Opinion: Teacher salaries don't add up to hourly pay

I would like to invite the letter writer to shadow my teacher responsibilities at any point during this school year. Clearly, he does not have a firm grasp of the reality most teachers face.

Though officially I am contracted to teach a 7.5-hour day for 180 student days, in addition to pro-ed and in-service days -- which brings the total to 196 days -- I usually work 10 to 11 hours per day. As a secondary math teacher at Safety Harbor Middle School, I teach about 140 to 150 students per year, and though I am given one planning period per day, I never have enough time to grade my papers, make phone contacts to parents, plan lessons, do computer work such as grades, graphs and other data for my class and personal portfolio, and lots of other duties. I frequently take home two to three hours of work.

Besides my official duties, I also am the sponsor of the National Junior Honor Society and work with Mu Alpha Theta, a math club, spending additional hours before and after school helping students practice for meets. These activities sometimes require Saturday travel, which I gladly do, so that my students can accomplish their goals. Not all teachers sponsor clubs, but many do and most do not receive compensation for their extra duties.

Every five years, teachers must recertify in the area they are certified to teach. Many of us attend night or summer classes at St. Petersburg College or other area schools, or attend workshops on weekends, to gain these hours. We do not receive compensation for this, either.

So, to the letter writer and anyone else who questions how most teachers spend their time, my class is open at any time to someone who would like to collect actual data on the number of hours spent compared to salary to determine if 75 percent is truly an accurate figure. I have been proud to be a teacher for more than 15 years now, but I still do not earn the average teacher's salary given by the letter writer.
-- Tina Hemme, Clearwater

A commitment few are willing to make

I was offended by the letter Teacher pay not so bad (July 26), which claimed that teachers work only 75 percent of the year and therefore deserve the pay they receive.

Every summer, teachers must scramble to obtain summer jobs to support their families and themselves. The recent elimination of summer school has seriously affected the number of teachers who are able to find a temporary job within the profession. Many of us are reduced to taking menial jobs for very low pay just to make ends meet during the summer. The other option is to have money taken from each paycheck during the year and stretch your salary over the whole year and bring home a smaller paycheck each pay period; for many teachers, this is a hardship due to the low level of our wages.

There are several other points that should be brought to light for the letter writer and others who believe teaching is a part-time job. First, teachers bring work home on a daily basis, everything from writing lesson plans to grading papers to making posters and calling parents is done on unpaid time.

Second, teaching is the only profession in which one is expected to purchase one's own materials. The budgets allotted for supplies for the classroom are minuscule, and as a result teachers supplement them from their own pockets. Can anyone imagine getting a job in an office and being told you must supply your own paper, pens, ink cartridges and paper clips?

Teachers are professionals and need to be treated as such -- we are all college graduates, and many of us have Master's and Doctoral degrees. Teaching is also one of the few careers that requires constant retraining. Each year we attend multiple training sessions that take us out of the classroom and help us to be better prepared to serve the children we teach.

If the public would support us and help push for more money for classroom supplies, smaller classes and better salaries, we would see improvement for children everywhere. This is important for the whole community, as these children will someday be our community members and they need to be well educated. Teaching requires a commitment few are willing to make; long hours, low pay and negative publicity impede our ability to do our jobs. It's time for the public to support us and stop looking on education as the scapegoat for the ills of our society.
-- Renee O' Brien, St. Petersburg

Teachers work more than full-time

Re: Teacher pay not so bad.

It appears that the letter writer has the opinion that most, if not all, teachers go home at 3 p.m. each day. I can't really blame him, though. I know much of the public feels the same way. I kind of felt that way myself until I became a teacher rather late in life.

It's hard to understand just what the life of a teacher is like if you haven't seen it firsthand. If teachers did go home every afternoon at the time our contract allows us to, then, yes, we would be working about 75 percent of the hours worked by full-time employees in many other occupations.

I haven't quite figured out, though, how it's possible to do class planning, prepare materials for lessons, attend afternoon meetings, do required paperwork, grade papers and record grades, meet with parents and handle the increasing number of new obligations that keep coming up in the amount of time that our contract requires us to be at school. If a teacher averages 10 hours a day on school days alone, that's roughly the same number of hours an employee who works 40 hours a week puts in over a full year. Most teachers I know not only put in extra hours during the school week but also take work home on the weekends. So, yes, I agree. Teaching is not a full-time job. It's more than a full-time job.
-- Lois Robertson, Odessa

Reduced class size is critical

Jeb Bush tries to convince us that the supporters of the class-size amendment need to get it on the ballot this November to get it to pass. He believes that if the voters were aware of the cost of this amendment, they would defeat it. Bush doesn't seem to believe that the voters of this state want to provide quality public education to all our children. He would like to scare us into believing that in order to improve class size, we will have to take away from other state-funded programs. Maybe Bush is afraid he might have to do away with his tax cuts for large corporations and close loopholes that currently keep them from paying their fair share.

