11/17/2000

Readers Discuss Accountability

Many teachers expressed outrage about the comparisons made in last week's column, comparisons between hours on the job, salaries and accomplishments of teachers vs. corporate employees. The underlying issue, the quality of education for every child, is something most readers feel passionate about, but is an issue that can get lost in the middle of slinging accusations about who makes more and who works harder. The following letters bring thoughtful perspectives to the discussion:

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The inflammatory letter regarding teacher accountability posted last week did little but fan the flames of economic rage, using the same confused set of arguments the politicians have been using since the Reagan/Bush administrations decided to use education as a scapegoat. The writer uses two "straw men" for his argument; one, the overpaid, underworked teacher, and the other, an underpaid, overworked regular guy struggling to swim in a school of sharks. Any student of critical thinking knows that the creation and use of straw men is a fallacy, an act of rhetoric, a violation of logical argument. However, I'd like to debunk both.

Having been out in the private sector, and having friends and family in the private sector as well, I can assure you it is far from the dog-eat-dog world the writer implies. Many are the workers who do reasonable work for reasonable pay, as any walk down the Pfizer hallways will show you. Find a nice restaurant at lunchtime and you will surely see workers having a good time, and often meetings. Yes, there are workers who strive for excellence and do more than their fair share. However, most are, as I said, doing a reasonable amount of work for reasonable pay.

Please note that I am writing about professional level employees. Teachers are, indeed, professional employees, required in this state to get a Master's degree and pass through what has become a quite rigorous certification process, and who must renew certification throughout their career. Yes, there are financial increases with additional degrees.

However, regardless of what the writer of the other letter claims, there are indeed raises and bonuses for learning in the private sector, often for the passing of a certification test. Tuition reimbursement in a small private manufacturing company helped a good friend get both her BA and MA. Another friend got a salary increase for passing his CPA. Yet another got a raise for a computer repair certification he passed and will receive a raise when he finishes his degree (with help from the tuition reimbursement plan of the company for which he works. Truth be told, the other writer left out salary numbers entirely, and, in doing so, failed to make the significant point that many, many professions' salaries far exceed teachers' wages.

Of course, the time issue always comes to the fore when the money issue is laid to rest. Teachers get summers off. That is, if they aren't scrambling to go to training and courses to maintain their certification, or teaching summer courses, or rewriting curricula, or working another job. Still, the time is there, and resented. However, it is needed time, time for absolutely essential rest from demanding jobs. You see, until a person has had to take charge of a classrom full of students, most of them unwilling participants, s/he cannot understand the energy required to make the situation work. It can be utterly draining at times, and, after a few months, even the very best teachers begin to show signs of deep fatigue.

Every teacher who worked in the private sector as a professional prior to becoming an educator has said the same thing: there is no comparison between the tasks. To be absolutely alert, active, decision-making, questioning, counseling, and improvising while monitoring a group of youths, all for 50 to 84 minutes at a stretch, is hard to do. I found it easier framing houses.

Could school be run year round? It is being tried, but even then, one to two week rests are given between four to six week sessions. Most teachers would be amenable to this, I'd bet. Those I've spoken to, and their number exceeds 50, feel it would benefit the students, and therefore is worth looking into -- hardly the reply of the lazy, pampered straw men the writer has depicted.

Of course, the writer clearly doesn't know any teachers, or else his discussion of overtime would not have taken place. Grading and lesson planning take away most of the free time available to teachers during the school year, as well as extracurricular activities. I lose every Sunday to these activities, as do many other teachers. I could go on. If you would like, I would be more than happy to generate a comparative text that can demonstrate that teachers are getting paid a reasonable sum for demanding work.

But the issue the writer raises is an important one: how can we assess the effects of the educational system?

Sadly, the question glosses a maddeningly complex situation. Any teacher past her/his first year knows that what happens at home comes to school and will hinder or help a child in powerful ways. It is supremely difficult for a teacher in her/his small piece of time with the child to overcome all the influences of the child's life out of school.

"My mother said I don't have to learn this vocabulary because even she doesn't know the words," I was told recently, regarding a set of SAT preparatory words. These words were not all that obscure; they are common words found in college-level conversation and writing. Yet one student was given permission by a parent to fail to learn them. Are her SAT results indicative solely of my performance as a teacher? Clearly not.

When half a class fails to do homework that required a plot summary of a television show, it too is not a failure of my pedagogy. When students come to school tired from staying up until one a.m., anyone in the world is going to have a hard time teaching them. When parents do not follow through on scholastic or disciplinary support, I am not to blame. Yet all these are realities, and very much the rule, NOT the exception, particularly in the middle-level classes.

