School not getting results? Fire everybody!

[Patroklos]

The US military should take over education duties in the US. Once they teach you how to be a teacher, you get deployed to a school of their choice.

There is actual a good point there, about teacher assignments. In the military superior performance leads to assignment to the most difficult billets. In most civil servant fields, superior performance leads to assignment to the most cushy jobs. The first thing a veteran teacher does with seniority or experiance is apply to a school or the classes with the easiest students behavior wise.

Can't say I blame them in all cases.

 

[Camikaze]

How many hours a year do you "officially" get paid for?

I can't speak for downtown, but I assume here is similar to there, in terms of working hours, and here, teachers working hours are about 7 hours a day, for a little over 200 days of the year. So on official working hour basis alone, $78k a year would be about $55/hour.

Edit: crosspost

 

[Patroklos]

I'm not complaining about the hours. I knew what I signed up for, and even though I work a long time, I think I am compensated fairly. I just think it isn't accurate to say I make X an hour, because I don't get paid for all the hours I log in. Nobody does.

I attempted to calculate my hourly wages once. It made me depressed so I didn't finish.

 

[Gilder]

Central Falls is, without question, the cruddiest town in the state. The school itself, just as cruddy.

I'll agree that the teachers were overpaid as it is. Although I wouldn't be surprised if most of the cash they made was just an incentive to keep them teaching. You really don't wanna end up in Central Falls. Of course that's the rub, they paid them too much and now the school department finds itself in mounds of debt it can't get out of, hence firing every teacher.

 

[luiz]

Teachers in disadvantaged schools are generally underpaid, given what they have to put up with. I'm not saying that they should get $300K a year, just that they are certainly not getting overpaid. Now, if they are being paid $78k a year, if you were to convert that to an hourly wage (only counting on-site hours, of course), then they get paid about $60/hour. So asking them to work overtime for half that is ludicrous. Asking them to work overtime for time and half pay is reasonable. That's what they asked for. You don't want to pay them overtime pay? Train them during normal working hours.

Or fire them and hire people who will do a better job for half of their ridiculously high wage.

 

[Camikaze]

Or fire them and hire people who will do a better job for half of their ridiculously high wage.

How on Earth are you going to get more qualified and more able staff for half the price at a horrible school? No teacher in their right mind would accept a job at that school at half the normal rate, unless they couldn't get a job anywhere else, which would indicate they are incompetent. So if you fired everyone and halved the wages, the problem would be drastically enhanced, not solved. Higher wages act as an incentive to get good teachers to disadvantaged schools. Higher wages = higher quality of staff. Sure, there will be exceptions, but the general rule does apply.

 

[Integral]

How on Earth are you going to get more qualified and more able staff for half the price at a horrible school? No teacher in their right mind would accept a job at that school at half the normal rate, unless they couldn't get a job anywhere else, which would indicate they are incompetent. So if you fired everyone and halved the wages, the problem would be drastically enhanced, not solved. Higher wages act as an incentive to get good teachers to disadvantaged schools. Higher wages = higher quality of staff. Sure, there will be exceptions, but the general rule does apply.

Note that the normal rate is one-third to one-half of what is currently being paid there. One of the points of offering ridiculously high wages is that you can then be selective when hiring teachers; the current cohort clearly isn't doing a stellar job (even when apportioning most of the blame to students/parents/culture/whatever). It's likely that the school could offer 80% of the current rate and fill its staff with a better teaching cohort.

--

@DT, as a teacher in a, shall we say, "troubled" school, what do you think? Is the union greedy? Should it be legal/okay to fire *everybody*? How do we turn around a situation like Central Falls? Seeing as you've been doing this for a few months now, I'd like to hear your insights.

 

[downtown]

Or fire them and hire people who will do a better job for half of their ridiculously high wage.

You don't get long term improvements that way. Half of that salary, in that crappy of an environment, can only buy rookie teachers...who are going to get turned into hamburger...'specially without veteran assistance.

