(Courtesy of Melissa Purdue and Andy Johnson)
Teaching In America: The Impossible Dream
by Zack Pelta-Heller
AlterNet
The new book Teachers Have It Easy, which collects roughly 200 interviews with educators from around the country, couldn't have a more ironic title. Co-written by former teachers Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari, and author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), the book highlights the bleak reality that not only are America's teachers grossly underpaid, but that teaching is simply not a sustainable profession it its current form.
Through compelling accounts, Teachers Have It Easy dispels one of the biggest myths about teaching in public schools -- that the paltry salaries educators receive are adequate compensation for summer vacations and "shorter work days." Instead, the book paints a Dickensian picture of our educational system, in which teachers routinely work 10-12 hour days that don't end when the dismissal bell rings.
The idea for the book arose from conversations between Eggers and Calegari, co-founders of the non-profit 826 Valencia, which offers tutoring and writing workshops for youth. (A new center, 826NYC, recently opened in Brooklyn.)
"The idea was Dave's to begin with," Moulthrop told me. "When he was in his twenties, he had friends, including his sister, who were teachers and loved their work. For them it was the best job on the planet. A few years later, they all quit because of the money. It was just a travesty."
Eggers' friends were not the only ones who discovered how impossible it can be to eke out a living as an educator. A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania, as noted in the book, found that 46 percent of teachers leave within their first five years. Such high turnover and instability undoubtedly wreaks havoc on public schools and their respective communities, in which teachers play a vital role.
"If teachers are just leaving at the peak of their game," Moulthrop says, "their students were ill-served by the system."
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5 comments:
Thanks for posting this. It's exactly why I'm now editing books instead of teaching.
Your welcome, sorry to have lost you, but I understand completely.
I can see the same changes moving into the lower levels of universities/colleges as well, where we now have CEOs instead of presidents.
And assessment statistics rule the day--how do you assess critical thought across the board?
Oh yeah, who do you edit for...?
I definitely believe our educators need to be better paid. How can one attract strong teachers when the best and brightest can make more in the private sector? But if the pay level could be raised, I would want much more stringent requirements on who is allowed to teach. I have met educators in all levels of education who scare the bejesus out of me. I think this can have a negative effect on those paying into a system they don't fully respect or may question. Plus, up where I live anyway, we vote for certain things and get jerked around by either our state govt or our school districts. The state voted to give teachers a raise and the governor took it away. In my local district of our last house, we voted on 2 levies, one of which was for technology upgrades in the school. It passed. Did it go to tech upgrades? No, it went to upgrading administrators' salaries from the low 100s to the mid 100s. That doesn't tend to encourage voters to support school levies.
On a side note, one thing our district does for school supplies is that every child is responsible for bringing in certain supplies at the beginning of the school year that is then pooled into the school's supplies. It's not like the old days when every kid had their own crayon box, etc. It's not a practical solution in low-income areas, but has greatly benefited schools in middle income on up areas.
today on CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/biztech/09/16/ibm.education.ap/index.html
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