So, if the taxpayers want to measure the level of effectiveness of the teachers, they need to find some way to erase the effects of variables, like home life, that can interfere with even the best curriculum implemented by the best teacher. It is actually funny, in a sick way, that people who have never been trained in assessment are grossly misusing instruments of assessment like the CMT and CAPT. Any student in any research oriented field can describe the travesty of measuring "Y" with an instrument designed to measure "X." It is simply not allowed. And yet it is done by the public, in judgment of people whose jobs the public has no comprehension of, or desire to do.

Are there valid measures out there? Some are emerging. As a graduate of the BEST program, with an MA in education (which included a research element), I feel confident in saying that the portfolio, at least as far as English instruction goes, is a reasonable measure of a teacher's ability to teach according to CT state guidelines, guidelines that reflect a solid synthesis of research and practice from all areas. The process of assessment is labor intensive for both the portfolio builder and grader, and would probably be very expensive to enact statewide, but it would certainly do a fair and honest job getting the information that taxpayers want.

I think taxpayers would be surprised with the results, because many, many Connecticut teachers would pass such an assessment. Many have already, as it is part of the certification process for most disciplines. Yet positive answers will not satisfy those who want to pay less tax, or who refuse to look at the lives of the children with a teacher's eye.

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I think the person who wrote that letter is totally wrong.

I am currently finishing up my student teaching assignment, and am very busy. I am also still working at my current job, as a CPA. I have worked in public accounting for 15 years, so I believe I know more than your letter writer about this whole subject.

First, for me to student teach, I had to pay CCSU over $2,200 dollars, and I am not receiving a penny to teach. Every single minute of educational time that I attended as a CPA was paid for by the various establishments at which I worked. The comment about teachers making more money because of being required to take classes and earn degrees is thus invalid. Teachers pay their own way. Why shouldn't they make up the cost?

Secondly, where is this letter writer observing teachers work a 6 hour day? Where I have spent the fall, most teachers are in the building at least from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. (I am at a high school). This does not include the time spent at night and on weekends correcting papers, creating tests and future work, and writing lesson plans. Also, there are the countless hours spent after school working with the various student groups, taking students on field trips, etc. for which there is no hourly pay. When most business people travel, it is not by bus, and the accommodations are fairly comfortable. When students need to raise money for these trips, the luxury level goes down quite a bit.

As far as a pay comparison, many professionals earn a six-figure income within several years of entering industry. Teachers in public schools never have a chance to earn that kind of money, no matter how long they work or how capable they are. And while many professionals have their busy seasons where they work overtime, such as CPAs in the Spring, a teacher's busy season is from September to June.

Also, teachers spend a lot of time baby-sitting for the unmotivated, disrespectful, arrogant, immature children of the other so-called professionals. If parents actually spent some time with their kids, maybe teachers would not have such a hard time educating them.

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I have just finished reading the letter in your column and must take a few moments to disagree with it.

I am 57 years old and with the exception of ten years taken to be an at-home mom who worked at various part-time jobs, I have been employed since I was a teenager. I spent approximately 12 years working in the private sector, most of it on a management level, and 12 years working as a teacher. Since I have spent time in both fields, I can speak with some expertise on the subject of who gets paid what for what they do. Most of my work time in the private sector was spent doing human resources, including negotiations that went all night long.

I worked successfully as an educator without a master's degree. Yet, I couldn't retain my teaching certificate unless I obtained a master's degree within five years of being employed as a teacher. I am a high school English teacher. To do my job well, I spend nights and weekends correcting papers. I even took a stack of papers to my daughter's college commencement.

As much time as I spent working on my human resources job, it never came close to the time I spend as a teacher, preparing for classes, tutoring children, attending their events, chaperoning their dances and functions and being a yearbook advisor. My students have my home phone number and are encouraged to call me whenever they need help with an assignment, and they do.

I took a ten thousand dollar pay cut to go into the classroom because the only experience school systems recognize is experience as an educator. If it weren't for the passage of the enhancement act in Connecticut, the cut would have been closer to twenty thousand dollars. Is my pay now reasonable for my level of education and time? Yes.

When I returned to the classroom, I found that teachers, unlike people in the private sector, hit the ground running and don't come up for air until the end of their work day. We do not have phones, so personal calls to doctors to make an appointment or to creditors to straighten out a bill, don't get made on taxpayer time. We do not get to go to the bathroom whenever we choose because we can't leave the children alone, even if they are eighteen. In this day and age it might not be safe for a variety of reasons. We get a half hour for lunch and we need to get our inter-office mail, often Xerox something or return a call to a parent, or drop something off at the guidance office. By the time we sit down, often we are lucky if we get fifteen minutes for lunch. We also get no time to recuperate. If a child insults or sasses us, we have to deal with that and then pull ourselves together immediately so we do not negatively impact the other children. We have to teach children the things they need to know to be successful in their futures. We also have to deal with behavioral and social problems unheard of when I was a student. And should I mention that we also live with the threat of potential violence that can be triggered in a volatile, emotionally unstable youth?

