FYI

That info on teachers was actually an average minimum based on basic class time. The other stuff I mentioned – class prep, extracurricular time, personal time – makes it more like a 60 hour week.

I was a little confusing in how I put that together in the other posts and I didn’t want anyone to think one post related directly to the other.

Rambling

You know, I’ve been supporting teachers on this blog, but I have to admit that I had some lousy ones. I also had some great ones. What I want to do is support public schools and the unions. The attacks lately are designed to push tax dollars to private companies and fund corporate tax breaks with cuts to the middle class.

That is my problem with all of this.

I do, however, think that public schools need to be fixed. I have a feeling that there are a lot of teachers who should be replaced. I also think that the reason for that is that many schools have not been attracting the most qualified teachers because the budgets keep being cut so they don’t pay enough. It doesn’t help when teachers are targets, either.

The same is true with the quality of the schools themselves, their state of repair. Budget cuts lead to lower school quality in level of education and buildings falling apart.

Unions get blamed a lot, but you can have a union and still be able to fire unqualified teachers. They are not mutually exclusive. And I don’t think collective bargaining ever kept a roof from being repaired.

Fix the problem, don’t just trash the entire school system. However bad things are, it is not the ‘public’ part that is the problem. A phrase about babies and bath water comes to mind.

Priorities are messed up and need to be reordered. I know what I think should be done, but for now I’ll just say that there needs to be more equality.

Oh, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen only one contestant make to Final Jeopardy before. Now I have a Weird Al song going through my head.

Teachers again

No, I don’t think that all teachers are great and wonderful paragons of virtue. At the very least they are like people in other professions – some are good and some are bad, with some most likely at either extreme. For some reason, though, they are being attacked.

I do think that teaching has become a thankless job and teachers in general are easy targets and a ready distraction to keep our attention from bigger problems. We should focus on the problems instead of attacking some monolithic figment called ‘Teachers’ or ‘Unions’.

Sure, public schools need to be improved, but cutting funding is not going to fix them. Privatizing schools isn’t going to fix them, either. Charter schools and private schools typically show better results only when they refuse admission to difficult or special ed students.

If your plan to fix the schools is to make them unaffordable for most people and not care about the rest of the kids or any special services I think you need to find a better plan. If your plan is to just get rid of public schools and replace them with private schools that do exactly the same thing I think you still need to find a better plan. If the tax money is there to be pumped into for-profit private schools then the money is there to improve public schools that are non-profit and open to all students. It is a question of ideology: should tax dollars go to private corporations or to public schools?

For some reason, many people think that government spending is only good if tax money goes to private companies. I don’t see anything wrong with paying public employees to do jobs that are designed to benefit the public. We need to make things better, but privatizing all government services is not a solution.

Teacher hours

Teachers are required to do, among other things, class time, class prep, staff meetings, extracurricular time, grading and continuing education (that they pay for themselves). The hours add up. As I said before it averages out to about 44 hours a week.

Now, my particular field is notorious for taking advantage of the people who work in it, so a 44 hour week seems quaint to me. A union might have helped. But in a sane world, where people supposedly work an 8 hour day 5 days a week, teachers work the equivalent of 5½ days a week. Except they cram most of that into 9 ½ months.

I know teachers. For them the school year starts in the end of August and lasts until July. In the next 6 weeks or so they get a vacation – that is, when they aren’t in class themselves. And when they aren’t they’re usually busy helping students, spending their own money and dedicating their time to do so much more than what gets done in their own classrooms. Teaching is not a job for the weak.

And every year they get blamed for the budgets they don’t control and the quality of the schools someone else is in charge of and the problems caused by environment and poverty and malnutrition and other problems at home. Their budgets are cut, their jobs are threatened and the solutions that are offered usually include hiring consultants or new district superintendents who get paid 3 to 4 times what the teachers earn. Their recommendations are to lay off teachers, cut back on school repairs and blame the teachers for the problems.

There are people on TV these days ridiculing teachers. People who work a few hours a day and make more in a week than a teacher earns in a month, or who make more in a year than a teacher will make in a lifetime – these people are calling teachers greedy elites who don’t work as hard as people on Wall Street.

I don’t know if it’s just fun to attack people who you don’t know and who can’t fight back or if it makes them feel good about themselves. That would be an unkind thought. Maybe these people believe what they say and are just talking about something they know nothing about. Maybe they think they are well-informed. Maybe they think what they say is true.

Maybe they should learn more and help their audiences understand things better.

How 180 days equals a year

There are 52 weeks in a year. Teachers in the US work on average just over 2100 hours a year. That’s the equivalent of getting 2 weeks vacation and 10 holidays and working 44 hours a week.
Many work much longer than that. The job doesn’t end when class does.

So the next time someone talks about how teachers don’t work a full year remember that they put in the hours for one anyway.