Could Bush be wrong in assuming the supporters of this amendment fear that a cost estimate would cause this amendment to be defeated? Or could the supporters of this amendment be motivated by the need to reduce class size in our public schools?

The reduction of class size is critical to improving the public schools. The longer our children are in overcrowded classrooms with overworked teachers, the longer it will take to start improving them. Why wait to vote on this next year when we need the improvements now? Let's start improving our schools and our children's future as soon as possible. Vote for the class-size amendment this November.

Bush refers to a vacuum; however, the only "vacuum" I have heard is the one trying to suck the life out of public schools. I think we should use the vacuum to hose out Tallahassee and clean house of those who are standing in the way of truly improving our public schools.
-- Kathleen Schulke-Jones, Land O'Lakes

Make education a brand-name product

I read William Raspberry's July 29 column, To better enable students' success, with profound interest. It is evident that Education Secretary Rod Paige is using a broad brush to paint teachers unfairly when he impugns them for having "low expectations" of students. Raspberry states that, as Paige sees it, "too many teachers accept as a fact that certain students can't learn." If the Bush administration wants "research-driven" education in America, it is going to need to be more factual than this. How did the secretary arrive at the conclusion of "low expectations" among teachers? Was a survey taken among parents? I remember that during the presidential campaign candidate George W. Bush used this "low expectation" tactic as a powerful means of demonizing public schools and the many hardworking teachers that go far beyond where Paige and Raspberry's teachers had to go in their school days.

Teachers do more parenting than you can imagine in modern schools. Parent involvement -- that is, participation in the schooling of the child from day to day -- was not even mentioned once in this conversation between these two learned and powerful men. Paige reminisces that in his college football coaching days he learned to be careful not to make "quick judgments about kids' ability to learn." He is right when he says that they must "be given a chance to develop." This is precisely why teachers resist the move toward national testing and national standards. Children develop in different degrees and styles. Good teachers have known this for a very long time. As a college football coach, Paige was working with individuals who had achieved a certain level of success already, having gotten to college in the first place.

It is very different in an overcrowded first-grade classroom where many primary needs must be met before the uncompromised teaching and learning Paige speaks of can occur.

Paige states that "the first thing we have to do is enable success." I disagree. The first thing we must do is to sell the students on the value of that education we want them to get. Otherwise, all of the good teaching, new schools and beautiful textbooks in the world will turn out to be nothing more than throwing yet more money at the problem. I suggest as a dramatic departure from conventional wisdom that we learn to market education as a brand name to both our youth and their parents.

Brand-name allegiance for products or services is a concept that we learn early in life, and with good reason. So why not begin to build the image in children's eyes and brains when they are young, of education as being a gateway to "the good life"? Most children, if asked why they attend school, will give some pretty simple answers about doing it because they "have to." Let's give kids good reasons to be in school, then we can cease the finger-pointing and teacher bashing so we may get about the business of improving education in America with the best resource we have going, the innate ability of our students to do more and better work because they want to, because they see a future.

Education is the most valuable brand name in the world. Think about it. If we keep doing what we've always done we will keep on getting more of what we've always gotten. This is the true genesis of low expectations of our students.
-- Jim Duffey, St. Petersburg

What happened to conscience?

We were taught that "conscience" was an essential aspect of human behavior. If so, how do we explain the many chief executive officers and accountants, who lie and refuse to return millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains while protecting profits in various ways, such as investing in obscene mansions, certain our laws will never touch them?

Do they sleep well or do overwhelming feelings of guilt enter their consciousness? Are they able to acknowledge responsibility for causing thousands of hard-working, loyal employees to lose life savings, retirement funds and health protection due to their excessive greed?

Or is the word "conscience" a fairy tale, taught to the young to dull suspicions that they may become easy targets to be taken advantage of? Cynicism, unhealthy as it is, might prove a better education in today's world.
-- Kathleen Brady, Lutz

Share your opinions

Letters for publication should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731. They can be sent by e-mail to letters@sptimes.com or by fax to 893-8675.

They should be brief and must include the writer's name, address and phone number. Please include a handwritten signature when possible.

Letters may be edited for clarity, taste and length. We regret that not all letters can be published.

Back to Opinion

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright

From the Times
Opinion page