A reader named Sam left this comment, in response to my post on teachers being overworked and underpaid, and I elevate it because it demonstrates, once again, how teachers get dumped on in ways that other professions don’t; Sam makes a good point:
It would be interesting to take into effect that teaching is one of the few jobs where people expend large quantities of their own money to do their job. I was a principal in a large urban district before I left education for a private sector consulting job. Part of the reason I left was the paper rationing that occurred during my last two years on the job. Our school district limited our teachers to three sheets of paper per student per week in an attempt to cut costs. Even the best, most engaging hands-on learning takes more than three sheets per week. Add in the lunch menus, report cards, and parent letters that need to go home and it would guarantee that our paper supply usually ran dry by March 1 or so and my teachers ending up buying their own paper.
Could you imagine the uproar that would occur in the mortgage department of a bank if suddenly employees were required to buy their own copy paper? Why is that acceptable for our teachers?
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service even has a specific standard deduction for teachers to use to cover the materials they take to the classroom, that would be supplied by other employers, that should be supplied by the schools. Isn’t it odd that we make provisions in the tax code to try to offset this error, rather than try to fix it?
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Well, this is just the very sort of thing that is so frustrating about trying to improve kids education, and teachers pay and happiness. You say:
> > Beef up the resources, give the teachers the tools to do the job, then let them be accountable.
But the problem here is, you have no plan for doing that. If you reaaaalllly, reaaally, and truly want that to happen, you have to design a system where the people making the decisions 1) Know what they need, 2) have the drive, capacity, and intelligence to get it, and 3) do, on a regular basis, pursue that.
No matter, however, what system is proposed to achieve that, the reactionaries always fight it. They want different results with the same old broken system. They say pour in more cash, but 1) can’t say how to get it, and 2) cannot rebut the fact that, if it were just cash, Washington DC would have had the finest school system in the world years ago.
It’s not cash, its structure. (Even if it were cash, changing the structure is the only way to get more cash). Yet no matter how we prose changing the structure, the reactionaries always say, Schools are unique. People in schools are unlike any other humans. Principals are unlike any other managers. Superintendents are meaner and crueler than any other CEO. School boards are dumber, or craftier, or more vicious than any other board. The taxpayers who fund schools are are dumber, or craftier, or more vicious than the taxpayers who fund the IRS offices, the highway patrol, the township park, the county library, the Department of Defense.
The reactionaries can’t ever explain why it is that teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and school-tax voters are so different from those holding equivalent roles in other enterprises public or private. But they always know just how to look past the big elephant in the room; the one big obvious beast that separates teachers from almost all other professionals.
LikeLike
There is some merit to allowing differentials in pay — unfortunately, no one has devised any system to make it work. Houston has merit pay, and it has succeeded in destroying morale. If most principals were skilled at human resources management, it might work — but if they were, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in.
Firing bank tellers won’t save the bank if the bank is insisting that the tellers bring their own change to work with, and that the tellers have to bring their own computers to access the system, and paperclips to clip bills together. And, frankly, would you want to bank at a place that was so stingy that the people watching your money can’t do their jobs?
Beef up the resources, give the teachers the tools to do the job, then let them be accountable. You are suggesting we make teachers accountable for the administrators’ mistakes. That’s what we have now, and it’s a disaster.
LikeLike
Yes, Ed, I breakfasted with Diane in December, and we lunched in November. Her unhappiness with the pace of change and the insufficiency of recent reforms becomes more and more evident. She is also an educational historian, and few among us would argue that trade unions did not have a time and place, and a limited role now (I thoroughly support the folks striking at my local supermarket, for example),
I live in Appalachia where wages are appallingly low, and my friends who drive truck are not suffering.
But back to the core point: you want to treat teachers like bankers. So do that. Call for them to act like bankers.
I know they act professionally as individuals. More so than most bankers; I’m sure. But collectively, they behave as if it were 1902, women were seen as near slaves, teaching the work of someone waiting to find the right man.
If you really want salaries to rise faster, and supplies to be provided faster, the only solution is to provide the mechanisms to do that:
1) Allow teachers to be paid as bankers are: on merit, as individuals, each walking in at hiring time and review time, and saying, “Hey. I did this, and this, and this, and I deserve more money than Cory, who didn’t.”
2) Allow the culture of bankers to flow into the schools. Make it easier for teachers and administrators too comfortable with the old, impoverished, ways to leave, and make it easier for people from other, wealthier professions, to enter the schools and inflict their higher expectations therein.
LikeLike
Yeah, I’m very much a free marketeer, and that worries the heck out of Republican conservatives who, it turns out, are socialists. Pricing functions don’t work for teachers (or nurses) because the government interferes with the mechanisms.
Interesting that you think wages are driven down by the minimum wage. That’s just the opposite of the yowls of the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and studies at various Federal Reserve Banks. What makes you say that?
My experience is that union wages often are a multiple of the minimum, so increasing the minimum wage exponentially increases union pay in the next round. So few workers are unionized these days that it has less effect.
