Public schools need to be better. A whole lot better. Yet in the valuable discussion of what to do and how, it is easy to fall into good union/bad union cliches which undermine even the most well-meaning critics, create a presumption of malfeasance, and undermine the critical relationships between students and teachers, and teachers and parents. Scott Lehigh’s recent Boston Globe column unfortunately does just that.
After Newtown, and all the other school shootings where teachers died in the line of duty, and after who-knows-how-many teachers have spent their own money on school supplies for their students, the continued attacks on teachers and teachers unions must not stand. Journalists have a responsibility not to mislead, and to accurately report what teachers unions stand for. Shallow portraits of teachers and their unions don’t help, they hurt, and provide a shameful cover for underperforming administrators who want to silence the voices of the most powerful advocates for better schools. In my hometown of Concord, the head of the local teachers union was recently fired. You think that was because she was a bad teacher? No one in Concord who knows her does.
The suggestion that teachers unions are opposed to a longer school day is wrong. Teachers unions, including the Boston Teachers Union, support an extended school day to help children academically and to better accommodate the works schedules of parents. But teachers should not be asked to work for free. We do not ask police officers, firefighters, librarians, social workers, or any government or private employees to work without compensation.
While requiring teachers to work without pay would certainly save money, so would asking janitors to work double shifts, and we don’t do that. We don’t ask National Grid to provide free energy, or Staples to provide free school supplies. Why does anyone think that teachers should be required to work without being paid?
Mayor Menino was right about the Stanford CREDO study: if you read it, instead of relying on the press release written by the Walton Family Foundation which funded the study, you’ll see is does NOT favor increasing the number of charter schools. The study specifically states that the methodology used is not dispositive, and that the causes of some differences between students at traditional public schools and at charter schools are “unknown”.
Teacher-student relationships must have at their foundation mutual respect. Teachers are in loco parentis, and need to be treated with respect and consideration for their overall well-being, just as parents do. “Respect the child,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Children who see their teachers being treated with respect will respond in kind. Ask a respected student if they believe their teachers should have to work without being paid. If we’re raising them right, in an environment that supports their innate sense of fairness, the answer will be no. If we ask ourselves if teachers deserve fair reporting, the answer will be a resounding yes.
Meanwhile, if you want a defense of what teachers currently “make”, check out this video.
I would argue, in many ways, he was the last old liberal Democratic mayor left in America. Here is hoping his replacement is a true blue progressive and not another Bloomberg clone like Emmanuel or Booker. If you want better schools the key is smaller classes, you get that by hiring more teachers, not less, and you get a longer school day by actually paying them the wages they earn. Charters are part of the problem, not the solution.
Schools do need to have a longer day. Back in the late 70s when community schools were opened up around Boston many of us argued for all schools to be opened to the community. Parents should not have to constantly be searching for quality after school programs to match their ever increasing work week. But this will require more than simply paying teachers extra…though of course Ms. Dolan is 100% correct that more work should mean more pay. But teachers are already stretched to the max…like most Americans. The problem is the wealth that has been created in this country from an increasingly productive workforce has been “stolen” by the 1%. If we are to create schools that educate communities we need to redistribute that wealth.
I think we should talk about using the time we already have more effectively. If there is more money, hiring more teachers to lower class size and give more individual help to struggling students should come before any talk about lengthening the school day. In many suburban towns, students are very stressed, and a shorter school day would actually be more appropriate. For schools where parents cannot afford out of school enrichment (private music lessons, sports teams etc.), the extra hours should probably be separate from school, and give students enrichment opportunities as well a quiet place to get their homework done with extra help/tutoring available.
just like taxes and spending, we’ll never squeeze 100% efficiency out of our resources, and we shouldn’t use that obvious reality as a barrier to improving our government services as a whole or our educational system in particular.
Longer school days are important because it allows lower and lower middle class parents the opportunity to work. It allows latch-key kids more healthy meals, more adult supervision, more time with kids their own ages. It allows more opportunity for mentorship, and for health and well being. It allows more time for exercise of body, mind, and creative spirit.
