I was speaking with Mark about this post and an interesting point came up. Teachers already have long and structured hours (pre and post class supervision, class hours and lunch duty) plus work at home (marking -- which at the high school level is never finished during the workday). KIPP has teachers also available by cell phone. In the private sector it generally involves a pretty hefty pay increase to put an associate on a pager.
When we talk about the need to increase our investment in education, are we really prepared to increase either the number of teachers or the median salary of teachers? After all, we are currently talking about teacher layoffs. Perhaps Mark, who has more practical experience in this matter, can comment?
I'll have more on this later, but just to provide a quick context, if we follow the various reforms being suggested, we are talking about maintaining a huge, highly skilled workforce (always a requirement for an educational system) under the following conditions:
ReplyDelete1. 60 plus hour work week;
2. an 80% chance of being dismissed and largely unemployable after a one year;
3. compensation based on metrics that are
a. largely out of the employees control
b. easily manipulated by managers;
4. permanent scapegoat status for any problems in the system.