Chicago teachers asking for 30% raises over next 2 years
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  Chicago teachers asking for 30% raises over next 2 years
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BigSkyBob
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« Reply #125 on: September 12, 2012, 11:41:04 AM »

Um, krazen, do you seriously propose that a teacher in Chicago should make less than $75,000?  How could they possibly live?

Teachers in rural Missouri start at about $28,000 and max out around $45,000 - this is merely a subsistence level salary there, as is $75,000 in a large, expensive urban center like Chicago.

The starting salary of $28,000 is definitely criminal,

In a free market, wages are set at a level for which every job opening that occurs at least one qualified applicant is willing to take the job. That seems to be the case in rural Missouri. Advocating raising that wage seems to be to me more an exercize in rent seeking than a moral imperative.
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BigSkyBob
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« Reply #126 on: September 12, 2012, 11:45:20 AM »


A subtext to this dispute is that teachers have pretty much had their way for the last two decades in Chitown along with the other public sector workers. The old machine was built on handing out public sector jobs. That's a hard culture to move against.



But, it is an easy culture to leave! People who objected to that culture have had the option of fleeing to the suburbs those two decades. Perhaps, they did.
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Torie
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« Reply #127 on: September 12, 2012, 12:01:29 PM »
« Edited: September 12, 2012, 12:03:32 PM by Torie »

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?
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Franzl
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« Reply #128 on: September 12, 2012, 12:12:34 PM »

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?

I agree in principle, but I do have one question that I feel hasn't been adequately answered.

How do we objectively judge merit? Test scores? Teacher grading by the pupils? I see some problems with judging who to promote to a "Master Teacher".
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krazen1211
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« Reply #129 on: September 12, 2012, 12:15:04 PM »

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?

Take a look at the salaries of private school teachers.


http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_075.asp




These chicago teachers are already getting a massive salary and a massive investment of $13,000 per student per year.
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Torie
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« Reply #130 on: September 12, 2012, 12:21:45 PM »

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?

I agree in principle, but I do have one question that I feel hasn't been adequately answered.

How do we objectively judge merit? Test scores? Teacher grading by the pupils? I see some problems with judging who to promote to a "Master Teacher".

The issue of evaluation attends any professional occupation, including lawyers. Just because it is subjective, does not mean that going through the exercise is not worthwhile. I would start by firing all the teachers who are functionally illiterate, and there are a lot of them. 

Krazen, private school pay is not applicable. Sure, teachers will teach for less if their students are well behaved middle to upper middle class kids. We are talking about a much tougher and more demanding environment here, where the kids have a lot more obstacles. It takes a special kind of teacher to make a difference. I would also focus on the early grades first, and also offer preschool education for the deprived, to get their vocabularies closer to the median when they hit first grade.
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LastVoter
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« Reply #131 on: September 12, 2012, 12:49:45 PM »

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?
So you want teaching to become a good-ol' boys network, where everything depends on who is evaluating?
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Torie
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« Reply #132 on: September 12, 2012, 12:53:19 PM »

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?
So you want teaching to become a good-ol' boys network, where everything depends on who is evaluating?

Surely you can do better than that as a riposte, can't you?
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Link
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« Reply #133 on: September 12, 2012, 01:09:43 PM »

Krazen's obsession notwithstanding, you guys really think teachers should get a 30% raise?

Here's what Kraisins won't tell you...

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Link.

How many of you would walk out of a $75,000 cake job?  I want the free market capitalist on this forum to explain this REALITY.  Don't just throw up a cherry picked string of statistics.  Explain to the forum inspite of all the wonderful benefits and three months off, and blah, blah, blah HALF of the people throw up their hand within 5 years.  Free market capitalism says if you have such a sweet lucrative cake deal you stick with it.  So is free market capitalism wrong or is the right wing teacher fantasy garbage?

To answer your question Senator, I don't know.  I need a lot more real information before I can say whether what they are demanding is reasonable or crazy.
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Grumpier Than Uncle Joe
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« Reply #134 on: September 12, 2012, 01:19:24 PM »

I wouldn't be a teacher for $75K anywhere....I'm far too impatient and cranky.
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anvi
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« Reply #135 on: September 12, 2012, 01:45:52 PM »

In response to BigSkyBob's post to me.

I know full-time entry level teachers who are earning that in St. Louis too.  But, let's think through this for a second.  How about we think in terms of hourly wages in a free market and see how a beginning teacher makes out compared to one minimum wage worker with no education requirements beyond high school? Let's then compare their salary to that of other average entry-level workers with equivalent educational levels?  