I don’t know how many of the extra hours should go for academic instruction, and how many should go for enrichment, and how many should go for something in between. Teachers, like all of us, are only productive for so many hours in the same day, and so at some point part-time or two shifts or some other mechanism becomes necessary.
In today’s society, there’s just no reason why kids shouldn’t be able to [not required to] be in a school from 8am to 6pm, five days a week. In the short run we’d get more productive workers (the parents!), and in the long run we’d get healthier, more well adjusted, more cultured and well rounded, and more well educated children, who go on to become not just more productive workers but also citizens who require less from society at large and provide more to society at large.
P.S. There’s no reason why we should wait until a kid is five years old to start. Optional, tuition-free all day pre-K, and even a year earlier.
writing is purposefully myopic. He enjoys creating division because it bolsters his readership and comments. He loves writing in latin cliches: I have a new for him to describe the “miracle” charter schools – “habeas corpus”. I doubt he’ll use it. The studies compare/contrast imaginary students. Nonsense
My favorite is Lehigh current spin on the success demonstrated by Charter schools 6 year graduation rate! I’m going to write a post about it as soon as I can get serious and stop laughing!
Everyone can agree that the quality of the Boston Globe has diminished in the past 15 years. Maybe its time for its readers to start calling for the reporters to work an extra 20% to make their product better. No extra pay, of course. Do it for the children.
I’m sure they’d find your proposal of going without pay fair. Lehigh just wrote how fair it was. But if the current crop of reporters worked an extra 20%, I can’t see how it would make the product better.
On the topic of the post: My wife is a teacher. She gets to school at about 7 or 7:15 each morning, doesn’t get out until after 4 (sometimes much later). That’s the same as a 9 to 6 day. Then she gets home and it’s lesson planning (including all sorts of research on the internet for new ideas) and grading. Her last 10 weekends have been ruined by a mandatory DESE class 45 minutes from our house.
If they’re going to keep schools open another 2-3 hours a day, they need to get some other people in there for the after-school stuff. My wife is sure as hell not going to work yet another 15 hours a week with no pay raise. I wouldn’t really want her to do it even with a raise. She’s tired enough.
Why does the school day need to be longer? American students already spend as much if not more hours in school than students in most other OECD nations. We are giving the time in buckets, but educators aren’t being allowed to use it wisely. If we keep doing more of the wrong thing — substituting repeating for thinking and above all teaching children to hate the experience of learning — things will just keep getting worse.
…what accounts for the difference between the perceived more time spent in school, mostly in the form of more days per year, and fewer actual hours of instruction.
Besides 30% New Market Tax Credits for investors who are pushing charters, I don’t think it has anything to do with education, and I have come to believe it starts and ends with childcare. Babysitters cost a lot more than many urban poor families make an hour. A few years ago, Menino’s “after school initiative” bombed because he couldn’t get enough “business partners” to send volunteer bodies to take over after school.
When BPS offered the stipend during negotiations , it ended up being $11 an hours after taxes. and would put me in rush hour traffic. I asked my students how much they were getting for babysitting, and one asked how many kids, I said 30, they laughed, and one said that’s about 32cents a kid! More laughter. They were getting $11-15 an hour to babysit per kid. Last time I babysat, in 1963, it was 50 cents and hour and when two families consolidated I got 75 cents! Time for Babysitter Reform!
Longer school year, we are definitely lagging behind there.
…that means shorter school day. Kids go home for lunch, or take off after five hours. That’s what most of the OECD does.
Save for Japan, which has optional private-run “cram schools”. Of course, that brings with it an impressive range of societal ills. Not a model I’d want to copy.
Keep in mind that lots of those OECD countries also have all kinds of child care programs provided by the state at little/no tuition so that parents can work.
Longer school year means less forgotten over summer. Shorter day means more care provided by child care centers instead of teachers. Sounds like a win-win, no?
I disagree with the concept that providing day care for working parents is a mission of any public school. If we choose to embrace government-sponsored day care, surely it makes more sense to directly advocate that.
In the meantime, I suggest that our children will be better served by attracting and keeping higher quality better paid teachers — and by intentionally restructuring our society to accomplish that end. I’ve lost track of the cite, but I recall discussing here research that demonstrated that better overall outcomes resulted from higher-quality teachers with larger classes than lower quality teachers and smaller classes.
I am more attracted by a vision of a society that elevates teachers to the status of lawyers, doctors, and CEOs — and compensates them accordingly. I would like to see teaching be a profession that draws the top tier of our graduates, and provides the material rewards that reflect that priority.
Perhaps if we treated our teachers rather more like doctors, lawyers, and executives and rather less like steel workers, farm laborers, and ditch-diggers, we might see better outcomes from our public schools — along with less need for unions, standardized tests, and draconian “performance” metrics.
In my view, the public school teacher to whom I entrusted my five children every school day of every school year had far more influence on them than, for example, the pediatrician that saw them, at most, a few hours in total during their entire childhood. My children were fortunate that, by and large, their teachers were excellent — more so than the several pediatricians they survived. My children, as college students and young adults, went out of their way to visit and reconnect with the teachers they liked and admired. They have never done the same with their care providers.
The best way for candidates to attract my vote (and for columnists to attract my respect) is to demonstrate that they share my vision and work aggressively to realize it.
I know where you are coming Tom, and I agree with nearly everything you said. Unfortunately the Rhee’s and Duncan’s of the world also say they want better paid teachers who are like lawyers and doctors. The implication for them though, is that our current crop are not educated to that level, and that teacher’s unions are an impediment to this goal since ‘good lawyers and doctors’ don’t need unions. Rhee eliminated tenure and curtailed collective bargaining in exchange for ‘merit based’ raises, it hasn’t really worked for DC.
Also it’s a myth, one Teach for America and it’s ilk perpetuates, that my generation is too selfish to teach and to serve without getting compensated for it.
To a man (for whatever reason this is not true of the women I know in TFA), nearly all my friends in TFA are doing it as resume padding so they can make the next round of consultant and trading shop interviews. The ones that actually care about teaching are already teaching in the CPS. There is a great and underfunded program that allows you to teach in the CPS while getting a fully funded master’s degree and certification. You can take a five year process and get it done in 2-3 years. Reduce the costs in terms of time and money that are a barrier to getting in the profession and you won’t need to raise the pay that much. Reforming tenure so that it is easier to attain for new teachers who are demonstrably good, and easier to fire those that are bad is another way to go. Oh and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ should be defined by evaluations made by peers and supervisors actually observing teachers in the classroom, NOT by test scores.
Lastly, on a sidenote, the worst myth perpetuated by the Lehigh’s of the world is the paternalistic BS that teachers unions hurt the poor and minority communities the most, that those communities are the most disengaged in their children’s education, and that they just need guidance and ‘choice’ in order for their kids to be successful. Everyday on the way to work I pass by Chicago City Hall and am inspired to see so many parents and students, together with teachers, marching to demand that their schools stay open. These parents are incredibly active, and they know that they are literally fighting for their children’s lives (some of the merged schools will bring warring gangs together). For white suburbanites to keep perpetuating this falsehood is incredibly egregious.
This is an issue where I rely on people I trust to lead the way.
Here are some litmus-test items that I use to eliminate candidates from the list of people I trust:
– Any approach that ends up providing vouchers for private schools
– Any approach that ends offering tax credits for religious school expense
– Any approach that proposes to further weaken teachers unions
– Any approach that further restricts collective bargaining rights of teachers
– Any approach that promises to fund itself through eliminating “waste”
We have underpaid our educators for generations. Changing that requires getting more tax revenue from somewhere. I’m open to suggestions about whether that is from federal, state, or local tax revenue.
