Most teachers love what they do. It certainly isn’t about the money. They get into teaching because they want to help children and despite bureaucratic hurles, administrative obstacles and other frustrations, most teachers maintain their enthusiasm and commitment to helping kids. Their hours are long, many spend hours outside class preparing for classes and grading papers and their pay is low, teachers are lucky to make middle class incomes. One benefit they do get is through tenure they get to build a career and some protection on the job. While I believe that there needs to be some reform to tenure so that it will be easier to discipline teachers who are not doing their job well, the simplistic move by Mayor Bloomberg and his business allies to get rid of it is wrongheaded. They say getting rid of tenure will keep good young teachers in the schools. The question they should be asking is without some protection, why would a young person get into teaching and more to the point stick with it? While in this down economy we have seen more young people become teachers it was not too long ago that the DOE had to create the Teaching Fellows program to make up for a shortage of teachers. When the economy recovers who says many of these young teachers will not go for better paying jobs, particularly if they can’t build tenure.
Now it is easy to blame teachers for education failures as Bloomberg and his school chancellors have a habit of doing. They are on the front lines and have the most direct interaction with students and to be sure teachers to bare a share of the responsibility for the system’s failures. However, the Bloomberg Administration and the DOE never take their share of responsibility. It is easy to say fire teachers, but what about the top-heavy bureaucracy and overpaid consultants that are supposed to be guiding the ship. The administration not only wants to hide them from responsibility but is taking money from the schools to pay them. Instead of rewarding the schools that saved money and ran a tight ship, the DOE wants to take half those savings and put them right back into the system. Education money should go to the students. Teachers and principals many times dig into their own pockets pay for supplies. The money should not go for the staff at Tweed.
So, teachers are not paid enough, they work long hours, their tenure is threatened and now money is being out of the schools. The question remains who’ll teach??
