Re: And is _this_ true?

In <g7vb8p$7v6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Jonathan J. Baker <jjbaker@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

My wife opposes them strongly, on the grounds that they would take
money away from public schools, which are perpetually underfunded -
teachers are underpaid, and more and more are expected to buy their
own classroom equipment: chalk, notebooks, paper, visual aids, copying,
etc.

Yeah, that might be true, vouchers might take money away from public
schools. I don't know, I think fixing the issues with the public school
system is pretty complicated, not sure there's any easy answer.

Part of that is driven by the widespread sentiment that "hey, teachers
get the whole summer off, I only get 2-3 weeks, what are they complaining
about". But of course, it's hard to get a summer job that pays as well as
any full-time job, and the teachers need those two months off to decompress,
or they'd burn out that much sooner. My father-in-law a"h thought that way.

To be honest I have a certain amount of sympathy for that sentiment as
well, everything's a trade-off. You shouldn't get into teaching to make
the big bucks, but OTOH that doesn't mean teachers are per se "underpaid."
I have a number of teachers in my family as well, some of them agree with
me on this and some don't. But I do know that if you're a junior teacher
you're working hard and getting paid peanuts, while if you're been there a
while and have some seniority it's an entirely different scenario - you
work 6 or 7 hours a day 180 days a year, you can't be fired, and when you
retire you get pretty much your same salary for the next 20 or 30 years
while you travel around the world or whatever. Some people have the first
experience, some have the second, it's hard to generalize I think.

But to your point, we don't get to vote on teacher salaries - we just vote
on how high our property taxes will be raised. If you object to the way
the school district is spending its budget outside of teacher salaries,
you're only option is still to reject the bond measure, you don't really
have much finer control.

Dad had to hold down two full-time jobs (teaching during the day and
playing Broadway shows at night), or later on, 1.5 jobs plus a summer
job (playing the Met Opera 3-4 nights a week, plus playing in a band
over the summer), to get by, and we didn't have much left after paying
for yeshiva tuition, even with scholarships.

I'm certainly not disputing that teachers don't get paid a lot of money.
It's just that you can't compare annual salaries from profession to
profession if one person's working 6 or 7 hours a day 180 days per year,
and the other's working 9 or 10 hours a day 240+ days per year.
Everything's a trade-off.

That said, it might make sense to have a program where teachers could work
a business-competitive schedule (i.e., work 40 hours per day, 240 days per
year) in exchange for a business-competitive salary. It'd make things
easier for people who need to support families, but make it harder for 2nd
income earners who need to go home to take care of the kids. Everything's
a trade-off.

I'd also want to see some reforms that reward good teachers with more
money, and permit schools to fire teachers who don't measure up. Further,
i'd like to have better accountability for how that money gets spent -
making sure as much as possible gets to the teachers and classrooms,
rather than being wasted whereever the heck it all seems to go.

--s
--

.

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