Reply to Incentives to Keep Teachers

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are already plenty of incentives. The problem is the grass is always greener, but at least there's no shortage of new teachers to fill in for the unhappy ones who leave.[/quote]

Exactly.  They get really good benefits and there are housing programs already.  And after the first few years the pay is decent to good for a ten month employee and they get tuition benefits for a masters or PhD.  [/quote]

And yet we can’t keep teachers in the classroom. Here we are commenting on a thread about how to incentivize people to stay in the profession.

TEACHERS know that the benefits aren’t worth the agony, but DCUM is here to tell teachers that their jobs are amazing. We’ll keep pretending that the teacher shortage isn’t a thing.

[/quote]
I am an MCPS employee. I know the benefits are great and my pay is not bad. I am a few years away from retiring with my full pension and I am leaving at the end of the school year. The stress and constant changes and demands are no longer worth it. I handed in my retirement papers and feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders. [/quote]

Congratulations! I took 3 years off when my children were younger. The stress, fatigue, and anxiety melted away. I forgot how bad it was, which is why I came back. I won’t be making it much longer and I’ll be kissing full pension goodbye. I don’t care. It isn’t worth my health and happiness.

The posters who love to remind us about the amazing benefits haven’t actually tried the job. The benefits aren’t worth it. At all. [/quote]

Teaching isn't the only difficult job in the county.  Lots of difficult jobs in social service for example.  But, you work 10 months, we work 12 months.  You get a pension, we don't.  You get far better health care than we do, etc.  So, yup, try changing jobs to what others do.[/quote]

Do you work 65-70 hours per week? Teachers do, and that is why they are getting out. The pension isn't enough because the pay isn't enough. [/quote]

I’m not PP, but, yes, I work 65-70 hours a week. I don’t get paid overtime. I only get 7 federal holidays. I get paged and work on my days off, which are limited. I don’t get good healtcare coverage from my work, but it’s not bad. This is standard in technology. However, I am paid way more than teachers in my present job. That said, at the beginning of my career, I worked even over 100 hours a week and even 36 straight hours before, and I got paid only barely more than my wife, who was a teacher. She’s no longer teaching, but still in the general field. She makes more, but not much more than if she had remained a teacher.[/quote]

It seems you were in a pretty crummy job situation. What made you stay? For anyone who counters with “but I also do XYZ…”  why do you stay in your job that also isn’t great. These are honest questions. All jobs have crappy parts to them but not every career has shortages of people to take those jobs. So if you are in one of the jobs, why do you stay? That could help answer the teacher retention question.[/quote]

I stay because I am a single parent with two kids going to college in the next few years. I missed the window to leave and now I'm stuck.[/quote]

I don't get why having high schoolers means you can't get a different job.[/quote]

It's kind of a great job that has summers off, unlimited sick leave, not to mention a pension![/quote]

You clearly don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, but go off because you’re mad you work 12 months a year. It’s seriously so pathetic and honestly, just a tired, uneducated sentiment at this point. You’re embarrassing.[/quote]

It's a 10 month job so technically summers are off but they are unpaid so you need to factor pay being 10 months vs. 12.  There is no unlimited sick leave but they are the only job in the county that still gets a pension so it is pretty cushy.[/quote]

Nobody thinks teaching is cushy. Nobody. There’s a reason there’s a major teacher shortage. The unpaid summers and the promise of a full pension if you can actually endure 3O+ years in the classroom aren’t enticing enough.

Students know it isn’t cushy, too. They aren’t choosing education as a major. Careers came up in my senior class recently. I pointedly asked if any would consider teaching. The class laughed and one student said, “why would we take a job that pays crap just so we can put up with what you have to put up with?” Fair point.

The only people who think teaching is cushy are adults who have a nostalgic idea of the classroom and no clue what modern teaching is like.[/quote]

The person who said that teaching is cushy is ridiculous. However, discussions about salary and time off are rarely productive because people tend to focus on one aspect of the job without considering the others. Talking about salaries and then comparing what workers who work year-round in the private sector (not in government employment) is apples and oranges. Private industry is an entirely different ballgame. The same is true of leave. I have a government job, and if I could have taken a pay cut to have summers off, I would have done it in a heartbeat. So would plenty of others. In fact, I had a government job that required me to work plenty of extra hours with no extra pay throughout the year, including the summer. That doesn't mean that there aren't a host of other reasons why teaching has become unworkable, but it also doesn't mean that summers off aren't something of a perk that others don't have. Let's talk about what needs to be fixed to make that perk worth something.