Teaching in the ghetto is kind of like running a professional basketball team. If your team is terrible, you are going to have to overpay to bring in talent needed to turn it around (witness the LA Clippers, Minn Timberwolves, etc). You can save a lot of money by mostly playing rookies at their cheapo contracts, but either the terrible situation stunts their development, or once they get good enough to escape their rookie contract, they leave.

 

[Zelig]

You don't get long term improvements that way. Half of that salary, in that crappy of an environment, can only buy rookie teachers...who are going to get turned into hamburger...'specially without veteran assistance.

Teaching in the ghetto is kind of like running a professional basketball team. If your team is terrible, you are going to have to overpay to bring in talent needed to turn it around (witness the LA Clippers, Minn Timberwolves, etc). You can save a lot of money by mostly playing rookies at their cheapo contracts, but either the terrible situation stunts their development, or once they get good enough to escape their rookie contract, they leave.

To go along with my military running the education idea: revenue sharing!

Keep taking money from good schools and giving it to bad schools until the situation equalizes!

 

[Camikaze]

Note that the normal rate is one-third to one-half of what is currently being paid there. One of the points of offering ridiculously high wages is that you can then be selective when hiring teachers; the current cohort clearly isn't doing a stellar job (even when apportioning most of the blame to students/parents/culture/whatever). It's likely that the school could offer 80% of the current rate and fill its staff with a better teaching cohort

Not necessarily. The teachers seem to have been doing a reasonable job in the last few years:

A union spokesman called the firings drastic and cited a 21 percent rise in reading scores and a 3 percent increase in math scores in the past two years.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/24/rhode.island.teachers/index.html?hpt=T2

Now, that article also notes that the board expects to rehire about 50% of the staff, just on lower salaries. Which strikes me as a financial decision more than a bid to increase quality. Now, it's all very well to try and save money, but not by cutting salaries that are most likely much lower than the real value of the teacher anyway.

And then what about the other 50%? They aren't going to be rehired, so new teachers will have to come in and take their place. What ensures that they are going to of better quality? Logic would say that they will be of lower quality, as they will be being paid less. Sure, you might get a few really good teachers for a lower price, but the overall gain in quality is going to be minimal, if existent at all. And that doesn't take into account the detriment to students caused by a disruption to their work environment. Obviously their work environment wasn't all that great in the first place, but radically changing it for the sake of minimal improvements in teacher quality is not going to be an overall gain.

It's a budget issue, plain and simple. They want to cut costs, so they'll take it out on the teachers, who are being underpaid as it is. Perhaps it's not the board's fault; why do they have so little to work with? But making it out to be a move that will massively improve the quality of teachers is highly misleading.

So the crux of the issue is whether the teachers are being overpaid or underpaid. And it's fair to say that in such a school, $78k a year is not nearly enough.

 

[Labtec600]

Needs even more unionisation. Obviously the union isn't powerful enough to guarantee the jobs of the workers, so more unionisation is needed to ensure that in future something as ridiculous as this doesn't happen. It isn't greed to expect that you are going to be paid a higher rate for what is essentially overtime, and if anything the teachers are probably underpaid as it is, judging by what it seems they most likely have to deal with.

Am I the only one that finds your user name and your post go hand and hand?

Paying people a reasonable salary to attract top candidates and to retain those candidates is logical. However, when these people that take these spots refuse to do some additional work to help out students without getting a lucrative additional amount of money - you're no longer in it to help the students but just for the salary.

Glad these teachers were canned for this outrageous BS demand.

 

[Camikaze]

Am I the only one that finds your user name and your post go hand and hand?

Paying people a reasonable salary to attract top candidates and to retain those candidates is logical. However, when these people that take these spots refuse to do some additional work to help out students without getting a lucrative additional amount of money - you're no longer in it to help the students but just for the salary.

Glad these teachers were canned for this outrageous BS demand.

So teachers should be expected to work overtime without reasonable pay for that overtime? That's hardly fair.

 

[cardgame]

Neither is $75K for a schoolteacher job, especially when the salary of the surrounding town averages to... what was it, $22K?

