Teaching to the Choir

Last night I picked up a copy of an interesting book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers. Authors Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements Calegari, and Dave Eggars build a case for educational improvement based on treating teachers like the professionals they are, starting with their pocketbooks.

Full disclosure: I am a teacher, and I do believe I am not compensated properly for what I do. “Proper” compensation, as it turns out, is quite the knotty problem. Since public school salaries are public information, here’s some straight from the horse’s mouth information for you.

I started teaching nearly twenty years ago in Florida. My initial salary was $18,000 and change. I have since earned a Master’s degree, so my salary was boosted accordingly (an extra $2500 or so each year, as of this year. For all of the other years, it was only $2250). Nearly twenty years later, I am making $50,891. Not bad, but not much when you compare it to starting salaries in business, engineering, etc.

I work damn hard for that money. In addition to the contract hours during the day–during which I am required to stay in the classroom with my students, since I can’t leave them unsupervised–I arrive about 45 minutes before school every day and stay about an hour afterward. When you’re with the students, you can’t plan, grade, schedule media center time, preview DVD clips for lesson enhancement, complete state-required paperwork, analyze any data (the current high holy grail of the teaching profession, thanks to NCLB), or do any research. All that happens on what is supposedly “my” time. And there is no such thing as a summer off when you’re a teacher. Our school year lasts longer and starts earlier than the students’. Most of us spend the summer going to workshops we can’t squeeze into the school year, planning for next year, taking classes, and working second jobs to pay the grocery bill, since the paychecks stop when the school bell does and don’t start up again until after you’ve been back at school for three weeks.

And that’s what makes the teaching profession different from every other. If I were a PR professional, like my sister, or worked in an accounting department, like my other sister, I could use the restroom whenever I needed to. I would have discretion to eat a sandwich at my desk or go out for Chinese at lunchtime. I’d get paid every two weeks all year long, which makes budgeting much easier, and I could eat other things besides beans and ramen noodles for most of the month of August. I could negotiate with my boss for my vacation days and not worry quite as much about my work if I had to stay home sick. You don’t have to provide lesson plans that may or may not get done for spreadsheets and press releases. My attendance record is a legal document. I could be subpoena’d at any time to testify based on whether I marked a kid here, absent, or tardy. A stack of legislation as tall as I am governs how I do my job. Every year, the stack gets higher thanks to legislators who have never set foot in a classroom since they graduated, but who think they know better than I what my students need.

I know what my students need. I’ve been at my school a long time. I’ve taught whole sibling groups. I have young men and women who call and email me from college to let me know how they’re doing. They come by with new babies and wedding photos and NFL jerseys with their names on the back to show off. If you go by the ones who call me “mom,” I have a LOT of children.

Those things are wonderful, and they are emotional compensation for what I have chosen as my profession. But they will not pay for my personal childrens’ college tuition. They won’t pay my mortgage. I can’t hand a picture of my first period class to the power company and make them happy.

Not only that, but every year I choose to stay at my school, my job gets harder. You see, I teach at a “failing” school. By choice. My students start life behind the 8-ball, and many never see any other view. My job is to get them around the 8-ball, over it, under it, or beyond by any means necessary. Sometimes, I have great success. Sometimes not. It’s hard to teach a kid who’s absent 75% of the year.

But that missing 3/4-of-the-time kid is charged against my account. So is the one who never comes. And so my percentage of growth goes down, and apparently, so does my effectiveness. These days, spreadsheet numbers are the only way folks in the know (read: legislators and pundits) determine whether I’m a success at my job. And their rules get weirder and weirder. In Florida, for example, they want all high school teachers who teach a class labeled “Reading” to complete a reading endorsement. The endorsement consists of six competencies, all of which must be completed on a teacher’s own time. The classes are free, but there is no compensation for taking them. There will also not be any additional pay offered to the teacher who completes the endorsement process. They’ll be able to put the endorsement on their certificates and teach reading, but nothing will show up on payday. Sounds great so far, right?

It gets better. The endorsement process guarantees that the only people teaching reading will be the folks with the endorsement. Sounds completely logical until you consider this case. A colleague of mine had the highest success rate in the school with reluctant readers. He got more of his kids to grow in their reading success than anyone else in the school, including a couple of folks who have Master’s degrees in reading. He has not taken a single endorsement class because he lacks the time (he has two kids and community commitments on top of his demanding job), and there’s no incentive to do so because nothing about the process will reward him in any way except an attaboy on his certificate. So he hasn’t taken any endorsement classes. And so the State of Florida, in its infinite wisdom, will not permit him to teach reading to our high-risk, high-need kids, success be damned.

Could you imagine telling a business professional the same thing? “In order to work on mergers, you must complete a 300-hour merger endorsement on your days off. You won’t get paid for the professional development, and we won’t raise your salary, but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that when we talk mergers, you can participate in the process because you’ll be merger-endorsed.” They’d laugh your crazy ass out of the boardroom.

But that’s the kind of logic you have running school systems these days. This is Florida, now, an admittedly screwed-up example. But it shows just how far we have to go to make our profession act like a profession and not a dead-end. How far we must go to keep the best ones. And how far we need to reimagine things so that the quality people are paid what they deserve and the dead weight find other places to be dead weight.

Pay me what I’m worth, yes. But far more than that, treat me like a professional instead of a puppet. You may picture me and my colleagues as somehow less intelligent than you, but you’d be wrong. Most of us could do your jobs with a class or two of specialized training. Most of you would crash and burn in a classroom within a week. Don’t believe me? Ask my kids. They’ll tell you the worth of a teacher.

Moulthrop, Calegari, and Eggars have a point. I bought the book, and I’m convinced. But the problem is this: I’m a teacher. I’m not the one who needs convincing.

Time to write that letter to Gov. Crist I’ve been threatening.