The first step is spending more on public education.
They reaped all the productivity gains since 1980, and they need to pay it back by paying high taxes to support education and other public infrastructure. I mean income taxes, estate taxes, taxes on capital gains.
And one the teachers unions should adopt when evaluating supposedly progressive candidates.We cannot continue to allow the villification of teachers unions given equal time at Democratic conventions. We cannot allow the voucherization and privatization of the last public good we have. And we cannot allow the demonization of individuals we work the hardest to help our kids, and frankly let’s pay them more, not less.
Instead of several years of training as we have for classroom teachers, we take college kids who want to help someone else and their resume, give them some pointers in medicine, and send them out to do surgery in medically needy areas.
It’s pretty much the same thing.
Christopher, did you misclick the vote? If you really disapprove of this idea, can you share your reasons? This seems like a good idea to me, and seems consistent with your past commentary.
It sounds like he’s “suggesting” that we get temporary doctors based on the same model as Teach For America, which of course makes no sense in the medical field. My downrate was to disapprove of the negative attitude toward TFA because I do think that model can work where it is needed and as long as they are not pushing out the professionals. In fact I have applied, though never actually worked, for TFA in the past.
I guess it depends on what you mean by “that model can work”. It is a way to get live bodies in front of students, yes. If that’s what it means for something to “work”, than TFA and Operating for America are equivalent. Typically, if we want people who are really dedicated and skilled at their jobs in a field outside of education, we make the job more attractive.
The day we accept that education is as critical to the health of a society as medicine is to the health of an individual, things will change. Until then, we’re regulating the speed of the decline, and nothing more. If it is wrong to put a barely trained surgeon in an operating room, it is wrong to put a barely trained teacher in a classroom. Just because the damage is less immediate doesn’t make it less hurtful.
…and maybe my years of subbing don’t hurt, but I feel you can put me in a room full of kids to teach and I would be comfortable doing so. Put me in front of a patient in need of surgery and I wouldn’t have the first clue what I was doing. Teaching I think is also a more naturally occuring skill. We all have skills and knowledge we can pass on to others and especially at the elementary level where I’m most familiar we’ve all been there ourselves and with the guide of materials and curriculum I think most adults can manage. Surgery OTOH requires post-graduate-level training that you only get by going to medical school.
Any of us could get into a fifth grade classroom for one day of Language Arts, and the kids won’t suffer permanent damage. The same is not true in an operating room.
But I think sabutai’s point is absolutely valid. TFA participants aren’t teachers. They haven’t had adequate training. I won’t denigrate their motives nor their effort. If we’re not going to do the right things to improve education, TFA might be better than nothing. Still, that TFA exists in its current form is evidence that we continue to ignore the things which we know do work in search of cheap fixes which don’t fix the underlying problem.
Anyone might be able to do it for a day. But doing over the course of a year requires planning, strategy, etc. The average person might be more able to do that than to walk off the street and do surgery, sure. But I would not agree that “most adults” could handle everything that goes into teaching a class for a year. I
‘ve heard experienced teachers say that it takes three to five years to really know what you’re doing, and relatively few TFA participants last that long. I have an acquaintance who did it in New Orleans, stayed there until Katrina (8 years) and is still a teacher back here in New England. She’d be first to say she’s the exception, not the rule.
I had spent two years subbing. Then I had to teach. I had to plan lessons from day to day, not pick up what someone else wrote for me. I had to realize the kid I’d disciplined on Tuesday would be in front of me on Wednesday. I had to speak with families. I had to justify what I did to legions of second-guessers.
I can operate if all I have to do is a small bit of the job, doing what someone else told me what to do.
I thought I was pretty corker in French after four years in high school, where I could understand the teacher well and spoke more fluidly than any of my classmates. Then I went to a francophone city and felt like an idiotic eight-year-old…
As we’ve seen recently, the results of such supervisor evaluation are not always trustworthy. Especially since so many administrators have so little classroom experience these days.