What's wrong with just being in it for the paycheck? I doubt my grandfather spent his childish nights dreaming of someday owning an Exxon station. I doubt yours thought: shipping manager at UPS! They did those things for a paycheck. And they were good, solid citizens who contributed a lot to their communities and their families. (Well, I can't speak for your grandfather. But I'm guessing.)
There are many fine teachers who have a real calling to teach. But we can't build a school system that depends on everyone being a gifted natural teacher with a fire in the belly for imposing civilization on thirty godless savages every term. We need a system that produces good results even when the teachers are just there to do a job.
Microsoft does not depend on every salesman being passionate about the XBox, every payroll clerk having dreamt from an early age about giving something back through the power of the healthcare deduction. Institutions work because they create systems--situations--where the easiest thing for employees to do is to further the institution's goals. These systems are more than a little imperfect. But they work better than a system where employees can't get fired, get no reward for improvement, and have some aspect of every moment of their day scripted by a bureaucrat who isn't even in the building. If we'd wanted our schools to do a poor job of educating students, we could hardly have hit upon a better model.
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Huzzah for Adam Smith!
There's also the fact that if teachers aren't in it for the paycheck, raising teacher salaries - or lowering them, for that matter - will do nothing to change the quality of instruction. You can only get better teaching by raising salaries if some or all of the teachers are motivated by their paycheck.
So it makes no sense for the same people who insist that teacher pay has to be raised to turn around and insist that they aren't in it for the money.
Actually my concern isn't the paycheck but the Pensions which I consider a serious money pit that devours education dollars.
No one here has taught, have they? Focusing on motivation misses the ball entirely, it's about compensation for burnout and working 70-90 hours a week, spending your own money on resources, etc.
There's also the simple fact that most schools are contextually disconnected from the systems that Ms. McArdle went through. You can't universalize yourself out of this problem with ideology.
(For the record, I'm not a teacher nor was I raised by one).
How dare I say public school teachers are just in it for the paycheck?
With all the posts, comments, and interesting debate about schools, vouchers, etc, did I miss the comment where someone actually asked you this?
I mean, sure "just" in it for the paycheck is a bit presumptuous - it implies that there is absolutely no other consideration at play. It sounds a little sneering in its construction.
But is there anybody (left, right, middle, or lunatic fringe) out there saying that either teachers don't care about their pay, or that they shouldn't? Or that pay is a big old factor in how people make decisions about what to do for a vocation?
What is this a response to?
So it makes no sense for the same people who insist that teacher pay has to be raised to turn around and insist that they aren't in it for the money.
Teaching doesn't pay very well compared to private-sector jobs that require the same skills, but it gives other rewards that being a middle manager does not. Someone who cares only about money will not become a teacher. This is not the same as saying that teachers care nothing about money, and will gladly work for crusts of bread and cast-off clothing.
No one here has taught, have they? Focusing on motivation misses the ball entirely, it's about compensation for burnout and working 70-90 hours a week, spending your own money on resources, etc.
I know a lot of teachers, and none work those kind of hours. Do you expect me to believe that teachers are putting in 15 hour days on a regular basis? In fact my uncle's school yells at him if he ever works a minute over 40 hours in a week. You're going to have to prove to me that teachers in fact spend 6-7 hours daily outside of school working.
Teaching doesn't pay very well compared to private-sector jobs that require the same skills, but it gives other rewards that being a middle manager does not.
The paycheck at the end of the week is generally less, but there are other monetary benefits to being a teacher. Platinum health benefits and a generous pension for life are worth a lot of money. Along with job security that workers in the private sector would kill for and a teacher is a pretty good gig.
My parents were teachers and they always said there are three good reasons to be a teacher. June, July, and August.
Most jobs give you maybe two to three weeks of vacation while teachers get three and a half months worth of it. Yes, it's tough, but there are perks.
84 hours a week is 12 hours every day. 7am to 7pm... every day....
