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I want my 8 days back.
This past week my school district, in conjunction with our various employee unions, agreed that the best strategy for meeting statewide budget demands was to hack 8 days from the school year for all programs in the district. They also decided to cut 2 full time positions at my school. I understand their dilemma, having to meet the Governor’s request for a 9% reduction based on income tax revenues, and I also applaud their decision in that few of my colleagues (most of them young and energetic) will lose their jobs. Yet, when I sit and think about what it means to lose 8 days of school, I grow more irate at the situation that the economy has plunged our districts into.
In “teacher terms” what does 8 days look like for me and what does 2 people cut mean?
a) An entire unit of study, GONE. As a history teacher, any time I lose a single day of school (snow, electrical failures, day after the Super Bowl…), I have to cut some aspect of civics or economics or history that I think that kids can use.
b) Time to prepare, GONE. When you lose those kinds of days, the scaffolding you’d like to do with the units and assignments you do have gets hurried. Differentiation? Not so easy. Trying to dial back to help students reach proficiency? More challenging now.
c) Those 2 positions translate to a loss of 2 actual classes from my department, which means my class size will go up (we’re looking at 36 or 37 in a class at this point).
d) A 3 to 5% pay cut. I’m not going to cry about it, because teachers have been less affected than other professions, but I should at least say it, so people know.
e) The realization that our educational system is falling steadily behind other states and (more importantly) international schools that offer upwards of 220 days of school.
I guess what this leads me to is what can be done about this? How do we get a full school year and a reasonable amount of staff per school?
Now, I read the blogs on Oregonlive, and I know that some people out there want to slice off every administrator or (and this was a real comment) “cut teacher salaries by 25%,” but I hate to say that neither of those is all too realistic.
I’m curious as to what can be the compromise solution? You see that Portland Public wants to cut P.E., and while that doesn’t appeal to me, is cutting programs like that a possible route for all schools? Should we offer the bare minimum to students? Meaning – no Auto shop, no Woods, no Arts? Are schools responsible for athletic programs or should that be left to the extensive network of club sports that have propagated throughout the country?
Or maybe this problem is an issue of our tax system? I grew up in New York, which (between state and county) had a high sales tax. While I don’t think that the sales tax is necessarily the answer, since it is a “regressive” tax system, maybe the income would be a bit steadier for the state and the school systems would not be submitted to these cycles where there is a constant concern about funding?
I am not necessarily interested in debating the merits of each element here, but actually arriving at a solution. As the parent of two school age children as well as a teacher of nearly 200 more, I am not happy at all about losing my 8 days. And really, none of us should be. But we have a responsibility, I think, to craft a real solution that is fiscally appropriate and educationally sound.
Higher taxes aren’t the answer. School boards in east county must renegotiate prohibitions on pay cuts in teachers union contracts when those contracts expire. Cutting school days and teacher layoffs are not the way to provide an excellent education for our kids.
Let the teachers strike! The monetary gig is up. There is not enough money to continue at the current status quo, and things are only going to get worse. Every school board in east county has a fiduciary duty to keep more teachers in the classrooms and cut teacher wages to sustainable levels.
Contracts aren’t static. Once they expire, everything is open to negotiation. The unions can choose to take their membership and over a financial cliff. If that is their choice, so be it.
Our schools were not created to blindly spend themselves into oblivion- they were created to give our kids the best education possible. The unions do not share those values. They care more about their paychecks and political donations to politicians. Our school boards must find their fiduciary, moral, and financial backbone and focus on affordable, excellent education. Those school board members who fail in this regard must be voted out of office, and replaced with strong leaders who are willing to change the school district’s financial situation onto a new sustainable path.
Dear concerned parent,
I want to address you in two areas.
First, I will accept the possibility of not increasing taxes. Oregon has long held out against a sales tax and their resistance to a regressive tax which hurts the poorer among us more may be admirable. As a taxpayer, I don’t want to see my taxes increase at all. I can still remember filling out my checks for the extra Multnomah County tax a few years back and was angered each time I did. Plus, states like New York and California (where I am typing this response from) have sales taxes and don’t seem to be doing better with funding education, having to make cuts themselves. So note carefully, readers, this is NOT my preferred route.
Secondly, I am not sure your solution is reasonable either. I would like to ask what you think I should make for salary. And honestly, please give me an average figure. Should a teacher make 30,000 with no benefits? 45,000 with? What is fair to pay in the mind of the average citizen? Maybe if teachers had an honest idea of what you think we should be earning, then we could dialogue more effectively.
You used the phrase monetary gig, which sounds clever but makes me think you believe that we teachers are making out like bandits. You also made the bold claim that as union member, I don’t care about giving students the best education possible. I would pause before making a conclusion like that, and I would query if you really gain by making such a provocative comment when I want to dialogue real solutions. Trying to antagonize the union and schools boards only serves to prolong debate and prevent a united approach to helping students learn. You and I don’t need to do that.
