handle a large money emergency, and we still didn’t have any appreciable savings. Two people. No kids. No expensive habits. Hadn’t taken a vacation since Disneyland. We had a second car at this point: my wife’s parents gave her their GMC Jimmy when they bought a new car for themselves.

Right about then (2007-2008), the economy collapsed. Even though we had bought the cheapest house we could, and done a lot of improvements ourselves, we went underwater on our mortgage. Teachers started getting RIFfed (Reduction In Force, the eduspeak version of layoffs), and our health insurance costs started going up, and our salaries got frozen, step raises delayed or canceled. Somewhere around there, right around when we finished paying it off, my Chevy got broken and we couldn’t afford to repair it, so it sat in our driveway for a year while I walked to work. (That was by choice. I could have taken my wife’s car, or had her drive me, but I liked the walk. The point is that I couldn’t afford to pay for a house and two cars. Eight, nine, ten years as a professional teacher. And Oregon teacher salaries are pretty good, taken as a whole.) So in 2010, I again took a second job, as a union negotiator for the contract talks we had with our district. That might have been the toughest job for the least compensation I’ve ever had; I got a one-time stipend of, I think, about $1400; in exchange, I stopped sleeping for the year and a half that I was the lead negotiator. Instead of sleep, I just hated everyone and everything. Especially myself.

Here’s the gist: by the time we moved away from Oregon, in 2014, I was earning $59,000 a year before taxes, though like everyone, our health care costs were going up every year. We sold our house in 2013 for a small profit, but only if you don’t count in the money we invested in it, or the time. We used much of that money to buy a new car – a two-year-old Kia Sportage with 25,000 miles – and a new mattress, and our first flat screen TV (Which we still have). And we moved to Arizona, where I took a job at a charter school in Tucson. That first year? My 14th as a teacher, who now had over 90 post-graduate credits, because I had to take more classes to renew my Oregon credential?

I made $36,000. Before taxes.

So now here I am, in my 18th year as a teacher. I am Highly Effective according to my last performance review, the top score you can earn. I have been one of the favorite teachers, if that matters (and since charter schools compete with public schools for students, and one of our selling points is to have students tell other students that they really like their __________ teacher, it does matter; I’ve had parents tell me the reason they came to or stayed with the school is because of the English department) every year; I was named Teacher of the Year in Oregon. This year I made about $45,000 before taxes. I only got it up that high because I teach AP (Extra work because there are more and longer essays), because I teach five different preps (Extra planning work to figure out what five different classes are going to do each day, and also tough to shift gears that many times during the day when I get four minutes in between classes), and because I teach more than a full schedule (I teach 29 periods per week instead of the usual 25) – basically, I’m teaching summer school during the year, now. And I can almost pay all of our bills. Almost. Still couldn’t handle a money emergency, nor save a lot. Won’t be buying another house any time soon. We are doing better because of my wife’s income. But shouldn’t I be able to pay for two people, no kids, no expensive habits? Isn’t that a reasonable expectation for a teacher’s salary? Especially a good teacher with almost twenty years of experience and two Master’s degrees worth of extra credits?

So here’s my question for the room. How much should a teacher make? I don’t mean a dollar figure, since that can reasonably be tied to cost of living depending on location; I mean, where should teachers fall on the scale? Are we middle class? Working class? Are we servants? Public sector workers? I’m sure you’ve seen the memes about teachers as babysitters (I have about 20 students at a time [Charter schools do have smaller class sizes, which is lovely] for seven hours a day; if parents pay babysitters $10 an hour or more, how much should I make? Sure, I’ll take $1400 a day.) or calculating all of the different tasks a teacher does during the day, or comparing teacher pay in the US to teacher pay in, say, Finland; but I’ve also seen people describing teachers as lazy and incompetent, as people who get summers off, as people who just hang out with kids all day, and therefore we are overpaid. Allow me to point out that part of the reason for low teacher pay is that teachers have always been willing to give up dollars in exchange for benefits: for good health coverage, for good retirement, for tenure, the system that makes it harder to get fired. (Not impossible: it is never impossible to get fired. Don’t believe anyone who says it is.) Allow me also to point out that, though it varies state by state, I currently have decent health coverage that is pretty expensive for me; no contribution to any retirement beyond social security; and no tenure. Those benefits are vanishing. And in exchange, we get – more work. And less pay.

You could argue that teachers know what they’re signing up for. You’d be sort of right, although – like most people, I would think – there were expectations I had that didn’t prove true, like the summers off and the tenure and such. But by now, I know what I’m signing up for. I could quit teaching, try to find something else; but I’d have to start at entry level. And also, I’m good at teaching: it seems like something I should stick with. And it seems like something I should be able to make a living doing, at least enough to pay for two people with no kids and no expensive habits. I could have turned down the job in Arizona, stayed in Oregon and made more. I could move away now and make more, especially if I moved to Massachusetts or New York, or back to California. But while that solves my problem, it doesn’t solve the whole problem: because there will still be more than a million students in Arizona, who need teachers. And if Arizona won’t pay those teachers enough, and the teachers all move away, then – what? What’s the plan? All the students follow the teachers to different states? They all get homeschooled, learn their math from Khan Academy?