If you can find me one teacher who worked more than 84(let alone 90) hours a week I will eat my hat.
The Myth of the Noble Teacher is one of those things that society needs in order to avoid thinking too hard about the fact that we entrust our minor children into the care of teachers for six or seven hours a day during a large portion of their formative years.
Meanwhile, if you asked a reasonably bright middle- or high-schooler to identify which of their teachers is in it for the teaching and which ones were mostly interested in drawing a salary for a job that includes union protection, a seven-hour workday, and prolonged vacations, they could have the list drawn up in under two minutes.
Do good teachers exist, i.e. the ones who spend their own money on classroom resources and work 50+ hour weeks while getting paid for 35? You betcha. Are there teachers putting in their time because the salary is easy enough to hold and it's too late now for a career change and loss of pension benefits? I knew of a few, and I came from a lower-middle-class school district which, though slightly underfunded some years, generally didn't have significant staff or student disciplinary problems.
we can't build a school system that depends on everyone being a gifted natural teacher with a fire in the belly for imposing civilization on thirty godless savages every term. We need a system that produces good results even when the teachers are just there to do a job. Microsoft does not depend on every salesman being passionate about the XBox, -- MM
Two problems. First, this is where you run up against the basic difference between public and private sector jobs. It's indispensable to have an ethic of public service and an esprit de corps in public sector jobs. If public sector employees are in it for the money, ultimately you wind up with the MMS, or short of that, just a really crappy, ineffectual police department, tank battalion, or elementary school. Of course your employees need to be well compensated. But they also need to be motivated by a desire to win the respect of their peers and the admiration and gratitude of the citizens they serve, including the tiny ones. Teachers are motivated by the desire for higher pay, but I feel pretty sure that my kids' teachers also get pretty jazzed when I send them a note telling them what a great job they're doing with this month's Unit of Inquiry and how much the kids love it. And even more jazzed hearing that from my kids, who actually know what they're talking about. Similarly, when I write an article, positive feedback from peers and readers can be more important than a paycheck. (Unfortunately the journalism industry seems to be trying its best lately to rely on this as much as possible, and to do away with the "paycheck" part entirely.)
Second, Microsoft actually does rely to a certain degree on salesmen being passionate about the Xbox. Apple sure as hell relies on salesmen and customers being passionate about the iPhone. Nintendo and Wii, etc. It's not a substitute for paying them well, but these companies are far from indifferent to the elan of their workers.
I occasionally encounter this claim when I advocate pay-for-perforamnce. I always say "great, if teachers aren't in it for the money, we have halve their salaries and get just as good public education for half the cost!"
While I always enjoy my witty comeback, it never convinces my interlocutors. I think the reason is that the people who say this don't see wages as signals regulating supply and demand. They see them as some sort of cosmic reward that should be bound up with the justness and greatness of your occupation. We always end up talking past one another.
I am a teacher. I do work 70 or so hours a week, more at the beginning and end of the year, less at various times in the middle. But I know for a fact that I am one of only two teachers in my school who works a minute over forty hours a week, and, in fact, my school discourages working more than an hour on either end of the school day.
For many teachers who don't have a passion to teach, there is a great benefit in having June, July, and August off. Even for passionate teachers, if we didn't get at least part of the summer off, we'd never make it through more than a couple of years: trying to be good at what we do, trying to give our students what they need, simply takes too much out of us.
But I think job security is a much bigger perk than the summers for many teachers, especially for those without children. No matter how terrible a teacher is, it is nearly impossible, courtesy our fine unions, to get fired. And in the cases where a teacher is let go, if they've been working in a big district (as I do) for more than a year or two they're just about guaranteed to get picked up somewhere else in the district, simply because the district's schools are prohibited from hiring outside the district if there's a qualified candidate in the district. Qualified here does not mean quality instruction, but rather time spent in the district, degrees and licenses, etc.
Geopoliticsandbeer -- you're exactly right about the disconnect.