It may be worth repeating too that teachers are already taking a 5% pay cut next year, which means the union was willing to take a hit financially…and that did not put us in the clear.
I should note here though that if taxes are not possible and teacher salaries have already been cut, what seems to be left is programming options. Maybe it is time to really consider what a public school is supposed to offer. My private school education didn’t afford me any electives or vocational classes. I love teaching Anthropology, but at the same time, maybe it is time we cut those courses in favor of a strict core curriculum. It would mean less choice for students, but maybe that choice should be for students when they hit vocational schools or the university level. My mentor when I taught at Jesuit told me when I started that K-12 education is supposed to be more structure than content. If you believe him, then maybe the common solution is to adhere to his belief, and scale back the role of the local school in the community.
Is that the route we should be headed readers?
Happy to keep dialoguing!
Autovermietungen in Mallorca…
Surprisingly, really very inspired, there are very few that can make me impressed!!! Good Read……
Shawn,
I really like your response. I don’t want to focus too much on money/compensation here, but like you, I also wonder how much people typically think is fair for a teacher salary. Sometimes I wonder if, because everyone has gone through school to some degree in their lives, people feel more qualified to take a stance on education and what education should be like than, say, what the legal profession should be doing, or what other civil servants should be expecting from their work. I’d be curious to hear what other people have to think about this.
I’m not sure what the answer is, either, but I’m really nervous at the idea of cutting “non-essential” programs from schools. The idea of what’s expendable and what’s not is what makes me uncomfortable. Expendable according to what? I mean, PE may seem unnecessary, but when obesity rates are in the upper 50% for Oregon adults, what kind of standard of living are we sacrificing when we implicitly tell kids that physical education isn’t important?
I guess it all comes down to the goal of education: certainly it’s to prepare kids for the future, but how do we know what they will need in the future? It seems to me that what kids need most are the tools to know how to think, how to creatively expand their knowledge to other topics, find new solutions. When we narrow school down to only a few subjects, I worry that we lose the breadth of experience that makes people flexible and adaptable thinkers.
Of course, maybe that’s what’s financially necessary to do. If that’s the case, though, I worry about the message we’re sending: yes, kids, we want you to be prepared for the future, but only, for example, as long as we don’t have to pay sales tax. Plus, I worry that we’d be setting up a system in which kids of means have access to all the other extra-curricular sports or educational programs, and the kids who live in poverty would only be falling further and further behind. It seems like school should be a leveling ground; as such, I don’t think that making it as spartan as possible in an effort to save money is doing anyone a favor.
Shawn,
I’m a reporter at The Oregonian covering East county, and wrote our story on Gresham’s school day cuts. A colleague of mine blogged about your entry.
I wondered if I could get in touch with you to learn more about what you and other teachers in the high school and district are thinking and doing about the cutbacks?
It sounds like, long-term solutions aside, you and your colleages will have to make some very real decisions to deal with the cutbacks as soon as summer planning starts.
Thank you, and look forward to hearing back.
Andrew
I think a point that has yet to be mentioned is the fact that teachers used to be held in such high regard and that regard seems to have gone by the wayside. Teachers used to be esteemed members of the community, respected for their work and admired for what they do. I think a pervasive thought in our society is that teaching is easy and that anyone can do it. I am currently in a Master’s program for teaching and I can tell you that they don’t just have you walk in and grab your diploma. We have to put in real work and long hours to attain a position in which we are underpaid and unappreciated. Our society seems to forget that people who become doctors and lawyers had to be in school at some point and that the people who educated them could be responsible for setting that person on their career path. Are you going to tell me that that is not important?
Do people really believe that allowing kids to have poor education due to large class sizes and a lack of electives will be a good thing? I think that society tends to remember the bad teachers and not the good ones. Maybe there would be more good teachers if they were paid a rate that was comparable to other occupations. Teaching is fundamental to every other profession and it lays the groundwork for our communities and cities. I think it is time that people truly opened their eyes and acknowledged this point.
Shawn, I’d like you to have your eight days back too!
Here’s my concerns as a parent.
My husband’s aunt is a school nurse in Rhode Island. They have a 180-day school year. My kids’ district is flirting with the idea of cutting us to 155 days. The gap between the two districts in two different states would be 25 days.
Now, over a 4-year high school career, that means we’re graduating seniors who are less than half-way through their senior year.
How competitive does that make them with the high school senior from Rhode Island? All things being equal, even if they were both 4.0 students competing for a slot in a university or a scholarship, the Rhode Island senior would have 100 more days of schooling, and therefore, be considered first over the Oregon student.
Oregon needs to stabilize funding for K-12 schools. Thank you for sharing your story!
Best,
Julie
[...] On Friday, ChalkBlogger Shawn Daley, was featured in an Oregonian article about the Gresham-Barlow budget cuts. The Oregonian reporter had connected with Shawn through his first ChalkBloggers post: 8 Days Back: A Reflection on School Budget Cuts. [...]
I agree with you. Reduction in the school system are always the wrong direction. If we reduced the education of today, we will have even more problems in the future.