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At least it's not over drug testing
By adamg on Fri, 05/14/2010 - 9:38am
The Globe reports the city and the Boston Teachers Union are going to arbitration because School Superintendent Carol Johnson wants teachers at 12 underperforming schools to spend an extra hour in school - without paying them more.
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Comments
imo
If the teachers are salaried and the schools are under performing, it's not unreasonable to ask the teachers to extend their day for an hour without additional pay so long as doing so will help the schools meet the standards ... unless their collective bargaining agreement explicitly prohibits it.
The teachers, if they do do the extra work, and turn the schools around, would be in a great position to negotiate extra pay for a job well done.
something to consider
That extra hour can cost a lot of money if you have kids in childcare or an elderly parent in an elder care program. It can mean the difference between picking your own kids up at school or meeting their bus at home and having to hire a babysitter. It also means driving home in heavier traffic, meaning an hour can stretch to an extra hour-and-a-half. It can also mean additional grading time due to the longer day - that's on top of the extra hour.
Even if you don't have kids or elders to care for, it can mean the difference between having the time to prepare dinner and grabbing takeout so you can have time to grade papers and get to bed in time for the next day's early start.
"Just an hour" isn't just an hour for many people, just saying ...
Consider this as well: the staff feel like they are being punished for working at a school that is likely underperforming because of things they had no control over. The more senior teachers will then transfer out, and morale goes to shit with those who can't escape the imposition, when many already feel that they have made some sacrifices to teach in a struggling school to begin with. What a wonderful way to flush the entire mess down the toilet.
Hardly serves the goals of improving performance if teachers quit, teachers leave, and everybody else is pissed off! When you consider what the staffing issues are going to cost, it would seem like it would just be cheaper to pay them the extra damn hour! At least make some honest estimates of the costs of this sort of attrition.
Unless these teachers really aren't doing a good job...
which could be true, I don't think this is a good idea.
Swirrly is right on. Why not go teach in a school or school system where you know the kids are already set up to succeed? Why bother working extra hard for kids that might more challenging to teach when the school system might just make you work an extra hour without paying you?
Why not go teach in a school
Because maybe you have a conscience, realize that even the under-served students need good teachers, and that someone needs to take the job everyone else is running from.
Amen. Thank you Jiffy for
Amen. Thank you Jiffy for bringing the true meaning of teaching into this. My mom is a top-tier elementary school teacher who chose to teach in the middle of the ghetto in New Bedford (Hayden McFadden) because she believed that these students had an equal right to education. Sure, her whiteboard may have had a bullethole or two, but she at least provided them with a solid-enough education that would allow them to succeed should they choose to.
Teachers don't teach for the money. The job sucks. The pay sucks. The hours suck (it's a 24/7 job with principals and superintendents breathing standards down your back). They teach because they care about students and believe in the future generation.
Did you work for a PIRG or ACORN?
I don't mean that as a republican tea partier slur, I mean exactly that. Why? Because the PIRGs and ACORN have the same attitude that you are evincing here, perhaps taken to an extreme end - you work for us because you are with the cause and have a conscience, so we can use that to ask you to work far too much for far too little compensation and then berate you if you actually, you know, need to do other things? I know people who worked for these organizations - some for as much as a decade - and they eventually burned out or left because of this all/nothing "all for the cause" attitudes in these organizations.
Sorry, but this sort of thinking has limits - and taking a school that already offers the stress and challenge of "underperforming" and heaping extra work hours for no pay on top of that stress means that anybody who can leave will leave for a conforming school or go diversify a nice suburban program. Period.
keep reading jiffy. That is my point.
What happens when your kids still don't succeed and you get fired for it or have to work for free for it?
Are teachers in Wellesley better than teachers in Boston because their kids learn more throughout the year?
Some of these teachers work their asses off and are limited in what they can hold students accountable for. Why punish teachers in underperforming scchools when they might be teaching just has hard or harder than those in overperforming schools?
Your point is valid, but your
Your point is valid, but your response/action to it is not. You cannot abandon students in under-performing schools. What really needs to happen is more funding from the federal government to get the proper facilities and materials that these schools need to at least attempt to educate the underprivileged class.
His point is that if teachers
His point is that if teachers are asked to work more and more and more for free, they'll have no choice but to abandon the students. You can't expect people, no matter how kindhearted, to work themselves to death out of a sense of human obligation. He's saying we have to pay teachers for this increased workload. Exactly the same thing you're saying.
It isn't my response or action.
it will be what the teachers will do.
At some point there is going to be a breaking point with teachers. Just because a school underperforms doesn't mean the teachers aren't trying hard.
You've got to phrase it
You've got to phrase it better then because the question you posted reads very differently than the point you are explaining now. I agree. There is going to be a breaking point and they do need to get paid for that extra hour if it is added on.
Okay, well, I guess you
Okay, well, I guess you missed my point, which wasn't to argue who's better at teaching, or getting fired for under-performing students, but merely to respond to the question you posed above, and to point out that many people find it gratifying to stay with the students who need the most help, regardless of the obstacles. Didn't mean to derail.
And for the record, I agree that this proposed unpaid hour is unfair.