Teachers struggle to make ends meet

[tonysam]

File this article under "No Shit, Sherlock":

Ray Vasquez is a Spanish teacher and swim coach at Cactus High School in the Peoria Unified School District.

He's been teaching in the district for seven years and has a master's degree from the College of Education at NAU.

But what most of his students don't know is that he also works at a Blockbuster every weekend for $7.62 per hour to help make ends meet for his wife and two children.

Because of state budget cuts and other losses in funding, the district had to cut salaries and require teachers and staff to take two furlough days.

Holly Urbancic, executive director and representative of the Peoria Classroom Teachers Association, said teachers also took reductions in Proposition 301 money, pay raises funded in part by state sales tax money.

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Just wait until these "professionals" are paid daycare wages because that is where public education is headed.

[tonysam]

1. Who in the hell is unrec'ing this?

I mean this is FACT, for God's sake.

[Dinger]

4. 4th Rec From Me

Charter school PUSHERS are most likely unreccing this.

[MichiganVote]

2. Won't get people to go to school for years just to teach for peanuts.

[Better Today]

6. Why not? Lots of other degreed persons do. One of the things that

just floors me is the disconnect between getting degrees and being paid well. Around here people, kids really, who've taken the time, gotten the loans (upwards of 40K), and dedication to get their BA's are having to settle for jobs (one's requiring BAs btw) for under 30K a year.

This is not a teacher issue, it's a higher education issue, it's too expensive for most of the degrees' promises of future reward.

[MichiganVote]

9. And how many of those "jobs" encompass 30+ kids per hour of the day?

[Better Today]

12. It's a problem on virtually

all disciplines coming out of colleges. I'm not saying teachers don't have it bad, but they are far from the only ones. You may want to jack teachers above all else in importance, I'm unwilling to do that. With a college education, one should be able to find employment that makes that education worthwhile, I don't think that is the case anymore.

[MichiganVote]

16. The OP was about teachers. Not other career paths.

[Better Today]

19. Mine isn't about career paths either, but since you aren't understanding that

Have a lovely evening.

[C_Lawyer09]

17. What is peanuts in your book?

30-40-50k? For weekends off and some holidays, plus usually part of a Summer? Most teachers with doctorates make 70-100k a year. My dad is a doctor of Psychology and makes 40-50k a year. Cry me a river.

[tonysam]

18. More anti-teacher b.s.

Teachers don't get paid for their "time off"; their salaries are for ten months spread out over 12 months.

Few jobs are as labor intensive as teaching. Try working with as many as 25 or 30 kids for 6 or 7 hours a day, being on your feet all day or else the principals raise hell if you aren't circulating around the room. Furthermore, expect to spend a lot of time being sick, especially if you work around little kids because the parents refuse to keep their sick kids at home. And then you have to plan lessons and correct papers on your own time, often taking the work home. If you are a special education teacher, you have to do clerical work on top of teaching, lesson planning, assessment, etc. and must arrange meetings which happen BEFORE or AFTER school hours on your OWN TIME. You are paid only for the hours worked during the regular school day. You have to pay for your classes to keep your license, unlike businesses that will reimburse you. You also have to buy your own supplies out of your own pocket, which for me ran well over a thousand bucks a year. Also unlike your dad's job, teachers have NO real control over their work although they are misclassified by the federal government as "professionals." They must follow guidelines and take orders from their bosses or higher-ups or risk disciplinary action or dismissal. Finally, as a teacher you are exhausted mentally because you're "on" all the time (unlike in the business world where you can daydream at times or work on menial jobs while thinking about something else), and you cannot delegate much of the work. You NEED the summers off to unwind.

Cry ME a fucking river about how "hard" you or your dad has it.

[C_Lawyer09]

20. Thats just it, I'm not crying

I'm using a real example to illustrate a point. So, how about answering the question, what's peanuts? You're being thin skinned about your percieved lack of empathy for your profession does nothing to keep me from asking questions or applying critical thinking, to the real worth of various jobs.

[tonysam]

22. And then there are special education teachers

who may have fewer kids to work with than a regular classroom teacher, though this isn't always the case with life skills teachers, for example, who may have as many 20 kids in their classroom. For example, a special education teacher may work exclusively with autistic kids--true autistics, not Asperger's--which may number five or six kids, but one of those is equal to about 20 regular kids, even with aides in the classroom and with an organized program (I can't remember the name of one of the most popular programs for autistics, but it employs picture cards and a sensory approach to instruction--I used it for an autistic student of mine--wait a minute, I remember it now--it is called "Strategies"). As a sped teacher you don't do case management just on the kids you have, especially in middle or high school where there could be as many as 130 kids out of 700 kids total in the entire school who are special ed. Schools divvy up the workload among all of the sped teachers so you wind up with 20 or so on your case load and the not the five or six you actually teach. You write up IEPs for kids you don't even know.

