The Preamble
As I write this post, teachers by the tens of thousands are protesting the proposed end of their collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin. The tug-of-war between teachers and government is the latest opportunity for commentators and cocktail-party-goers to label teachers as greedy and selfish. I have always found that line of reasoning so astoundingly ignorant of the facts and I want to take a moment and explain why. With the historic nature of what is going in Madison, it seems the right time.
Teachers don’t make a lot of money. We all know this to be true. It’s a common cultural joke that public school teachers drive beat-up cars, bring bagged lunch, and wear old shoes. According to teacherportal.com, which uses multiple sources to aggregate its data, national teacher salaries average anywhere form $38,000-$58,000. It’s not that teachers don’t make a living wage, but no one goes into teaching for the money, it’s a simple as that.
Yet every time there is a budget crisis in this country, it seems that everyone else wishes they could live as high on the hog as they believe teachers do. You hear people scoff at a teacher making $70,000 at the end of her career. The word greedy is tossed around. A lot. But if it is true that teachers are the robber barons that much of the public believes them to be, then why isn’t every pharmacuetical salesperson, copyright editor, and PR executive running to teach?
Teachers in Chicago draw a salary on the higher end of the national average. But there is also a requirement that all city workers live in the city. A teacher who makes $55,000 and lives in Chicago can, after years of saving a down payment, own a small one or two bedroom condo. Many teachers take on second jobs: I worked with a woman who bartended three or four nights a week to buy her condo; another teacher sold beer at baseball games to afford his. Both were single, however. A small condo is not an easy place to raise a family of, say, two kids.
We want teachers to behave like professionals but get paid like replaceable labor. In Teachers Have it Easy, written in part by author Dave Eggers, he argues that teachers “seem to exist in a strange realm with regard to the status of their profession, somewhere between a union-protected workforce and a college faculty. We expect them to be brilliant and capable, and yet we treat them in a way that leaves them feeling untrusted…It’s a rare professional who can live with the seeming contradictions built into the field of public education.” Video by Jay Rehak, featuring “Peace in My Fingers” by his lovely wife, Susan Salidor
The popular line in Madison these days is that teachers need to suffer like the rest of Americans who have lost their jobs. And the teachers have accepted their share of the financial burden: they agreed to what amounts to large cuts in their total compensation packages. So what is at issue now is whether or not teachers (and many other state workers) have the right to get together and bargain for things like workplace standards, additional pay for extracurriculars, class size, and scheduling. These are not small potatoes. These elements of education are at the heart of what makes a good classroom and what makes good instruction. When teachers are treated fairly in these areas, it means students are too.
For example, if a teacher is made to move to a new classroom for every class she teaches and is not given any workspace of her own during her preparatory periods (as in one school where I taught) instruction will suffer from the logistical constraints of that situation. Or, if teachers are not paid for sponsoring clubs (as I was not, despite creating and producing an end of the year school play) student clubs will disappear, or the teachers sponsoring those clubs will simply not put in the extra effort to make them interesting and worthwhile experiences for the students. The importance of class size is well-documented, but I still taught classes of 34 students, some of whom did not have desks. And as for scheduling: Ask any teacher how many times she has planned a test only to find out that there would be a schoolwide assembly during classes that day. Or planned to have a guest speaker come to address her class, only to find out that class periods would be shorter that day.
Teacher’s issues are student’s issues.
What Teachers (still don’t) Get With Strong Unions
Who, if not a teacher, is concerned with how much access to paper and copies a class has, or how many students are in one class, or how much time a teacher has to prepare a quality lesson or unit?
Principals have financial worries, staffing worries, logistical worries. These worries often do not coincide with the worries involved with setting up a successful classroom.
For example, if a successful unit is created using Backward Design (a concept that involves starting with the final assessment and working one’s way backward, creating every quiz, project, handout, and visual aid beforehand, so that the unit is holistic and purposeful), current technology (difficult still in most schools where just scheduling time in the computer lab for one’s students can be like getting a reservation at Alinea), and is rigorous in its assessments (a good test question is comprehensive, analytical, and fair; and often really hard to come up with). The time that such a unit would take to design could be anywhere from 20-100 hours, depending on the grade, subject, and the curriculum. Multiply that by 8 or 10 units in a year for every class taught.
If a teacher is in classes all day and has only one 45-minute preparatory period (as many schools do), she is clearly writing curriculum on her nights, weekends, and summers. She does not bill for those hours, as lawyers do. She does not get overtime for those hours, as many workers do. If a teacher wants to instruct in a quality way with quality assignments, she accepts that she will work many hours without extra pay. And this is with a union’s ability to collectively bargain.