Let's assume a new single teacher has a load of four or five courses to teach per term.  Their pay is $28,000 a year gross, which after 15% in federal taxes and about 6% in Missouri state taxes comes down to a net of $22,120 per year.  Now, that pay is compensation for for 36 weeks, two 18 week terms.  That would shake out to $614,44 per week net.  Now, a very recent study just released by the Gates Foundation, which surveyed 40,000 public school teachers, concluded that the average teacher works 10.4 hours a workday, which includes contact hours, preparation, grading and administrative responsibilities.  That's a 53-hour work week.  That would make the hourly compensation for a new teacher, $11.60 per hour, net.  

Minimum wage for a 40-hour work week in Missouri is $7.25, but a full-time single minimum-wage worker in Missouri would pay about the same 21% in federal and state taxes, so their net hourly pay would be about $5.73.  

So, a new teacher in Missouri makes just barely over twice the minimum wage in Missouri net.   But, here is the kicker.  Let's say the minimum wage worker in Missouri finished high school (though not all need to, of course).  The new teacher with at least a masters degree, and possibly a doctoral degree, which would be required to qualify for the job has an extra six to twelve years of higher education.  All that education makes the new teacher only double the minimum wage.

Now, let's compare people in other professions with masters and Ph.D. degrees.  The new teacher in Missouri makes $28,000.  The BLS puts the average new full-time social worker with a masters degree at a salary at $40,000 per year.  An MBA working for an average bank in 2009 made about $120,000 per year, before bonuses.  How about Ph.D's?  In 2009, according to the BLS, the bottom 10% of people with chemistry Ph.Ds who worked in industry earned about $36,000 per year, with the median salary for industry-empolyed Ph.Ds in this field at $72,000.  But let's even forget for a second about advanced degrees and take a peek at just technical training.  An entry-level computer-aided design drafter with a high school degree and some community college courses can pull in an average entry-level salary of $42,000 a year.  

So, to put all this in perspective, if we think $28,000 per year for a new full-time teacher in Missouri is an adequate salary, then we think new teachers should be earning twice the minimum wage, 66% of the salary of a community-college educated CAD-drafter 70% of the wages of a new social worker, 77% of the wages of a new industry-employed chem Ph.D., and 23% of an average MBA newly hired at a bank.  

Now, obviously, most teachers who have been in the field for a long time earn a lot more than $28,000 a year.  But if we think that's a fair entry-level wage, it seems to me that our market doesn't value new teachers very much, especially when one considers how much more heavily colleges and universities are now relying on them relative to how many tenure-track positions they offer.  And, if this is how much we value them, I wouldn't expect to draw too many talented people into the profession or expect much in the way of educational quality from those there now.
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anvi
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« Reply #136 on: September 12, 2012, 01:58:39 PM »
« Edited: September 12, 2012, 02:02:46 PM by anvi »

As to evaluation standards, I'm fine with letting schools retain firing options for every teacher's entire career, and I think rational evaluation procedures by peers, mixed in with incentives for continuous professional development and offering to teach for periods of time in poor urban and rural schools all make sense.

I don't think teacher compensation or careers should be linked to standardized test scores.  Here is why.

If you do that while leaving the rest of the current system in place, then teachers will be hired or fired, promoted or demoted, on the basis of their students' test performances, but there will still be tons of financial aid money and open enrollment available at colleges and universities.  All this does is give teachers incentives to cheat and students no incentive to learn anything.  That's like making dentist licenses depend on their patients' dental health, but then letting even the patients with lousy teeth get leading roles in Hollywood flicks.  The dentists will just find creative ways to get good reports filed to whoever is on the oversight boards.

If you want to use standardized testing, then you have to do systemic reform where scores on those tests will determine what schools and career training opportunities students can qualify for as well as how much aid they can get for what.  That puts the incentive to learn back in the students' court, where it belongs.  On the teachers' end, you ensure that they get requisite training, qualify to teach the subjects they are assigned, mentor them, have them peer monitored, and give them incentives to improve and the school the option to let them go.  If the systemic reforms are rational, then merit pay based on standardized test scores will be unnecessary.  And since that approach has never been proven to produce the desired results anyway, why not do things right instead?  So much of what passes politically for education reform nowadays really does nothing, and the financial incentives in education, from student aid to funding schools to the way teachers are handled is also all f-ed up.
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opebo
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« Reply #137 on: September 12, 2012, 02:46:38 PM »

I would start by firing all the teachers who are functionally illiterate, and there are a lot of them.