And of course there is now "response to intervention" required by federal law and put forward by people who have either never taught a day in their lives or else have been out of the classroom for years. The ultimate goal of RTI is to gradually eliminate special education teachers (except for those who teach life skills or work with kids with behavior issues), although this isn't happening right now. My old district had just started this mindboggling bunch of horseshit when I was wrongfully sacked in 2008. It's not enough to have to assess the kids you have as a sped teacher, or write up IEPs for your students and other sped kids, and it's not enough to have to be responsible for teaching the kids you have. Now you have assess these kids EVERY single week on Mickey Mouse type assessments in reading and in math to see if there is incremental progress being made. And then you get put the kids' scores on the computer so it generates a cutesy little line graph which you proudly show to the parents in the IEP meetings how much progress the kids have made.

There are districts out there which delegate RTI to parapros, but not in my old district. Sped teachers had to test these kids every week.

[MichiganVote]

23. In most places my dear, its 50k for k-12 teachers after 8-10 years...

Not that your likely to add that into your calculations. As for the weekends off? Most teachers are grading papers, attending events or coaching events. Ditto for most evenings. The Doctoral teachers you speak of at the salary range you suggest are a dying breed. They are of the 60's 70's generation at the collegiate level. Nowadays few professors achieve that b/c colleges hire adjuncts to save on costs.

No one is asking you to cry a river. No one has appointed you the last word either.

[adnelson60087]

3. Reading through the responses from that articles site makes it clear

that teachers are THE PROBLEM with education and many of the general public don't value what we do. I so wish that people in our country truly understood what educators do and how challenging it has become. In my nearly 20 years of work, I've never seen it as bad as it is now. I fear for the future of our nation, due to the fools running educational policy. Duncan and Obama know nothing about pedagogy or best practices in education. BushCo knew less than nothing and established NCLB on the Houston School District's lies and deceptions. Charter schools are undermining public education and its funding, and private companies are sucking money and time away from true educational programs that established research KNOWS works, instead putting their faith in standardized exams based on normalization (bell) curves where 50% must be the center. Too many above that 50% means we need a new test. And they cycle continues. All the while, taking time and money away from the kids and ultimately from the nation.

[tonysam]

7. I think one really has to be in the system as a teacher to truly understand it

People think because they were once students in public schools or that they have kids in public schools, they are experts. The demonizing of teachers is a result of decades' long propaganda which diverts people from the real problem in public education, which is with the administrators.

[adnelson60087]

25. I don't really think administrators are what's wrong with education today

since they have to work within the rotten framework established by the foolish politicians. The admin does plenty of questionable acts, but they didn't set up this trainwreck. We have gullible and complicit politicians getting bought off by big business (who see virgin economic territory) and anti-public school forces like the religious right (boy they want vouchers the WORST way). These guys don't care about poor or inner-city schools. I promise you that.

[tonysam]

26. It IS with the administrators, for they are the ones who run the schools

and are not held accountable for their actions. A lot of the problem with administrators stems from the fact they have total power over teachers; they can very, very easily ruin their careers. They also have control of the legal system, making it extremely difficult for teachers to prevail in lawsuits. That's because they have unlimited money with which to fight teachers, thanks to taxpayer money.

The problem as I see it is structural because of the extreme power imbalance between administrators, beginning with principals, and teachers.

The outside forces are important, but they aren't what's truly ailing in education.

[Better Today]

13. Unfortunately no one seems to understand that teachers can't

teach in a manner that is reflective of their style, or their abilities, or their enthusiasms (?) because of directives like NCLB, though I saw similar stuff happening back in the 70's with Texas A&M standardizing a lot of its curriculum. Within a year, the effect on the professors and therefore the interest from the students was really noticeable. I left shortly thereafter but I'm going to guess they stayed with it since NCLB is a plague unleashed from Texas, if not A&M specifically.

IE. . . it ain't the teacher's fault, it's the systems fault. And there are so many things wrong with the system, including it's purpose. The idea that all non-challenged students should all learn essentially the exact same things with no regard to their personal strengths and weaknesses is complete crap, imo.