Where do I get the idea nurses are underpaid? From 40 years of surveys by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and 40 years of programs through HHS to try to make up for the problem with other incentives to get people to go into nursing. Are there any contrary data? Have you surveyed any nurses yourself? I know a few who are satisfied with their pay, now that they have masters and doctorates — not many, but a few.
Yes, there are a lot of public hospitals — Parkland in Dallas, D.C. General, Los Angeles County, etc., etc., etc. Under the Hill Burton Act, most hospitals of any repute and longevity are effectively public institutions in the trauma care areas; any hospital that offers Medicare or Medicaid services has nurse pay effectively controlled by federal regulation — that socialist bent, again.
No, Texas is not an exception on teacher unions. Even in places where unions are reputed to be strong — say, New York City — there is no evidence of a powerful union to make a case. Teachers don’t drive Cadillacs, have shortened work hours, or in any other way show evidence of a powerful union — that was the point of the post: Teachers have to bring their own paper, pencils, books, basic classroom things, to work. No banker has to provide her own paperclips. Americans demand teachers do a gold-plated job with tin-plated tools. Miraculously, some teachers get some great results, but that will never obtain across the board until we start supporting teachers with the tools they need.
This last year I had to provide my own computer and e-mail access. Dozens of teachers buy printers and scanners because those they have access to are far away, or inadequate. Can you imagine a bank requiring tellers to provide their own computer access to the bank’s financial records? Can you imagine a bank requiring tellers to bring their own change? Out of the 50 states and top 100 metropolitan areas, teacher unions have clout in probably a dozen states, and maybe 20 cities. Where are you that it’s different?
We need more lawyers to handle everyday legal affairs of average people, at economical prices. More lawyers should drive prices of representation down, in a free market. Lawyers are closer to a free market than doctors or teachers — except in those states that enacted socialized law systems called “tort reform.”
Why are teachers prohibited by law from bargaining individually? Remember, I’m in Texas where there are not fat union bosses. The conservative and Republican legislators prefer socialism in teacher staffing. One excuse is efficiency in administration. Any way you cut it, teachers get the short end of the stick both ways. Do you know of a state where the union bosses agitated to end such bargaining? Generally it works the other way: The unions impose real bargaining on the school board, with the threat of collective action necessary to get the schools to bargain at all.
Are there some fat union bosses who don’t do right by the unions now? That’s a real problem. But most school systems are at the exact opposite position — pre-union, teacher oppression.
Here’s an idea: Read something from someone who makes a case for unions, here: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter06-07/includes/ravitch.htm
It’s an interesting piece by Diane Ravitch. You know who she is, of course: The darling of the Reagan administration’s education establishment, assistant secretary of education for research in the Bush I administration, conservative credentials longer than yours and mine together.
The key point stands: Teachers shouldn’t have to provide classroom materials out of their own pay. It’s unfair to the kids. It’s unfair to the teachers. It hurts teacher morale. It contributes to the inability of schools to meet state standards. Which is again, unfair to the kids.
Truckers don’t “rejoin” the union. Did you miss the last 50 years? McLane Trucking, the nation’s largest food distributor, is located chiefly in states where it can avoid unions. But I offered the information that truckers are in trouble as a rebuttal to your claim that non-union truckers are doing better than union truckers. It just ain’t so — they’re all suffering. Truckers didn’t leave unions; trucking companies relocated and engaged in hard union-busting practices (much of it illegal, but the NLRB has not been prone to enforce the laws under several administrations over the past 30 years).
LikeLike
Wow. Well, one place to start might have been the core of my thesis. But,…
Your idea of economics is, to say the least, of some bizarre parallel universe we don’t live in. So I guess its fair to ask, have you studied any economics at all? Is the price function something familiar to you?
Sorry about the hodgepodge nature of the rest of this, but that’s what you gave me:
-Yes, many wages are driven by the minimum wage. Driven down. For the exact same reason I outlined above.
-Where do you get the idea that nurses are underpaid? And are there actually any hospitals as public institutions left in the country?
-If all those non-union truckers are in such big trouble, they can fix that today: rejoin the union. But they don’t. If you think on this awhile, you can deduce that truckers have left the union in droves because it does not deliver for them as well as non-union work.
-As to teachers forbidden from striking or organizing, Texas must certainly be the weird exception. Strikes are looming at schools all around us, all the time.
-I won’t ask why you think we need more lawyers (ich!), I don’t want to know, but …
-Why do you suppose that teachers are forbidden from bargaining individually? You don’t suppose that perhaps, just perhaps, well paid and plump union bosses pushed that law through to protect their own fiefdoms? No, no that couldn’t be it.
LikeLike
I’m really at a loss where to start. Teachers in Texas are forbidden from striking, and in a few cases, from organizing at all. Plus, it’s illegal for teachers to bargain for higher pay individually. How in the world you think anything other than a union could break that logjam is beyond me.
And, this may be news to you: Truckdrivers, especially the non-unionized, over-the-road guys, are in big trouble. Lots of bankruptcies. Diesel at $3.00 a gallon may knock out half our truck fleet.
