Studies are coming out that at least a decade's worth, up to a lifetime, of damage to the psyche of kids, is going to be seen with the shutdown of schools, not even including the increased failure rate that is happening, which will also set them back in life. Bravo parents and districts that don't get it, you are some sort of evil.
My wife works in education so I have a little insight to the other side of things that many don't. I'll absolutely agree that some teachers have absolutely taken advantage of this opportunity to drop the ball. That said, in our area, their job doubled in complexity. Students have the option to distance learn or go to class and they had to choose one at the beginning of the semester and stick with it. So the teachers now have to come up with 2 sets of lesson plans every day and if they are doing their job well, that is an immense amount of work. When my wife still taught, before moving into administration, she would spend a couple hours a day, minimum, at home making lesson plans on top of all the other work she did. I'm not saying this as an excuse as the teachers are free to find a different profession if they can't handle it. But understand they are overburdened at the moment. And they were probably faced with a distance learning system that was likely deployed with only a couple weeks preparation while trying to teach students and parents that same system and the teacher is still learning it themselves. There is an upside to all of this though. This probably more closely resembles the outside world than their prior methods did. When you go to college or go get a real job, you're probably going to be faced with similar adversity. For far too long, schools have made it damn near impossible to fail. So when kids get in the real world where failure is guaranteed at some point, they don't know how to cope. If our schools have had one major problem above all else, it's a lack of preparation for the real world.
Teachers do get summers off, and many holiday weeks off, and in many places a lot of union protections, so let's not also say working hard is the end of the world for them. It's just new territory. Once they create this template, the hard work is done for the future. Much like any other job. Our school system has the same setup hybrid, or virtual only. Thankfully we ended up with a replacement teacher who is young and can understands technology very well. She has done a great job rolling with the punches, and she is definitely very involved and trying to make sure that the kids are learning. The hard part is teaching virtual kids and kids in class at the same time, but she seems to have done a good enough job that my kids look forward to going to school, even though it's 2 days a week.
I think there are a lot of misconceptions about teacher's jobs being gravy, because they only "work" 8 hours/day and have more time off than most other professions. But if they are doing their job well, they are working way more than most people realize - creating lesson plans, entering/calculating grades, attending extra curriculars, etc. And keep in mind, they are paid based on a 37.5 hour work week (if I remember correctly). Frankly, their pay is borderline abysmal for a high demand, college educated profession. There was one point in our careers where she was working more hours per week than me (and I was working a lot) and I was making close to double what she was. I also don't have a degree. A good teacher generally gets paid an insultingly low rate, even considering their time off.
in NYC and surrounding areas, a regular teacher makes over 100K, assistant principals make $150k and principals $180K-220K. Some buildings have multiple "schools" in them, so times that one building x4 principals, x4 assistants, etc. I know the principal of my co-workers kid HS makes $550k/yr....so this is what is seen around here. I have the utmost respect for teachers, but it's far from a janitor at McDonald's job.
Really? How much time a year do you get off? Did you know that educators actually are paid on a daily rate for about 180-190 days per year, so they actually don't get paid for the days they are not working? How would that work for you? As a principal, I had a 220 day contract which gave me about 30 unpaid days per year of traditional work days. That is 6 weeks off. About what many people in the workforce get, except they get vacation pay and I got nothing. Sound fair to you? For educators, Christmas and spring break do not count as contract days and are therefor, unpaid. How about the amount of time over the summers and holidays that the teachers spend on continuing education and professional development? How about the amount of time when school isn't in session that they spend in their classroom developing lessons, lesson plans and prep for projects? How about the amount of unreimbursed money that they spend on materials, supplies and resources? I'll give the same advice here that I have been giving for the last 20 years, "Don't go into education, unless you absolutely love to teach, because you won't get rich and the stress isn't worth the money." Every time we have an education thread on here, the ignorance of the majority with regard to teachers and contractual pay, continues to astonish me.
https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls/schools The teachers here get paid weekly through the summer, and annual salary is just that, a salary /52
I've talked to teachers, parents and students and the general consensus seems to be it's a big clusterfuck for all involved.
