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.

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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]

A year in the private sector might help you better understand the world today.[/quote]

Steps ahead of you. I transferred from the private sector to teaching. I’m very familiar with both environments and can easily compare. I regret switching to teaching.

[/quote]

Another one here who transferred from the private sector. HUGE difference. The professionalism is atrocious of administration.  What they do would never fly in the private sector.  I absolutely regret switching to teaching as well.  The working conditions of modern public classrooms should be a priority to address.  These kids in these classrooms are our future.  [/quote]

Of course it happens in the private sector.  [/quote]

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