Brooksfoe -- you make some good points. Even the worst teachers I've worked with -- and alternative schools, where I've always taught, are frequently a dumping ground for a district's teachers that no other school will take -- take a great deal of delight in positive feedback from students and parents.
That said, I couldn't agree more with Megan and others calling for some sort of overhaul. The system in its current form is about the worst I could imagine, and pretty much guarantees that the majority of our students who would most benefit from good teachers are instead given terrible instructions, primed for failure.
Poor resource allocation (among many other inefficiences) does make it hard to keep some of the best teachers. I know I enjoy working in the hardest schools, with the least advantaged students. I think many of the best teachers seek out those sorts of challenges (though there are certainly plenty of good teachers in the suburbs too; I'm not trying to exclude...). For those of us that end up in such high-stress environments, with the least resources (and in the most need of them), it all starts to add up. I honestly can't see myself teaching that much longer -- maybe five years more at most -- simply because I don't think I can take that kind of work environment that much longer.
I am curious to see what comes of these sorts of discussions, which I find myself running across more and more frequently the past few years (NCLB or no NCLB, I don't know...)
Matt, the situation you describe is exactly why I chose not to be a teacher despite spending ridiculous amounts of money at a private college getting an education degree.
Not that I have any solutions to offer, just empathy. Or maybe just sympathy - I did my student teaching at New Trier in Winnetka, one of the richest public school districts in the country. (I later lived in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods, but not as a teacher.)
Your last line is very similar to this one from Milton Friedman:
And unless they start molesting their charges, it's basically impossible to fire them.
Wow. That is a REALLY bad incentive for administrators to have...
I've always assumed that it was because becoming a teacher requires a lot of schooling and is a profession. Around here, it's a Bachelor's plus two more years. Generally, we assume that a professional with six years of schooling under his or her belt expects a pretty handsome salary.
But if we think they're in it for something other than the money, then well I guess we don't have to pay them so much now, do we?
"No one here has taught, have they?" (geopoliticsandbeer, 3rd comment)
I'm a public school teacher, in the Shenandoah Valley, and a lot of what I'm reading here is at best exaggerated:
So far from getting "June, July, and August" off, we get less than two months: my first day of work (yes, a full day) was August 7th and the last will be June 10th (students started on August 19th).
Spring Break is four days: Good Friday through Easter Monday. We do get two full weeks at Christmas, and the usual two-day week just before Thanksgiving, but there's no other fall break.
Gold-plated pension plan? Maybe in big cities. I get 1.7% times my final-year salary for each year of work. I'm 55, so if I work for 10 years and then retire, I'll get 17% of my final salary, which would be less than $8,000 if I retired this year. If I wanted to retire on 2/3 pay, I'd have to work 40 years: I don't think any of my colleagues are retiring at 50, and quite a few look to be over 65. The health benefits are nothing special, either.
Even with 14 years teaching experience and a Ph.D. in my field, I don't get anywhere near $60,000, much less $100,000. Try $46,400, which actually seems like a lot to me.
Union? There is one, but I haven't joined, and I can certainly be fired if the principal isn't happy with my work.
Seven-hour days? I'm contractually required to be at school for 7 1/2, and find that I cannot get all my grading done during my official prep time, so I'm certainly putting in more than 40 hours per week, as are most of my colleagues, so far as I can tell.
Are my evenings free, once I finish grading? Not necessarily: I've already done Parents' Night, and will be collecting tickets at a Volleyball game on the 30th and a JV Football game on October 15th, a date I would have preferred to keep free for a cultural event elsewhere. (Maybe I can get someone to swap duties with me.) At least I'm not running the Drama Club: those two teachers are at school for a couple of extra hours every day. Teachers are required to do various things to keep their teaching licenses, e.g. take classes (whole-semester or one-day), publish articles, give lectures, go to conferences, and so on. Some of these are subsidized by the county, some not.
