Vance made all the usual specious arguments teachers hear all the time: teachers only work ten months out of the year, teachers only work 185 days out of the year, teachers only work 7.2 hours a day “with [a] 30 minute lunch, one planning period a day, one team planning period a week and one planning period a week of they are working on some type of special project.†Vance then lists myriad benefits, such as personal and professional days, but makes sure to throw in every possible additional type of leave, such as maternity, personal injury, and sabbaticals, creating the appearance that teachers typically cash in on all these days, and so significantly reduce the number of actual working days.
She also makes the claim that general wage increases when coupled with step increases will benefit some teachers with “as much as a 24 percent increase [in salary], if not more, over the three years of the contract.â€
I know I’m mostly preaching to the choir in this column, but honestly, though many of us can name a teacher or two we know who arrives to work last minute and leaves before the buses and who takes every sick day possible, those teachers just are not the norm. How many of you will spend Thanksgiving seated in the other room grading quizzes? How many of you will collect term papers right before February break so you can spend your so-called vacation reading, commenting on, and grading those papers? When’s the last time one of you took a sabbatical? And best of all, does anyone know anyone in the profession whose salary jumped 24 percent in three years?
I can only imagine that Vance performed some sort of improbable, hypothetical calculation in which some imaginary teacher hit the top step and somehow managed to complete a sixth-year degree or an 092 certification, or something along those lines, in the period covered by the contract, and thus propelled him- or herself to the absolute top of the pay scale. It’s just one of those things that won’t happen, and he must know it. I’d challenge her to name the teacher she has in mind, highly suspecting she cannot, but I would not want to establish the precedent of publishing teachers’ names in such a context. One need look no further than what happened recently in Los Angeles, where the LA Times has been publishing the value-added evaluations of teacher performance, and one popular teacher became depressed and subsequently committed suicide after a rating of “less effective than average†was posted in the Times. I hate to say it, but I knew something like this was going to happen eventually.
The point Vance concludes with is that “seniors on fixed incomes†living in Columbia can’t afford the tax increase that would result from the new contract. She doesn’t say how much more the average tax payer would pay annually. Nonetheless, Vance’s conclusion reveals a bigger issue, and that is education funding. Simply put, we shouldn’t be funding local education through property taxes. The state and federal government should be providing much more direct and equitable funding of education. Vance is attacking the wrong opponent, and in the process joining the likes of the Willimantic Chronicle and, in an extreme example, the LA Times, in demonizing and vilifying teachers, creating a hostile environment that contributes to a loss of respect, the deterioration of morale, and the loss of interest in entering or remaining in the profession. Honestly, I have been in education for twenty years this year, and am from a family of teachers, and I have never seen morale so low. My family members haven’t seen morale this low since the strikes that occurred in the 1970s, before the educational enhancement acts were passed in the 1980s.
In conclusion, Vance says, “in these economic times taxpayers need a break.†How about this one: In these economic times, education needs investment and teachers need support.
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