I'm an MCPS elementary school teacher...AMA
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Anonymous
If the unpaid summer is such a benefit to you, please consider switching professions. We need more teachers. (Apparently those unpaid summers aren’t a big enough perk to keep many of us in the profession, but maybe it’s enough for you.) |
Anonymous
Nearly 90% of MCPS teachers have more than 5 years of experience and just over half have more than 15 years. I think that's amazing and I am so grateful that MCPS is able to retain these experienced educators. |
Anonymous
+1. The bizarre thing about these conversations about teacher pay is that they're always theoretical and divorced from the reality of the fact that we don't have enough teachers. A salary and benefits are "great" if they attract enough people who want the job, not if someone who doesn't want the job thinks they sound great. |
Anonymous
The fact that MCPS has so many experienced teachers suggests that they are staying because of the pay. The teacher shortage in Montgomery County (currently I see 174 vacant positions) is likely due to poor working conditions. Truly low paying jobs like childcare do not have the majority of staff working there over 15 years. |
Anonymous
That's a low freaking bar. "The turnover is not as bad as jobs that pay literal poverty wages, so the pay must be good enough?" |
Anonymous
Obviously many people are paying because they are locked in to MCPS because of the pension. If they suddenly switch careers or move, the value of their pension dramatically drops if they don't reach a certain number of years. The conversation about teacher retention is completely meaningless if you're not aware of the power of the pension. This would be a different conversation at private schools. |
Anonymous
| ^ correction – many people are staying, not paying |
Anonymous
In other words they are staying because of the compensation, which includes the pension. Not in spite of it. If they could make massive amounts more money outside of teaching the pension would not matter. |
Anonymous
It's not just "not as bad" - it's not even remotely comparable to the turnover in childcare. |
Anonymous
| The $63k teacher with one year of teaching experience translates to $75k over a 12-month period. That is a good salary. |
Anonymous
| Okay, guys, please take the teacher compensation discussion to a different thread if you want to keep talking about it. If we have one or more elementary school teachers here willing to give candid responses to our questions, I think we should keep this thread focused on that. |
Anonymous
The problem is that compensation competes in the budget for spending that improves working conditions. There is a limited pot of money (yes, really) and the priority for decades has always been compensation, which is eating up a larger and larger share of the pie every year. |
Anonymous
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I’m quickly chiming in as a full-time substitute, at times, and I’ve observed that a lot of behavioral issues are indeed with boys, though they seem to be somewhat diminished when I’m there. (For context I’m male.) I think it’s a combination of issues at play, though I note with interest that the times I’ve had to contact parents about their son (or daughter) that sometimes I get a brush-off. (Or in extreme cases when the school wants to send them home, the parents refuse to pick them up, citing that their children are our problem.)
I have tried to get hired for full-time work with the district for years now, as I’m often able to engage and teach students, but it seems like schools like to hire internally, often people with no experience in that given field, and the turnover is more than it should be. Having said that, I am also not fluent in Spanish, and I regret that, as that would be even moreso helpful in reaching my students. So it goes. With regards to the Boxlight, it’s just a replacement for the chalk board, as it were, no more, no less. The times I've done read-alouds, I’ve borrowed digital copies from the public library and move the pages with a presentation clicker. This allows all my students to see the pages blown up, rather than trying to show off a physical copy. I’m also able to walk around the room, making sure everyone is paying attention and not acting up. The funny thing is that I’m old enough to remember taking computer classes in elementary school, on IBM PCjrs, learning BASIC, and getting fast on word processors and typewriters. And I distinctly recall, at the time, people saying that all that access to video games (Atari and later N64, for me) and even home computers was going to rot our brains. It’s a miracle anyone survived the 1980s and 1990s, if so. \s (When I went to college Netscape was just being adopted and then, oh boy, we had AOL, Geocities, and so much more. And card catalogs went the way of the dodo.) So, I don’t think technology (or the amount of it) is necessarily the issue, so much as the implementation, as with anything with MCPS. So much is rolled out without proper integration with the curriculum or the right training to make it work best for the teacher and for the students. Teachers are doing the best they can with what they have. There are just so many other variables at play that it’s hard to say that it’s just one or two that need to be tackled, rather than a basket full of them. |
Anonymous
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Pension. They stay for this.
Summers "off". They stay for this. |
Anonymous
| The conversation about experienced teachers is ignoring that there is indeed a lot of turnover and transfers within the district, and that when push comes to shove a school will hire someone who may not be right or ready for the position, but that they need a warm body. All of which feeds into the turn-over cycle, as they get chewed up or burnt-out. There simply aren’t enough well-trained teachers currently in the system, and MCPS Careers does not quite reflect that reality, unfortunately. |