By the way, I don't mean any of this as a complaint: compared to being an adjunct at a university or teaching at a private school, the pay is excellent, and I love teaching. Why this particular county? The fact that public school jobs are numerous and relatively interchangeable* means that I can live wherever I want, which right now is a block and a half from some of the best Shakespeare in the world. I've seen six different plays (two of them twice) and an opera in the 5 1/2 weeks I've been in town.
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*Most private schools are either religious or have some kind of ideological bent (Montessori, military academy, whatever), so your average teacher will only want to work at 1/2 or 1/3 of the private schools in a given town. The ones where everyone wants to work (e.g. established prep schools with substantial endowments) have very low turnover.
JordanT and JMO, please either suspend your disbelief or eat your hat.
I am a former HS teacher and have worked a 90 hour week.
I did not do this regularly, nor did I like it. But I assure you that there were 2 periods of time in the school year where I did 70+ hours every year that I was a teacher.
1) The first week of the school year. I had to set up my class, meet students, call parents (I called each and every parent), grade papers, plan my curriculum and host back to school night.
In my first year I worked 95 hours that week, in later years that number decreased to the 70+ range.
2) The end of the first semester. At the end of the semester my school did not take a break, there was no 'grading day' nothing to help teachers... So, I got my exams, whatever projects I had, and had to teach a normal week of classes with all the preparation and grading, while also writing 1-2 paragraph individualized comments about each of my students for their report cards. I would have exactly 1 week from the end of exams to complete all semester-related grading.
I can assure you that many of my colleagues in their first few years of teaching worked similar hours. Two of my friends got in trouble with the school's alarm company because they were in the building working at 3AM.
Our gym teacher/athletic director would arrive at 6AM every day and leave at 5PM every day, then go coach or attend games at night and on the weekends.
I assure you, there are teachers who work like this. This is how my mother works as well, she's a HS teacher too.
All teachers do not, many work the minimal number of contract hours. I don't mean to claim otherwise.
"Institutions work because they create systems--situations--where the easiest thing for employees to do is to further the institution's goals"
The most important task of management is to establish this kind of system. Unfortunately, managers are people, too, and the system within which THEY operate does not usually make this the easiest thing for them to do. So they create systems which are easier to administer, whether or not they further the institution's (purported) goals. Taken to an extreme, the institution's goals become Top Management's personal goals, which can too often be self-enrichment or self-aggrandizment.
Doctor Anonymus - You put in more than 40 hour weeks, so do many other full time workers. Your days off where exaggerated by others? OK, but you still get more than most workers, unless you teach summer school, and if you do that you get extra pay.
Using your own data you get 72 days off (not counting weekends, except ones that occur during the Summer break, I didn't subtract them out). That's for your official holidays and breaks, you don't mention if you can take off days with pay beyond that but I would assume you can take at least some non-holiday/break days off and still get paid. Most people get no where near that many days off. You might argue you don't get paid for those days so they aren't paid days off, but the point is that your salary is just for the other days. Add in the weekends for the rest of the year, and you work barely more than 200 days. Lets assume you work some weekends (lesson plans etc.)
I'm not saying that your overpaid. And I guess you do have a good point about how others where underestimating how long teachers work, but even if some people went to far on this point, it is clear that teachers (at least those that don't teach summer school) work a lot less hours than most full time workers.
From my experience as one who has a father who teaches, the job can work very well as the second income in a two income family as vacations and workdays tend to coincide with the vacations of children as well as the fact that the demographics have encouraged the profession to structure itself around having a large portion of the workforce take time off to care for newborn children at some point in their career. The quality of the job can depend greatly on one's disciple, however. In many areas, reasonably competent science and math teachers can more or less write their own tickets while English, history, elementary, and music teachers have to struggle for the scraps of the job market.
That having been said, my dad (a former industrial chemist) loves his job as a science teacher and even though he could easily live the life of an at-home spouse (and did for several years after my siblings were born) as at this point because my mom earns over an order of magnitude more than him, he truly enjoys getting up every morning and teaching.