[maryf]

5. K&R nt

[LWolf]

8. I'm one of them.

First of all, I spent all of my available assets 4.5 years ago rescuing my grandson, getting him the open-heart surgery he needed to survive, and helping my son set up to be a single dad.

Besides spending all my assets, it included a move out of state and a massive pay cut.

Now I don't have much seniority, leaving me vulnerable, and last year took another pay cut. With another looming on the horizon.

I'm working special programs after school to make extra money, spending vacation time scoring state writing exams for extra money....anything I can to stay afloat.

[Riley18]

10. A big part of the problem is the lack of adequate funding for public education.

Another thing is the propaganda that has been shoved at us from every direction for the last 9 years. It would have been nice if it had started to change for the better once Bush was gone, but it has only gotten worse. That crazy Arne is bad news for public education. He makes it seem like he is on some kind of mission to "save" education or something when in fact he is out to destroy it. Then we have the movie stars who actually think they are doing the little people a favor by giving money to charter schools. The end result will be the end of free education.

[tonysam]

11. If anything, it has accelerated under Obama

His administration is truly anti-public education.

[C_Lawyer09]

15. How many dollars would it take?

For a classroom of 30 students to pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery(just math reading and verbal)? which is given at a 9th grade level more or less.

[C_Lawyer09]

14. I respect teaching as a profession

Having said that, I'm curious why there are constant postings about the detriment of teachers, and not other professions writ large. This has gotten ridiculous. I've been repetetively beat up on du in regard to troops to teachers programs, vis a vis vets whom all supposedly conduct their classrooms like mini basic training evolutions. As a Recruiter, half of high school graduate prospects were able to answer these two questions correctly. What is half of 7.5, and, what is the following word, (chaos)? Only half of them answered both questions correctly. Myself, and fellow recruiters tutored countless individuals toward passing the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery(ASVAB)on our own time. A standard work week was 60-80 hours.

Another teacher on du, ventured that all of the vets taking advantage of the aformentioned program were responsible for devaluing her profession, by lowering standards and giving people opportunities for free. States have been shedding jobs for two years. There are no lateral entry hire jobs available. There are no more stipends excepting Special Ed. Math, and Science jobs, and very few of those. Many of my relatives are teachers or retired teachers, at various levels, grade school through college. I certainly respect the profession, and had always looked forward to teaching as a career after military retirement.

I made it a point recently to detail, exactly what it takes to enlist in todays(not the Vietnam era Army). There are nine pre-requisites that must be satisfied. I also attempted to make clear, how many jobs in todays military require several skill sets, that often also entail a secret or top secret security clearance, which requires a federal background investigation. I did this after listening to or reading several comments about Army, versus flipping burgers as a simplified choice in today's economy.

I want to let it be known that there are many men and women out there that would love the opportunity to teach, regardless of the supposed financial hardships. One of your fellow teachers made a point of mentioning she was Rolling on the floor laughing, if that is what (ROFL) means, when I stated that it is harder to join the Armed Forces than it is getting in to many colleges. The thread was terminated so I wasn't able to read her response.

The WASL, which is the standardized test in WA state is ridiculous. Further, I empahtize with teachers that are not fully supported by their administrations, and are constantly scrutinized by administrators with limited classroom experience, though the reality is, that these annoyances are taking place in many fields across the board. It has become clear to me, since recent militar retirement, that, apparently, unless I continue on towards a Masters, my employment possibilities will be limited. Meanwhile I work delivering cleaning from one place to another, and will probably start a graveyard security shift soon.

I'm not attempting to be judgemental, but I wonder if "teachers" realize most employees are undergoing the same type of challenges. One of your contemporaries was babbling about the importance of pedagogy. This might mean something to her and/or you, but I've taught various and many skills over the last 20 years and am confident I could do so again. Do I think teachers are getting a raw deal? Yep. Do I think they are suffering more than other employees? Nope.

[proud2BlibKansan]

21. Because this is the education forum

Did you get lost?

[MichiganVote]

24. Frankly, judging from your remarks I don't think you even understand what it is

to respect the profession of teaching or of teachers. Sorry, whether you agree or not, your comments are derisive. Respecting teachers or the profession does not necessitate attention to a sob story. The fact that you seem to think that is what teachers want from you or anyone else in society merely reinforces your ignorance.

Perhaps since you have met with such unhappy responses to your remarks about teachers in DU, you should consider your own part in the dialogue. Its never too late for you to develop critical thinking even though teachers are not allowed to instruct it anymore.