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The life of a teacher As the end of the school year quickly approaches, children are fussing over a drawing or a gift purchased for their teacher and parents are quietly collecting donations for “class” gifts. Many of our Readington teachers have had a rough year, and it might be worthwhile to take an inside look at the life of a teacher in order to better understand the depth of their contribution to our district. Working in a public school district is not like working in any other kind of environment. Even aside from the children and the critical importance of the job, the relationship teachers hold with the administration, the manner in which they are compensated, and the unique hurdles they must overcome every year can combine to create an environment in which only the most devoted professional would continue to work. We will look at some specific examples. The layman might not realize the amount of teaching materials and classroom supplies a typical teacher collects over his or her career. A professional who has been teaching for a dozen years will likely have just as many moving boxes stuffed with lesson plans, materials, books, and teaching aids. As a teacher begins to specialize in a particular grade level or subject area the collection of supplies grows. In fact, it is not unusual for a professional who is retiring to bequeath his or her collection of teaching supplies to a new teacher starting out in the same area. This is one reason that moves between physical classrooms can be such an ordeal for a teacher. As some of our teachers make their move to new classrooms for the next school year, they will be packing up and labeling their collection for the move. Let’s be clear about something, though: these collections are personal property. These collections do not include the curriculum materials, software, classroom supplies, furniture or other equipment provided by the school district. No, the moving boxes are full of things paid for by the teachers themselves. Teachers routinely spend their own money on necessary materials for their classroom. For example, 660 respondents to a recent online survey of National Education Association members indicated that the average educator spent $1,180.00 in non-reimbursed expenses each year. Similar national and regional surveys have found that teachers spend a minimum of $500.00 each year of their personal money for such items as books, lesson materials, and classroom supplies. Readington teachers are no different in this regard. Our district has again allocated only $250.00 in funds for each teacher to order classroom supplies for the 2005-2006 school year. That money must be spent through a system whereby teachers order from the catalog of an approved vendor. (In previous administrations, the amount allocated to teachers was more than double.) After that chump-change is gone, the teachers are left with a stark choice. Newer teachers who have not accumulated years of materials are especially hard hit. Lacking the books, supplies and materials they will need to foster quality learning in their classroom for the year, they first resort to begging. At the beginning of the year there will be “giving trees” located in classrooms during back-to-school night in the hope that parents will help pick up the slack. Specials and specialty teachers without classrooms lack even that luxury. During the course of the year parents may also donate occasional boxes of paper or other cast-offs from businesses. Such donations only go so far. The reason vendors like Staples and others offer special “teacher discounts” at the start of the school year is because they have discovered that teachers spend a lot of their own money at that time. From basics like paper, markers, tissues, and snacks to higher level things like books, lesson materials, and subscriptions to professional journals, the individual teacher is stuck with the bill. After accumulating many years and many boxes worth of specific resources for their grade level or their subject specialty, and after spending many thousands of dollars on the contents of the boxes, teachers can sometimes find themselves with a collection that is suddenly useless. When a Kindergarten teacher is moved involuntarily to a first grade position, the change is not so drastic that many of the collected resources will not still be useful. When a teacher is moved involuntarily to a grade level that is three or four levels above or below their previous experience, the story is very different. Now the resources do not fit the classroom and the teacher is forced to throw away thousands of dollars and years of work. Imagine an automotive mechanic who works for a Chevrolet dealership. He has spent years training on GM systems and procedures and he has invested a considerable amount of his own money for specialty tools that will allow him to fix GM front-ends and transmissions, plus computer analyzers that read GM computer codes. One day in June his service manager calls him to his office to inform him that in September he will be working exclusively on Audi vehicles. How would he react? Yet, teachers take far more abuse than that in stride. Teachers are very often the buffer between the children and the sometimes thick-headed policies of administrators. A previous article on this website noted how some teachers have sought to ameliorate the effects of standardized testing. When unique circumstances occur that require extra manpower in the schools, most often it is teachers who are told in pointed terms that their “cooperation” would be appreciated. When there is controversy over a curriculum matter or a school board policy, it is teachers who are asked to provide the dog-and-pony show to board members or parents and it is teachers who are advised just to keep quiet and to support the administration. When a particular child is falling through the cracks or being mislabeled, it is individual teachers who step in at their own risk to change the label, to quietly re-assign the classroom, or to find the help that is most appropriate. In a Winter 2001 article on instructional leadership in the Journal of Staff Development By Jo and Joseph Blasé, the authors identified what teachers consider to be the characteristics of effective leaders. Their study involving 809 public school teachers noted that effective school leaders:
In addition, instructional leadership is embedded in school culture; it is expected and routinely delivered.” The reader can decide to what degree these characteristics have been evident over the last year in Readington schools. It is little wonder that many of our teachers offer a sigh of relief when they can close their classroom door in the morning and concentrate exclusively on their students. For, when the classroom door is opened, too often the threshold is darkened by the looming pressures of conforming to inane district programs or the menacing politics of personal revenge. As our amazingly high teacher turnover in almost every school shows, there are also other ways in which teachers handle ineffective leadership. Some would argue that teachers still have a pretty good gig, considering all the vacation and the salary for ten months of work. Yet, there is a deeper story there too. Public school teachers are paid according to a salary guide that is negotiated between the school board and the teachers union. In theory, a teacher’s salary increases as years of experience or additional schooling is accumulated. One is paid from a certain “step” on the salary guide depending on how many years one has been teaching and what level of education has been achieved. In Readington, however, some teachers are not paid according to the amount of experience they actually have. They were hired on a lower “step” than their true experience should have permitted and they continue to be paid less than what they are entitled too--probably less than they could receive elsewhere. As our Readington teachers pack up their personal resources this month and in some cases head off to new classrooms or to unwanted assignments, parents should remember that individual teachers are sometimes the only buffer between students and stupidity. We must remember the inexplicable sacrifices our teachers are willing to make in order to safeguard learning by our children. We owe them a debt of gratitude, and, based on average class size and average personal spending by teachers, we owe each of them about fifty bucks per child. |
