[CSPS] teachers & economics

Tue Jun 28 11:26:29 CDT 2005

As any teacher will testify, money is not the answer.  But its absence 
makes accomplishing goals much harder.  And the question of hiring the best 
football coaches never seems to be bogged down by mere trifles like salary 
and perks.

June 27, 2005

Reading, Writing, Retailing

New York Times
By DAVE EGGERS, NINIVE CALEGARI and DANIEL MOULTHROP

THIS is a bizarre and unsettling time in the lives of students, parents and 
teachers. It is a time when school lets out, and hundreds of thousands of 
teachers start their second jobs to keep their rents and mortgages paid. 
One day they're shaping minds, a moral force in the lives of the young 
people they teach and know, and in some ways the architects of the future 
of the nation. The next day they're serving cocktails and selling plasma 
TV's at the mall.

In your community, you might spot your son's Advanced Placement biology 
teacher working in the summer as a travel agent. Or perhaps your daughter's 
English teacher is painting the house down the street. Not counting those 
who teach summer school, about 20 percent of the country's teachers have 
second jobs (often during the school year, too), and the majority of those 
jobs could not be construed as enhancing universal respect for those who teach.

If you're at the Circuit City in Grapevine, Tex., you might run into Erik 
Benner, who teaches history and coaches the football team at Cross Timbers 
Middle School. His work at the school, which averages 60 hours a week, does 
not come close to paying the way for his family of four, so he moonlights 
during the year, selling stereos and digital cameras.

Mr. Benner hoped to teach summer school this year, but enrollment was low. 
Instead, he started using his truck to run a small delivery service, and 
he's picking up any available shifts at the store. He works alongside an 
old friend, who makes double selling electronics what Mr. Benner does teaching.

If you live in the Bay Area of California, you might find the head of 
Redwood High School's science department helping customers at the Plumpjack 
Cafe select a wine to complement the soft-shelled crabs. Skip Lovelady has 
not missed his Saturday night waiting shift there in 12 years. He can't 
afford to. If he could get more shifts this summer, he might take them. But 
they're not available, so he's teaching summer school.

Most teachers love teaching, but teaching is often not so easy to love. 
True, the profession is gaining respect: in 2003, 49 percent of adults 
thought teaching was a profession with "very great" prestige; in 1977, only 
29 percent thought so.

But teachers' salaries are well below what similarly educated professionals 
expect. The average salary for a teacher in 2003 was $45,771. A teacher 
with a master's degree might get an additional stipend of anywhere from 
$500 to $2,000. Across all professions, however, the average beginning 
salary for those with master's degrees is $62,820 - about what a teacher 
might earn with 15 years of experience. It is no surprise, then, that in a 
Public Agenda study, 75 percent of teachers considered themselves 
"seriously underpaid."

Meanwhile, President Bush's education law known as No Child Left Behind 
insists that by 2006 all teachers be "highly qualified." A laudable goal, 
clearly beyond debate. But while school districts must find increasingly 
qualified teachers, the legislation does not provide enough money to 
substantially increase teachers' earning potential.

Imagine that scenario in the private sector. A chief executive decides he 
wants better performance from his company. He issues a mandate that all 
employees be highly qualified. Then he proposes, as No Child Left Behind 
does, that the staff members be more tightly controlled, that they conform 
closely to his top-down directives and that they be tested yearly to keep 
their jobs. And he wants all of this without raising salaries a penny. Who 
would want to work for such an outfit?

This is the question on the minds of thousands of recent college graduates. 
Talk to students who intend to teach, and ask them how they feel about 
their chosen profession with this legislation putting teachers under such 
remarkable scrutiny. Educators must spend a greater portion of their time 
preparing for standardized tests, and they face reprisals for themselves 
and their schools if they or their students don't perform correctly. Add to 
that the prospect that if they're unmarried, or if their spouse doesn't 
make a good deal of money, their ability to buy a home or car will be 
limited, unless they take on that second job. It's no wonder that only 18 
percent of recent college graduates say they would ever consider teaching.

There's almost something darkly comic about it all. We place the highest 
demands on a profession, and not just through the teacher-quality 
provisions of the legislation. We have unarticulated expectations that 
teachers be morally and ethically unimpeachable, possessed of dynamic, 
compelling personalities and agile minds and capable of guiding the 
learning, for example, of 35 hormonally charged 13-year-olds right after lunch.

After asking that of them, we pay them so little that they have to find 
work selling electronics and cleaning our houses. Is it any surprise that 
45 percent of new teachers leave our schools within the first five years?

The solution begins with fixing the legislation and carries down to each 
school district. Those behind the law have to recognize that schools will 
never attract the most talented teachers by making the job seem like a 
cross between a prison guard and the person who administers the written 
tests at the department of motor vehicles. And districts need to make a 
commitment to higher salaries; it is the first step in improving not just 
their schools, but also the community as a whole.

A few years ago, the residents of Helena, Mont., decided that their schools 
needed improvement. So they started with teacher salaries. They increased 
average pay some $8,000; pushed starting salaries to $30,000 from $23,000; 
and built incentives for improving performance, working on professional 
development and taking on responsibilities outside the classroom.

In years past, a vacancy in the Helena school system would attract perhaps 
a dozen, mostly underqualified applicants. Last summer, Randy Carlson, 
principal of Capital High School, needed three new social studies teachers. 
He got to choose from a pool of more than a hundred candidates.

But where will local districts get the money to increase salaries? One 
idea: every day, bonds are approved to build stadiums, even schools. The 
presumption is that the new buildings will increase the profile of a given 
city, thus attracting more visitors, more businesses, more families and 
more tax revenue, all of which will pay down the bond. By the same token, 
then, wouldn't it make sense to create a bond to pay for better educators?

The district would get the best teachers, families would get better 
schools, businesses would settle in the city with the great public schools, 
property values would go up, and everyone would be happy. Especially the 
students, who would get the best educators, gain respect for the profession 
and might even consider becoming teachers themselves. The talent pool would 
then grow ever stronger, and in 20 years we could have created the best 
corps of teachers the country has ever known.

Dave Eggers is the founder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit group that tutors 
students, where Nínive Calegari is on the board.Daniel Moulthrop, a former 
teacher, is a radio producer for WCPN in Cleveland. They are the authors 
ofof "Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of Our 
Nation's Teachers."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/opinion/27eggers.html

Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
aaas.org 
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