I read an article this morning in the New York Times about how all public sector government jobs have been disappearing and losing pay; a couple of statements struck me. Both came from the same woman, Teresa Moore, a social worker in Oklahoma who investigates reports of abuse of both children and seniors. The first was this:

Ms. Moore’s friends and neighbors hold conflicting views of her taxpayer-funded job. “The minute they have someone in the nursing home they perceive to be mistreated, we’re the first people they come to,” she said. “They want us when they need us. And when they no longer need us again, they don’t want us.” Source, Emphasis added

The second was this:

Some are resentful that they are being asked to pay for benefits that they themselves struggle to afford.

“I asked my brother, ‘How do you feel about this pay raise?’” Ms. Moore recalled. “He said: ‘I want you to have it. You deserve it. But we don’t feel like we should pay for it.’” Source

I think this is how this country sees teachers. People want teachers to care for children, and they want us to do a good job of educating them; for some people, that means a specific information set, and for others, it means a different set – but everyone wants us to do a good job. Unless, y’know, they don’t actually have kids and don’t need to think about education, in which case, they’d really like us to just go away. Or else they don’t want to pay for us personally, and they think only parents should pay for us. (This attitude, held by the many retirees who come to Arizona for the winter months – the so-called “Snowbirds” – is a large part of the reason why Arizona teachers are the worst paid in the nation.) Or, of course, they don’t know who should pay for us: so long as it isn’t them, personally. (This also may be where the Snowbirds land.) I’m sure there are some who are resentful of teachers making more money or having better benefits than they themselves have, but that’s an insupportable argument if it comes only from envy: you can argue that teachers should make less money if you have an argument why teachers are worth less money. For many people, that argument starts and stops with good benefits and summers off and “spending all day with children.”

None of which, I hope I’ve shown, are actually true. The benefits are gone; the summers off never existed; I haven’t talked about the lil angels we get to spend all day with, but I doubt most people believe that. Because of course they aren’t angels. You weren’t, were you? Neither was I.

People want us to do a good job, but they don’t want to pay us to do a good job. They want to pay us the bare minimum, and ask us to do the maximum – because it’s for the children. And while we should do the very best we can, for the sake of the children and for society, that doesn’t mean we should be paid the very least we can survive on at the same time. Because that isn’t for the children: that’s for the people who just don’t want to pay us. Who maybe think we deserve more money, but they don’t want to be the ones footing the bill.

The last month or so has shown us the new truth: teachers are done with this trade-off, our best for taxpayers’ least. There has been a long slow slide down, which has taken advantage of career teachers who don’t want to look for new jobs; and which has taken advantage of old benefit packages which have been traded for pay cuts (The time has run out on this one, since there isn’t any more pay to cut, and so those benefits have been cut, too); and which has taken advantage of teachers’ general sense of goodwill and public service to the community. A lot of us want to teach in the places we grew up, and places that pay less, like Arizona and Oklahoma and Kentucky and West Virginia, have surely taken advantage of that. One of the best teachers at my school, my department chair, is still there despite being overworked and underpaid and being treated generally shabbily, for all three of these reasons: she grew up here, she’s been a teacher here for 25 years, she’s willing to make a little less if her benefits would be a little better.

What does it say about us as a nation that we treat people like that so poorly? We liberals rant and rave about how President Trump makes us look bad: but we all let teaching get to where it is. All of us.

And then, of course, there is the biggest reason why teachers don’t make enough: we care. We usually want to do a good job. We usually care about children, and about education, and we are sympathetic to the needs of families. When I was running the union negotiations, the biggest hurdle we had to overcome wasn’t the district, or the parents: it was the other teachers. Many of them wanted to cut their own pay because that would have saved other teachers’ jobs. Many of them wanted to accept whatever was offered, just so long as they got to keep teaching; and whether or not they could afford to live on their salary didn’t matter: their students needed them. It’s the same reason why, when classroom supply budgets get cut, most teachers go right out and buy the supplies themselves, even though in many communities, the parents make more than the teachers. But we do it because the kids really need those supplies. If the kids don’t have those supplies, we can’t do that project, and that project is really effective – plus the kids love it. We’re nice people, and that makes us saps. It also makes us good at our jobs. But we only get paid like saps. And then they ask us to do a little more, to give a little more, to work a little harder. For the children.

It’s gone too far. Teachers are going on strike, even without a union to protect their jobs and pay them partial wages, as would have happened had my own negotiation broken down that far. (It didn’t. We took the deal the district offered us. We saved jobs, lost money, and kept teaching. Of course. But Oregon has farther to fall before it reaches where Arizona is now.) Despite all the reasons why we don’t want to, we’re walking out of our classrooms, walking out of our schools, walking out on our students and our careers. We’re no longer willing to do this for what America seems willing to pay us. Either we get paid more, or we stop doing this. I say, we need to get paid enough to pay for two people, with no kids and no expensive habits, to build up some savings and maybe buy a house. Not just because that would suit me, but because I think it’s reasonable based on the value of services rendered. I will endeavor to prove that in another blog, hopefully tomorrow.

We’re good at our jobs. Unless America doesn’t want us to do our jobs any more, then we say we need to be paid more. Starting right now.

And you know what? We’re right.

After all, we’re teachers.