Teach this!

I spent 26 years covering lots of local schools off and on as a newspaper reporter. Yeah, some teachers in large, wealthy school districts did OK. But none were getting rich. And many, especially in smaller, less well-heeled districts, were working at damn near poverty level. Those summers they had "off" they generally worked, non-school jobs if not teaching, to try to make ends meet.

I knew more than one really good teacher who went into another profession entirely so they could support families and put kids through college.

From an NYT story on how a lot of teachers must be feeling about those targets on their backs in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and on and on:

"Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class. 'I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt,' she said. 'I’m 30 years old, and I can’t save up enough for a down payment' for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents."

Meanwhile, "Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, said the decline in teachers’ status traced to the success of unions in PAYING (my caps) teachers and granting job security based on their years of service, not ability. 'They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn’t individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear,' Mr. Finn said."

How do you even talk to a guy with such a disconnect from reality?

I like this from Gene Lyons in his column posted at Salon today:

"Even if they don't often think about it, most people do understand that government employees do much of the basic grunt work that keeps a civilized society functioning. Think of it this way: Every hedge fund manager, investment banker, oil industry lobbyist and political consultant in the USA could be raptured to that great Republican country club in the sky to spend eternity golfing with Speaker John Boehner and the brothers Koch, and weeks might pass before anybody noticed. Newspaper columnists, too. There's raw sewage in your basement? Well, don't call me. None of us is keen to take on a class of 35 9-year-olds, let alone, heaven forbid, teenagers. Try some lazy, overpaid, unionized government worker."

We shouldn't be talking about how to pay teachers less. We should be talking about how to pay them commensurate with their integral role in the well-being of our society, and how to best make the profession attractive to a cadre of the brightest and most skilled among us.

You want to adjust the tenure system, to consider merit in hiring and retaining teachers? Fine by me. As long as it is really merit you want to consider, not the fact that somebody in town doesn't like somebody else's politics, or the church they attend, or that they don't attend any church at all, or a book they're seen checking out of the library, or their support, heavens, for organized labor--because that kind of thing, which happened routinely in the American history conservatives are happy to ignore (and still happens in some communities), is why tenure was fought for and won.

"Merit" also doesn't include pandering rightwingnut politicians getting rid of old teachers just because they cost more than young teachers. In teaching, experience counts. Yesterday, a teacher spent part of his busy afternoon explaining to me how he mapped the molecular structure of a common cold virus. It was exciting, educational and fun and that's the assessment of a writer who's certainly no rocket scientist, let alone a biology PhD. Don't yawn, we might get a cure out of this yet for those miserable colds that afflict even the piggishly wealthy, their Chamber of Commerce priesthood and their Tea Partying acolytes.

My teacher in this instance is 81.