So, why do I teach? Because I love the kids and I want to make a difference in their lives. They matter to me, and I work very hard to do what I can for as many as will allow me to do that.

Not every teacher is wonderful, just like not every doctor is wonderful, or dentist or lawyer or businessman, etc. Most of my colleagues are good and care and give a good portion of their lives, their time, and even their paychecks to children. I have known teachers to help fund kids through school, to buy supplies for their classrooms, to pay for lunches (that's a given), to buy clothes and Christmas presents (anonymously), to pay for class trips for those who cannot so that every child can participate.

Our educational system needs to be overhauled, that's true. We are teaching children of the 21st century in buildings and often in a manner used to teach their great-grandparents. I expect that soon the year-round school will be in place. Most of us anticipate the change. Right now, it is not the educators stopping it, but the parents, the children, and the communities who do not want to air-condition buildings, pay more for supplies or hourly staff, etc. Try thinking outside the box, innovatively, about how to improve our educational system.

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Without a doubt, teaching, as a "job" versus the private sector, does have advantages. I was involved in business for over twenty years, and it is fair to state that in the "real" world of dollars and cents, there are far fewer holidays and no protection (I was downsized). However, people who enter teaching and work to attain degrees, do it for different reasons than those in the business world.

Most teachers truly like to teach, and most teachers truly enjoy their area of expertise. The problem today is that while more and more is being asked of teachers, they find themselves with less and less return from their school systems. Teachers start out with small salaries, which are then advanced each year by a "step" system. Teachers are faced with endless meetings, paper work, phone calls to parents. Teachers are required to earn CEU's from assigned workshops, credits to be presented to the state every five years to ensure that their teaching certificate is updated. All teachers are frequently visited and "graded" by administrators and supervisors.

Perhaps they greatest irony of all is teaching in the inner cities. Here, the facilities are the poorest, the students are the most difficult and troubled, the local politics is the most intense, the school day the longest, violence is greater, every day tension is often extreme, and yet, the salary is often lower than in the suburbs. Teaching and its associated problems are very complex subjects indeed.

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There are many school districts in which teachers, by contract, work more than 180 calendar days. Also, while there is a salary increase implemented upon the completion of postgraduate degrees, the author needs to realize that in the majority of public school systems in Connecticut, these increases are minimum. The teacher bears the burden of paying tuition as well as other schooling costs. Even with the minimal salary increase it takes approximately 10 years to cover the cost of the degree.

It is my understanding that in many other professions, employers foot the bill for higher education. As far as the time spent "teaching", I don't know too many teachers in my place of employment that work only 6 hour days. My average day begins at 7:15 a.m. in school and ends at 5:30 P.M. Then I go home and take care of my family and at approx. 9:30 P.M. settle in for about two hours of correcting papers.

My husband, who puts in similar hours (usually fewer), makes almost triple the amount I take home. Are there some teachers who need to move on? Certainly. However, the majority is doing a darn good job and still has to put up with people who are worried about spending a few extra tax dollars to pay decent teachers their hard earned salaries.

Support teachers instead of criticizing them. Then focus on a bigger issue for children ... the accountability of PARENTS!

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I'm not a big fan of public education, but I do feel the person who wrote regarding school accountability and teacher pay needs to reconsider the math. At least in our town, teachers work more than 180 days a year. The 180 days applies to the students. Teachers begin school at least two days before the students and end at least two days after the students. Also, when students have days off for in-service training, the teachers are in school taking mandatory courses.

The six hours per day again applies to the students. The teachers arrive, I believe, a half-hour before the students and stay at least that long after the closing bell. And if the "discounted overtime" refers to homework correcting and time outside of school hours spent talking with parents, that should be factored into the math. A better equation is 188 days times 8 hours per day equals 1,504 hours. I support decent pay for teachers. I want quality teachers and none of us can expect that if the person who teaches cannot afford a decent life.

I agree that we need accountability in our schools. I am not sure incessant testing is the way to achieve that. Eliminating tenure and instituting merit pay raises may be a more effective way to encourage quality teaching in the classroom.

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Teachers would like nothing better than to come into class and be able to teach. However, the reality is we spend 50% of our teaching time on discipline problems stemming from rude, obnoxious, boisterous, belligerent students who have not been taught common courtesy or respect for anyone -- including themselves. The greatest deterrent to student's academic performance is not "sloth" on the part of teachers, but ignorance of the importance of the parenting role in the academic learning of our students. Money might well be spent in educating parents to be parental role models and support systems for our students.

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Please send questions or comments to bbruno@snet.net.