In America today, with few exceptions, high wages are driven by the union floors, or by the minimum wage. Diseconomies in some professional ranks make things more complex (we need more lawyers, but even lawyers can’t afford to go into the law business to help out) — teachers don’t quite fall into that category.
Maybe the analogy is nursing. Nurses make lousy pay, for the most part. But there are still quite a few in the pipeline. For 35 years, however, we’ve fought nursing shortages. Most nurses get at least part of their pay from a public institution, and public institutions are fond of underpaying.
So health care is more expensive overall, and nurses can’t get their share. It would lower overall health care costs to staff up nurses to where we should be, but it is impossible to get such laws through state legislatures.
Tom and Ray Magliozzi are fond of saying “The cheapskate always pays more.” And that’s the problem we have with much of education, and much of health care. We’re cheapskates about it. So we pay more, and get less. And that increases calls to cut spending for nurses and teachers.
Organization would probably benefit both professions. Organization would probably benefit trucking, too — even if it’s under the Teamsters.
LikeLike
Why, exactly. None of these professions organize as collective bargaining associations (trade unions). Thus, their wages rise freely and individually, with the ebbs and flows of time.
You can find an example in your own finances as to how this works. In mine, it is the iPod and the gas/beer tab. Now, I have wanted an iPod for quite awhile. I have even deduced that it is tax deductible for me, as a great deal of information related to my profession comes in its most timely manner through mp3’s. Still, a year after I committed to buy myself one, I haven’t. I just can’t swipe that card for $249.
On the other hand, I have wasted far more than $249 in unnecessary driving, bar tabs, trips to McDonalds & Subway, etc. These I justify one at a time, telling myself this breakfast will help me concentrate better, that coffee on the road will let me pause and adjust my notes.
And so it is with employers. When employees come in one at a time, either at hiring or at evaluation time, and present their qualifications and work history, employers will find ways to give most of them decent pay, as the market bears.
In collective bargaining, however, employers are presented with a single huge jump in their labor costs. They look at their work force and say, “this is the same work force I had. I can see meeting inflation, but why should I pay more than that?” And so the collectively bargained wages tend to drop steadily relative to the economy’s growth.
This is why union membership drops decade after decade. It isn’t good for but a few employees. And truck drivers have noted this as much as anyone. Teamsters membership is half what it was; the number of trucks on the road surely has not shrunk.
—
Now, organization has another effect: how the profession performs, and how the general population perceives the profession. To see this effect, visit ieee.org and compare it to nea.org. Which one looks like a professional organization passionate about improving the quality and knowledge of the membership? And which one looks more like a political action committee?
The public (teachers’ employers) see this and realize it, and they are not impressed.
Teachers work hard, and they ought to be paid well for it. Let them emulate the engineers and the IEEE, and they will.
LikeLike
I’m curious how you think accountants and engineers are organized and negotiate together. But I’m especially curious to hear what you think truck drivers are doing differently on that front.
LikeLike
Ed, we can debate all day about how much teachers do and can earn, but all that is far, far beside the point. If teachers are underpaid (and I believe many are), it is completely their own fault. If they really want to be paid like other professionals, the thing to do is to act–en masse– like other professionals.
Alas, teachers do not approach the marketplace as do accountants, engineers, designers, medical specialists, advertising and marketing professionals, programmers, sales professionals, technical specialists, artists, or musicians. Instead, teachers approach the marketplace as do truck drivers.
If teachers want higher pay, the very simple answer is: organize, educate, and negotiate as do professionals, not as truck drivers.
(In fairness, most truck drivers these days have learned the same valuable lesson, while teachers have not).
LikeLike
I have experienced some of the same problems and more. I often contribute supplies to my classroom for just basic operations. In addition to these, I try to still find money to buy interactive materials and books for unit studies within my classroom. With this practice, my students last year scored 100% advanced or proficient. That is pretty remarkable considering my textbooks were at least ten years old, most older. The information was so old that the need for other resource materials became a must. I did not have a computer in my classroom until October of that year (2005), so I was forced to purchase a laptop computer to run my day-to-day activities of my classroom. What help did I receive? I got a $250.00 tax credit last year to offset the cost. Somehow, this just doesn’t seem right! Will this teacher continue to teach in Mississippi for years to come? I just do not know. That is a shame considering my G.P.A. was an overall 3.8 in undergraduate studies and currently 4.0 in graduate. Most of all, it is a shame because I love Mississippi students and appreciate the fact that progress requires a good educational background.
LikeLike
Hi Ed,
I agree, it is a shameful condition. Teaching is becoming a non-profit occupation. My wife has to bring to class 24 copies of the text of her tests to the students, because the school does not make the service easily available to her. And I am talking about Italy!
In Italy we have a public education system which still works, but it is being attacked in many ways. Tax cuts, attempts to derate it in favor of private institutions, etc.
Cheers,
T.
LikeLike
I liked his comment, too.
A related item is that in many schools, it is the PTA/PTO which obtains many school supplies and necessities. Unless parents have a custom of this type of activity, and have the disposable income when necessary, disparities will exist.
LikeLike