 

[Labtec600]

So teachers should be expected to work overtime without reasonable pay for that overtime? That's hardly fair.

So $70,000 salaries for 9 months of work (not counting their weeks vacations they get for spring break, winter break, and any of the other random break weeks),$3,000 plus for two weeks of summer training and additional 90 minutes a week, $30 bucks an hour for some other (what, it was no mentioned) after school activities is not reasonable?

I'm willing to be that 70K doesn't include benefits. Man, having to work an extra two hours a week and eating lunch with the children once a week while only pulling in a six figure salary is ROBBERY.

Piss on these teachers. I know teachers that get paid nothing close to what these hacks are being paid that go the extra mile for their children because they care. These teachers are just showing their true colors - they dont give a flying F about the kids - it's nothing but my salary that's important.

 

[Gilder]

To go along with my military running the education idea: revenue sharing!

Keep taking money from good schools and giving it to bad schools until the situation equalizes!

Except even the good schools in the state are heavily in debt. I know the principal at my old school was dismissed over mismanaging money.

 

[downtown]

@DT, as a teacher in a, shall we say, "troubled" school, what do you think? Is the union greedy? Should it be legal/okay to fire *everybody*? How do we turn around a situation like Central Falls? Seeing as you've been doing this for a few months now, I'd like to hear your insights.

Here is what I think about the whole situation:

1) I have a hard time believing that these teachers are in any way underpaid. Sorry, but over 70K for the average salary is a *lot* of money, no matter how much the school sucks (and I bet it sucks a lot). For comparison's sake, my district likely sucks just as bad from a quality of work environment, and our salary scale tops out at 61,000 (at 27 years experience + masters degree). Teachers who work in terrible schools deserve "combat pay", but when you aren't in a super expensive area (NYC, Bay Area, DC), you can't argue underpaid at 70K\

2) I am surprised that it came to firing everybody. I have a hard time believing that every single teacher's performance was so bad that termination was the best option...'specially at this point in the year (weeks away from end of year testing! I think this is going to really hurt their ability to bring in QUALITY (not just cheap) staff members. Forget the money, not only is your work environment hard, but now you know your Super is a little bit crazy. You have to be a greenie or desperate to take that job.

3) I think both parties should have worked for some give and take here. Accepting those changes is a pretty significant change in work environment, and if the district couldn't afford to give a raise, they should have been prepared with other concessions. In our last collective bargaining agreement, our obligations increased and the district couldn't afford to $$$ compensate us, so we got an extra sick day. Eating lunch with the kids means that you don't get a duty-free lunch break...so the staff should have offered an extra planning period or something during the week to make up for it (example). The inability for either side to come together to make the needed concessions shows that nobody is without fault.

It is legal to can everybody, but it comes at great political and educational cost. For all the talk about the teachers saying 'screw you' to the kids...the administration didn't do their students any favors either.

 

[downtown]

Neither is $75K for a schoolteacher job, especially when the salary of the surrounding town averages to... what was it, $22K?

I don't think that means anything...it just means they teach in a poor area. If anything, that means that their work environment is going to be a lot harder, so you'll have to pay more to keep staff.

I make more than double the average salary for the neighborhood where I teach, and I'm a first year teacher. If they made our salary the average in the neighborhood, nobody could work there...we couldn't afford it. We'd be on food stamps!

 

[Karalysia]

This thread just goes to show you how much the Republicans hate the working class. The massive billions of dollars that CEO's that crashed their companies hand out as bonuses doesn't bother them, but by god teachers asking to be paid what they're worth? OUTRAGEOUS!!

 

[cardgame]

Or fire them and hire people who will do a better job for half of their ridiculously high wage.

Actually; At $53,473*, Rhode Island was ranked 9th in the nation for average teacher salaries in 2005

they would then be quite underpaid

 

[CaptainF]

This thread just goes to show you how much the Republicans hate the working class. The massive billions of dollars that CEO's that crashed their companies hand out as bonuses doesn't bother them, but by god teachers asking to be paid what they're worth? OUTRAGEOUS!!

Quite the delicious double standard.