As a teacher in a large urban public school system, I had protection of the union. But, even with that protection and solidarity, I experienced outrageously poor workplace standards, bullying by administrators, and frequent unfairness. At one school, under a new administration, we were told that each teacher would be given one ream of paper per semester. One ream. The rest was up to the teacher to provide for herself. I was an English teacher who used written instructions for projects and tests to help students learn accountability, who used supplemental materials–such as news articles and related literature–to augment understanding, and who gave lots of quizzes. In a first-world public school system, paper should be a necessity. But I (and most of my department) was not tenured, so we didn’t say a word and instead got preferred customer cards at Staples. It was an expensive year.
Another example: At the same school, I was observed by the assistant principal and was given a glowing review. Except for one thing: I had not tallied (by hand) the amount of absences and tardies in my gradebook (most teachers tally when the data is due, at grade time). This fault went in my permanent file as a lack of record-keeping. It was then made clear to non-tenured teachers, such as myself, that if we made someone mad at that school–had I asked for more paper, for instance, or demanded that the school institute a detention program, which it did not have–we would have had to fear being fired for, in my case, ostensibly not tallying tardies. When I say that my students suffered for my and other teacher’s silence at that school, I am not overstating the reality. By the end of the first semester, the principal had instituted a “closed door policy” and almost all communication was cut off for good. Many teachers left, but the students, of course, remained. And I think of them often.
What does this have to do with collective bargaining? Both of these circumstances are examples of teachers feeling distrusted and unempowered to do their best work in the classroom. And each of these circumstances took place in a strong-union public school system. Imagine if teachers were stripped of any leverage or power regarding their classroom environment and work conditions.
Oh wait. You don’t have to.
What We Get Without Strong Unions
I have a friend whose family member teaches high school Spanish in Oklahoma, where unions are weak and she (we’ll call her Sue), a union rep, has a hard time finding 
anyone to help her with union business. At that school, just this year, they announced that all teachers will teach six instead of the precedented five classes. They also will have to be in charge of lunch duty 6-7 weeks of the year, where they have a 10-minute lunch and then do duty for 20 minutes. This schedule was not negotiated with the teachers, and it was instituted without any additional pay. What it basically does is make teachers work harder with less time to prepare for the extra work.
A teacher in this district–now with 120-150 total students–will likely have to assign less writing and project-based assignments to her students, spend more time managing classroom behavior, and spend less time giving extra help to students outside of class. When teachers lose, students lose too.
Sue cracked $40,000 in 2003-2004. After 21 years of teaching experience and a with a masters degree. She now makes $53,600 ($62,900 including retirement and health insurance). This is with 28 years of experience and a masters. Her district’s salary schedule is above the state minimum, and it used to be — might still be — one of the top 20 highest paying districts in Oklahoma. Sue is a single mother who raised two daughters on her own.
What we have to stop pretending is that teachers are volunteers. They are not. They are professionals, many of whom have advanced degrees. And they ought to be treated as professionals, otherwise we attract candidates that are, simply put, not professional.
There is a lot of peripheral talk in America these days about incentive pay for teachers: recruiting professionals from white collar careers to be public school teachers. But when a bilingual high school teacher with a masters can only crack $40,000 after 21 years, teaching will only ever attract saints and sinners; neither of whom guarantees our children a high quality education. It does guarantee that we can cut teacher pay when we want. And the rights of teachers, apparently: Oklahoma just passed legislation that will take away teacher’s rights to collectively bargain.
Finnish schools have been held as a model of what the US would like our education to look like. Tied for first place in the world, Finnish students often score highest in reading and science tests. But some of the conventional wisdom about what makes a top-notch school system is debunked by Finland’s reality. For instance, according to a BBC profile on Finland’s schools, “Finnish children spend the fewest number of hours in the classroom in the developed world.” And in “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart”, the Wall Street Journal reports that “High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7.” And finally, and importantly, teachers in Finland are unionized and collectively bargain.
What is a less surprising component of Finland’s successful schools, is that, according to the BBC, “Teaching is a prestigious career in Finland. Teachers are highly valued and teaching standards are high.”
American educator and lawyer Derek Bok said, “If education is expensive, try ignorance.” Expensive does not just describe monetary costs, though. What is happening in Madison is not about money. It’s not about balancing the budget in Wisconsin. And, though negotiating with teachers might sometimes mean an administrator or legislator must give up a little time, a few desires, and even some pride, ignoring them will be far more expensive in the long run because their voices, which are all too often the voices of students too, will be silenced. Which would be a shame, because they are strong, creative, and interesting voices that need to be heard:
