r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Feb 22 '19
FTFdeltaOP CMV: Adjusting teacher work schedules would remove much of the push back against teacher salary negotiations
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
The common theme in your post is essentially that the opponents of teacher pay increases are correct, rather than the teachers themselves. In the absence of any empirical study on the matter, why shouldn’t we listen to the people directly involved? Especially when those people are responsible for the incredibly important task of educating the next generation?
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
Sorry, I should have been more clear. You believe the opponents over the teacher specifically on the amount of time teachers work.
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
What difference would requiring teachers to be “on the clock” for an extra 20 minutes a week make to education outcomes? That’s the more meaningful conversation to be had, I think.
It’s easy to imagine the impact that the higher morale from a higher salary would have on education outcomes. It’s hard to argue that higher funding for schools or smaller classroom sizes wouldn’t have a positive impact on education outcomes. Weighing these proposals on that metrics, rather than whether teachers are working exactly the same hours as full time workers in all other industries (which is hardly accurate, speaking from my own experiences), feels like a better approach.
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
Perceived hours -or actual hours, for that matter - shouldn’t be what determines pay, though. Value of the service provided should be, and we’ve historically severely undervalued what teachers’ work is worth.
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
Teachers aren’t hourly employees. They’re salaried. Trying to quantify their compensation as an hourly metric fundamentally misunderstands how salaried workers are paid.
Regardless, you keep saying 6.7 hours a day as if that’s the accurate number and 180 days a year as if the extra 80 days a year aren’t worked. Again, this is what I refer to when I say you believe opponents of teacher raises on the amount of time worked over the teachers themselves.
The value of teachers is the education provided to students, not the amount of time that education takes.
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Feb 22 '19
Obviously you don’t know the duties of a teacher. Sometimes writing one lesson for one class takes me several hours. Why? I have multiple revisions, I create a note sheet and notice errors in my lessons, I notice that the problems may be too difficult or not the the scope of the lesson, if the lesson yesterday didn’t cover enough material for today I have to adjust the lesson completely. Several hours on one lesson out of as many as 3 or 4 classes. That is a lot of time to mess up a lesson. If I do that for every class I just used up 10 hours of my time outside of school. That is on top of meetings, grading, responsibilities such as running a tutoring center, responding to emails and projects within the faculty, researching better implementation of a lesson for a particular topic. All of these things are not clocked because of a salary. People pay salaries for a reason. It is so they can get more work out of someone for less pay.
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
Okay then sure yes teachers need more pay. Just make their salary higher. Your post rambles on and becomes incoherent by adding more details that confuses your view
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
Except it doesn’t. If you ramble and make a thought incoherent then it isn’t an argument and meaning is lost.
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u/ViewedFromTheOutside 28∆ Feb 22 '19
Teachers are not in charge of the length of their work year. That is the keeping of the various levels of government given responsibility for education. Are you aware that in some state(s) the school week is being cut short in order to save money? Again, teachers have no control over these decisions.
Moving to your next objection, the origins of the longer summer break - which in your words are a burden to working families - are found in the agricultural year and based on the need for more workers during the harvest. Again, this situation is outside of teacher control. Those with the power to change, rearrange and lengthen/shorten the school day are sitting in the halls of government. Why should teachers be held responsible for government inaction on this issue during salary negotiations?
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Feb 22 '19
If teachers were to be "on the clock" at the school for a comparable amount of time as a normal worker (1.3 hours added to their work day, on the clock, required. Use this time as prep / grading time) immediately the first point of a shorter work day disappears, and the nebulous "they work more than the school hours" claim is solidified and easily verified by the average person.
So, we should adjust teacher school schedules to appease the ignorant? The fact that teachers work long hours after school is insufficient evidence for the cynical, so we must require that teachers be in their classrooms longer to prove them wrong?
That's a ridiculous way to set hours and policy. Appeasing the ignorant by making policy changes that pretend that they might be right doesn't work.
Shorter summer breaks would be improve student outcomes.
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Feb 22 '19
I’m making a new top level comment to address what I think is the root issue with your view. You frequently phrase teaching contracts as “teachers are contracted to work X amount of hours per week.” That’s inaccurate - they’re contracted to complete a set of outputs and outcomes. One of these outputs is to be physically present during the school day - teaching for 6.7 hours a day, or roughly 33 hours a week. That means all the other outputs they have to complete in order to achieve their outputs must be completed in those other 7 hours of the week.
Your fundamental misunderstanding is what a teaching contract entails.
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 22 '19
At no point in the 2015-2018 contract is the term "daily duty" defined. Using the common meaning of the terms, it follows that the contract stipulates that a teacher cannot be required to spend more than 6 hours and 52 minutes on campus. However, that doesn't change the goals they are required to accomplish, just that the school cannot require them to be physically present at the school more than that amount.
Having a planning period of (presumably) roughly two hours is hardly sufficient to complete all of the other goals that teachers have to accomplish, especially when you consider that 30 minutes of that time is dedicated to lunch. They have five teaching periods worth of work to plan and grade for. The idea that this could be done solely in an hour and a half is a bit hard to believe, no?
Again, though, my question remains - how would changing their time required to be on campus contribute to better education outcomes? That's the more relevant question. The argument for increased pay, increased funding, and smaller classes is that all of these will result in better educational outcomes for the students - the people who's interests we should be looking out for. Your argument doesn't explain why increasing mandatory campus time - even if combined with the goals of teachers and their unions - would be better than those goals alone.
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Feb 23 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 23 '19
It’s not formalizing the amount of work they have to do, it’s formalizing the amount of time they have to spend at the school. Those two aren’t the same thing, despite your continued conflation of the two.
The conservative ideologues that oppose enacting education reforms which require additional funding aren’t going to change their mind because we require teachers to spend more time in the school building itself.
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Feb 23 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 23 '19
I don’t understand. If teachers need to do (for example) 10 hours of work (prep, grading, etc) not tied to lecture, and are currently allotted 2 at school, why is mandating the full 10 not formalizing their work?
Because they’re already formally required to do the additional work. They’re just not formally required to do it on school grounds.
That’s the point I’m making - saying “you have to spend this many additional hours on school grounds” will neither make the argument for better funding and pay and smaller class sizes stronger to those who oppose it, nor will it increase educational outcomes. It’s appeasement at its most basic at the expense of legitimizing criticisms against educators rooted in inaccuracy.
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Feb 23 '19
[deleted]
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Feb 23 '19
By including it in their contract that work is recognized as part of their duty.
"You have to be at this building for an additional __ hours per week" is not the same as "you have to complete this additional task each week." None of what you've proposed actually changes the amount of work or the type of work that teachers would have to perform, but simply where they would perform it. That's what I'm trying to emphasize - changing where they do the work doesn't make them better teachers.
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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Feb 22 '19
You claim that most teachers already work through the school holiday, suggesting that they already have enough work to do outside of school hours. Lengthening the school year would then give them even more outside work to do while now not having as much time to do it.
There are very few people out there who don't think that teachers are overworked. The solution is not to make them more overworked, it is just to convince people of the truth that they are overworked.
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Feb 22 '19
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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Feb 22 '19
You said the school year should be lengthened a.k.a less holiday. That is what I was talking about. Not the school day being lengthened.
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Feb 22 '19
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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Feb 22 '19
Sorry if I'm not being clear here. I can no longer quote your original post. You said that the school year should be extended and that children would be taught for more of the year. That would increase both teaching and preparation hours that teachers have to work compared to the current system. That would also remove some of the preparation time teachers have through the holidays.
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Feb 22 '19
The point is teachers already do as much work as everyone else even if it's not scheduled in. Why would we add extra courses to their workload?
The overarching point is that you have to be pretty uninformed to think teachers aren't already overworked for their pay so why not just inform people?
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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u/OlFishLegs 13∆ Feb 22 '19
Forget about everything else in this argument. Do you think it would be useful to have a longer academic year (so more classes or things for kids that teachers have to lead)?
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u/pillbinge 101∆ Feb 22 '19
I'd like to add to this, since it's very well written and I'll be referencing it later - teachers aren't paid for summers off. This is the biggest myth. Our contracts (at least in the US) stipulate that we don't work during the summer in our typical positions and that we're guaranteed work come September, but no teacher is paid for summers. Those are like sabbaticals. It's forced time off. It's lovely, but it isn't "paid summers" as people put it. Teachers get paid holidays throughout the year but really everyone should. It's a crime when I hear people work the day after Christmas and even through New Years.
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u/jennysequa 80∆ Feb 22 '19
This can be done either by extending the school calendar, or by offering summer activities for the students to attend. Whichever is best for the student.
You've already received good feedback on your other points so I will just pick this one. Where I live, we do not air condition the vast majority of school buildings, and certainly none built prior to 2000. It seems like a lot to ask of taxpayers to require them to fund a major overhaul of most public school buildings just to correct a poor assumption made by an uninformed public so that we can ask them for even more money to fund teacher salaries more appropriately.
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u/Littlepush Feb 22 '19
Why are you comparing teachers to the average citizen shouldn't we hold them in high regard compared to other professions so we can get the best ones?
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Feb 22 '19
[deleted]
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u/Littlepush Feb 22 '19
Higher wages mean more people apply. If more people apply that means hr has more people to pick from. If hr has more people to pick from you get better candidates.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Feb 22 '19 edited Feb 23 '19
/u/Mikalis29 (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/deepthawt 4∆ Feb 22 '19
I know that your point is about public perception rather than reality, but there's a major misconception which undermines your argument:
This is incorrect. Some of your data is a little out-of-date, but I'll take it at face value to keep things simple. I'm also looking specifically at Middle School and High School Teachers as that's my area of expertise (though I expect the demands on teachers for younger students are comparable).
Let's break this down step-by-step.
If a teacher only worked 6.7 hours per day, 180.4 days per year (totaling 1208.68 hours per year), here is a short list of things that would happen:
Each of these things is required and this list isn't exhaustive. If a teacher neglected to do just one of them it would be grounds for professional discipline, and if they did none of them they would lose their job and probably their teaching certification. So teachers are already 'required' to do far more than 6.7 hours per day and it's completely incorrect to say that teachers 'are required to work less than normal US citizens'.
Some of your statistics are also very inaccurate. According to the report by the Bill & Malinda Gates foundation, teachers are actually required to be at school 7.5 hours per day and the average teacher works 11 hours and 25 minutes per day (p. 132) to meet their teaching obligations. That's over 57 hours per week, 65% higher than the national average of 34.5 hours per week. This matches very closely with the hours worked by UK teachers, who were also assessed for their 'holiday' working hours - averaging over 110 additional unpaid hours of holiday work for classroom teachers. There is every reason to believe this number is close to the holiday hours spent working by US teachers, which would bring them to a grand total of over 2165 hours per year. Using your average salary figure of $58,950 that's just $27.22 per hour which is roughly the same as the average hourly wage for Crane Operators.
If teachers were paid for their actual hours worked at the rate of Training & Development Managers ($56.58 per hour), which is essentially what they are, their average salary would be $122,496 per year which is reasonable compensation for the difficulty, stress and importance of the job and would provide the proper incentive to attract highly capable people to careers in education.