My problem with salary and leave discussions is that, from what I can tell, we could pay teachers $300,000 a year, and they would still be miserable. I don't know any teachers who actually work 60+ hours every week (my sister is a teacher and works nowhere near those hours), but I will take teachers at their word that they are doing that. If teacher salaries were $300,000 a year, wouldn't we hear the same complaints about hours, administration, lack of respect, etc.? There's no amount of money that would make their complaints worth it. So why do we focus on salaries so much? Paying teachers more while everything else remains the same will further erode respect for the profession because teachers will still be miserable, constantly complaining, and in short supply, and parents will remain frustrated and concerned about issues like delays in communication, absences, and late grading. [/quote]

I was fine with your post until I got to “constantly complaining”. Perhaps if people would actually listen to us as we explain WHY the job is miserable, we’d be able to get somewhere. But what happens instead, as seen often on DCUM, is that a simple explanation is called “complaining”. Then someone who doesn’t teach diminishes our real experiences by telling us how good we have it.

$300K would go a long way to making me feel appreciated for the absurd amount of work I do. It would also acknowledge the importance of a teacher’s job; it’s one of the most valuable professions and should be compensated as such. But I agree with you about one thing: it’s not about the money. I would trade that higher salary for respect. Let’s start with not telling teachers how we should feel about our jobs and how we should do our jobs. [/quote]

OK, so maybe "constantly complaining" was a poor choice of words. Is pointing out why the burdens of teaching have become unworkable complaining? Maybe it isn't. I apologize. But I never said how good you have it. I just wish the discussion wasn't always framed as teaching versus every other profession. That pits parents against teachers.  Quite a few of us are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated in our jobs, AND we have to structure our lives around school demands and a schedule that hasn't changed much since most families had stay-at-home parents.  What do you want people to do to help make teaching better for you? If the only answer is paying teachers $300,000 because your job is much more difficult and important than ours, I'm not sure how much support you will get. [/quote]

I don’t need $300K. Heck, I even wrote above that I would take respect over money.

I’m tired of seeing my colleagues walk around as zombies because they are regularly grading past midnight, just to be told we aren’t providing prompt feedback. I’m tired of seeing my colleagues cry because they have a disruptive class of 35 and no help, just to be told the disruptions are caused because we aren’t making strong enough connections with students. And on and on.

So, respect is worth more than $300K. I don’t even need all these problems fixed right away. Just acknowledging these problems exist without dismissing teachers’ experiences is enough. [/quote]

I keep seeing posts about teachers working super long hours, grading past midnight (as seen above) etc., One of my very good friends in an elementary teacher in MCPS and she doesn't work those kinds of hours at all. These long hours after school or on weekends, is this mostly middle and high school teachers who have lots of grading of papers like English and history teachers?[/quote]

I have taught kindergarten and first grade.  While my students assessments don't take as long to grade, there are other aspects to things that take far longer.  Here's one small example: To determine who needs what in reading, I first test my students' phonics skills.  This means calling one kid over at a time.  I first test which letter sounds they know.  Then, I test if they can read CVC words.  I'm going to need to track the kids who can read these CVC fluently, which ones still need to say each sound and then blend them to make a word.  I'll need to record which kids can say each sound and get the first two sounds correct when they blend but make up the last sound because they can't remember that all. 
 Then, words with long vowels, blends, digraphs, etc.  If they know those, then I need to move onto 2 syllable and 3 syllable words.  That means I could easily spend 30 minutes testing one kid.  That means I have to come up with independent work to keep everyone else busy while I test that one kid.  Repeat 20 times.

Then, I also want to test for phonemic awareness.  Who can blend, who can segment, who can rhyme, etc.  Then I need to look at if they can encode (translate spoken words into written words).  Then I need to figure out which high frequency words they know. I'll want to identify which words are most often unknown and teach those words. Then, I need to look at the entire class results, group kids, prep/find/create the materials to work with each group, time it all, and again, prep work for meaningful work for everyone else to do while I work with those groups.  I'll need to check the work those kids are doing when I'm working with the small groups later.  And I need to do it all again in 4-6 weeks.  That's just for reading groups.  That doesn't include anything for math, science, social studies, spelling or handwriting.  That doesn't include anything for SEL.  So, no, it isn't time consuming in the way grading essays is.  But it is time consuming in a different way.

I used to put in 60 hours a week.  Now, I just don't put in that work anymore.  Partly because I have another teacher in my room who helps do some of that work.  Partly because I'm just unwilling to work more than 5 hours past my contract hours.  I'm not working 20 hours past them.[/quote]

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