Be very careful, Torie - intelligence and even knowledge does not predict the ability to 'do a job well'.  In fact, for many - perhaps most - jobs, a kind of doggedness which is usually associated with the moderately stupid works best.  After all, what is more stupid than getting up early every day and spending your life at a job?

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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
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« Reply #138 on: September 12, 2012, 03:06:11 PM »

Anvi, one thing your posts show is that the teaching profession is highly over-credentialed these days.  (Nor is it the only profession that has suffered at the hands of the academic-industrial complex.)  We really ought to go back to the days when we had normal schools that offered people a chance to pick up the fundamentals of being prepared to educate students in a two-to-three year curriculum.  It should not require a master's degree to be a teacher.  However, the credentialing organizations look more favorably on the employment of teachers with higher degrees and the pay scale in most public schools depends on how much college you've slogged through.
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anvi
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« Reply #139 on: September 12, 2012, 03:30:40 PM »

Yeah, Ernest, there is an oversupply of people with advanced degrees competing for teaching positions.  Allowing primary and some secondary school to be staffed by people who have earned teaching certificates along with their BA degrees would be ok with me.  But the current oversupply of people with advanced degrees gives institutions that hire free rein to nab the most credentialed people at the lowest prices they can.  And, since school facilities themselves, as opposed to their administrative and teaching staffs, have suffered from less and less state funding as the years have passed at the same time as population has risen, schools without major endowments have to draw more and more of their funding from tuition and fees, and that also motivates them to hire the best credentialed people they can afford so that they can survive in this competition.  The circle is many kinds of vicious. 
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krazen1211
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« Reply #140 on: September 12, 2012, 04:13:27 PM »

Chicago Public School enrollment has plunged 17% in the last decade with the fine job done by these teachers.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Philadelphia_Research_Initiative/Closing-Public-Schools-Philadelphia.pdf



One wonders whether the number of teachers employed by CPS has plunged in the same fashion. It would be highly astonishing for there NOT to be school closures that the union is whining about!
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Snowstalker Mk. II
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« Reply #141 on: September 12, 2012, 04:34:22 PM »

Rahm Emanuel is among the worst mayors in the country.
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Miamiu1027
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« Reply #142 on: September 12, 2012, 04:45:08 PM »

while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living.

"oh God, go to Hell"  - my spontaneous reaction
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Vosem
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« Reply #143 on: September 12, 2012, 04:47:52 PM »

After all, what is more stupid than getting up early every day and spending your life at a job?

My initial reaction to this statement has to be 'not doing so'.
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opebo
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« Reply #144 on: September 12, 2012, 04:51:24 PM »

while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living.

"oh God, go to Hell"  - my spontaneous reaction

Haha, well, to be fair, this is a natural reaction to any pontification by the insulated rich. 

After all, what is more stupid than getting up early every day and spending your life at a job?

My initial reaction to this statement has to be 'not doing so'.

Meh, dead end either way.  And anyway of course I was being facetious - for 99% of people there is no choice but to get up every day and go to work.
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mondale84
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« Reply #145 on: September 12, 2012, 05:12:59 PM »

Chicago Public School enrollment has plunged 17% in the last decade with the fine job done by these teachers.


As it has in most urban areas...your point?

No one cares about this strike btw...
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Link
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« Reply #146 on: September 12, 2012, 05:13:07 PM »

Rahm Emanuel is among the worst mayors in the country.

Why do you say that?
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krazen1211
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« Reply #147 on: September 12, 2012, 05:48:09 PM »

Chicago Public School enrollment has plunged 17% in the last decade with the fine job done by these teachers.


As it has in most urban areas...your point?

No one cares about this strike btw...


Obviously with a plunging school population, teachers need to be fired and schools need to be closed.
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Link
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« Reply #148 on: September 12, 2012, 06:02:24 PM »

Chicago Public School enrollment has plunged 17% in the last decade with the fine job done by these teachers.


As it has in most urban areas...your point?

No one cares about this strike btw...


Obviously with a plunging school population, teachers need to be fired and schools need to be closed.

Why?

If they need to reduce the work force it can be accomplished easily through attrition.

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krazen1211
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« Reply #149 on: September 12, 2012, 06:30:38 PM »

Why?

If they need to reduce the work force it can be accomplished easily through attrition.

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Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041


In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.


The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.
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