Monday, December 28, 2009

The Dichotomy of Perceptions About Teachers

Teachers change the world. We want our best and our brightest to go into teaching and inspire a new generation to the greatest heights imaginable. We want our teachers to be trained in the best methods and to collaborate with other great teachers, and we will honor it as a profession.
Unless the economy is bad. Then....
Teachers are just like any other state employee. Look, we get that contact time matters, but class size is just going to have to go up. And we know that cutting salaries is a message that gets around and makes the job less attractive and that, when it comes to talent, you get what you pay for, but you teachers need to live in reality just like the rest of us. The kids'll have to cope.
No industry is recession proof, and if you consider education an industry then the logic follows. It's just interesting how we can move so quickly from one to the other, based on a financial line.

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4 Comments:

Blogger ms-teacher said...

And, it's also interesting to note that when times ARE good, teachers rarely get pay increases to reflect it.

2:33 PM  
Blogger NYC Educator said...

I was going to say much what MS teacher said. When the dot-com craze took Wall Street, city teachers took two years with no raises at all.

3:07 PM  
Blogger Dr Pezz said...

In addition, if a teacher complains about cuts to education or freezes in salary or benefits, we are "complaining" and need to live "in the real world" and so on. Tough row to hoe.

8:43 PM  
Blogger Dr Pezz said...

By the way, who said the quotes you listed?

2:11 PM  

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