Not sure on the cost of living there versus here but I'm going to guess that makes those numbers slightly less impressive. However, even adjusting for that it does sound like NYC educators are paid decently well. For reference, my wife started teaching high school in 2011 at $33k/year. I believe younger grades were paid even less. I had just started working production on a factory floor and at my starting rate, was making approximately $37k. Roughly 4-5 years later, she had gotten some length of service raises and a couple cost of living raises but was still below or right at $40k/year. I had gotten a few raises myself as well as a couple promotions and was making close to $70k. Since then my pay has not changed too drastically and she's gotten more length of service and cost of living raises, a raise for getting her masters, and a promotion into administration so that has closed the gap between us a bit but I still make a fair amount more. And she also now starts back to work 2 weeks before students, works 2 weeks after students are gone, has to do occasional training during the summer, and works just as many hours during the school year as I do. And I'll reiterate that she has a masters degree and I still haven't even finished my bachelors. I can say with 100% certainty, I absolutely would not want her job. Given some of the bullshit that comes with our education system, I'd go back to sub-$40k/year working on a factory floor again before doing her job at her current pay. Luckily for her and the students and teachers she supports, she's passionate about what she does and receives payback in the form that she knows she's making a difference to some people. But I couldn't do it. There are a lot of educators out there just like her. I happen to have 3 of them in my family. I'm not going to say they are all like that. I know they're not. But that could be said with any job. What I will say is given what that job entails, I have to think most core subject educators have to care at least some because I can't find any other reason why you would do that job with a college degree (and therefore other options) for what they get paid, excessive time off or not.
It is. And in my experience, it is not the teachers' or even their administration's fault. At least around here. Everyone knew this was a possibility back in the spring and no one came up with a contingency plan. At the end of July, our local board made the decision on how to proceed with the first semester. Students started back the 2nd week of August if I remember correctly. This new plan included the purchase and utilization of this big online learning program that was to be used by teachers and students. No one had ever seen or heard of it before that. It was almost laughable as I had a similar situation going on with my job just a few months prior, where we were transitioning to a new operations system for manufacturing at our plant. It was similar to our previous system, only affected a plant of roughly 400 employees, only about 10% of which actually had to understand how it works, and we still took an entire year to train on and deploy the system. Even then, it wasn't the smoothest of transitions. Then the board of education decides they're going to roll out this massive new system that is to be utilized by tens of thousands of students and teachers and expects everyone to figure out how to use it in 2 weeks while the teachers and administrators still have continue teaching by their old methods at the same time. Anyone with half a brain should've known it was going to fail.
Location, location, location. The teachers here do fairly well for themselves, even with cost of living adjustment. The union is very strong and the pension and healthcare benefits are pretty fantastic. A teacher gig would have been nice, but I couldn't do it day to day, So coaching for free is what I do. I must say though for those teachers who are doing the in-school teaching and also have young kids that are attending other schools, much respect teaching other kids.
Rads, i can put you in touch with The Wife if you want for specific questions and honest feedback. She’s got 20+ years in elementary and middle school education. You’ve got my contact info. There’s so much dumbfuckery blasting of teachers in this thread it’s nauseating.
The union is probably the biggest difference if I had to guess. No such thing here. My wife does have kickass healthcare and her retirement plan is ok in terms of pay but it's biggest payoff is she can retire after 20 years if I remember correctly. It's not necessarily a sweet retirement check but being able to get it that early is nice. Shitty part about the healthcare though is your spouse can't be on it if their own employer offers medical benefits. So I'm stuck with shitty, overpriced insurance. And while the time off is nice, you basically can't take any time off during the school year without a doctor's note. I've missed a few GP/WSBK/MA race weekends because of that.
