Do you like high wages? Job security? Obscene health and retirement benefits? Limited Oversight? Three months of vacation? Do you like being in a position of authority and the natural deference that comes with it? Do you want to believe that you’re changing the world? Do you hate to sacrifice, but like it when people at cocktail parties reflexively commend your nonexistent sacrifice? Do you like having the moral high-ground to sneer condescendingly at the primitivism of the profit motive?
Do you like children? Wait. Scratch that last one. It’s not exactly a deal-breaker if you don’t. Be a public school teacher! Even better, be a public school administrator! It is, quite simply, the easiest job in the country.
I have a serious question: who out there doesn’t believe that they have the skills to teach 8th grade math? Here’s a small sampling of the brain-busting activities these intrepid teachers courageously plod through every day:
-Adding Fractions with different denominators
-Greatest common factors
-Identifying Triangles by Angles (i.e. “and this pretty shape here is “scalene!”)
-Finding the Area of a Triangle
-Simple equations and inequalities (4x+3 = FUN!)
Come to think of it, if you don’t believe that you could make an impromptu lesson plan and teach these items to a group of children, you were probably taught by a public school teacher.
Imagine, for a moment, being a career 8th grade math teacher at 53 years old. Shake that feeling of dread that you’ve done nothing productive with your life and that you will die alone with your seven cats. That’s not part of this hypothetical. You made all your lesson plans when you were 23 and just out of college. You’ve been doing this for 30 years since. If you can’t explain how to find greatest common factors after thirty years of practice, you deserve a lobotomy, not a $100,000+ salary. Being a teacher simply isn’t very difficult. We’re not talking about actuaries, doctors, or professional athletes. We’re not even talking about mechanics, welders, or carpenters. In terms of the necessary skills required to be a functional public school teacher, the skill requirements are most analogous to those of the Opinions Page Editor at the New York Times. (Oh SNAP!)
Just as an aside, what are you doing on any given Tuesday afternoon next July? I’ll be working. You’ll probably be working. You kid’s teacher will probably be gulping down Mai Tais in St. Bart’s. I don’t begrudge teachers a vacation, but three months is obscene. On vacation time alone, teachers only work 80% as hard as the average American worker. Any other talk about benefits ought to start and end with “you get THREE MONTHS of vacation!” But it doesn’t. Public school teachers also get healthcare, dental, and retirement packages. For nine months of work. Even when they’re on the job, being a teacher requires very little actual work. In addition to three months vacation, teachers make the lesson plans their first year and coast the rest of their careers. They work about 7AM-3PM (the normal eight hours) but you get to take off recess, gym, art, and whatever other nonsense they do in schools these days. This is when teachers actually do the grading and lesson plan tweaking that teachers so often squawk they do on their personal time. Outside of the actual teaching, which requires little above mere literacy, the rest of the job is basically babysitting, a profession mostly occupied by sixteen year old girls trying to get enough money to give their boyfriends Justin Bieber haircuts or pierce their ankles.
It’s not hard to imagine why teachers work so little; they have no accountability and minimal oversight. With massive union protections, firing a teacher is virtually impossible unless they molest their students in plain view of the principal, a police officer, and three union representatives or start harvesting organs. Teachers fight tooth and nail against objective and standardized measurements of student learning, so administrators have no recourse against bad teachers. And considering how toothless the punishments are (three weeks paid leave for drinking on the job!) it’s a wonder teachers even crack open the books. The way schools work is so backwards and crooked, they can’t possibly succeed. There are no objective measurements of success. There is no punishment for failure, either in results or in process. The compensation structure encourages the most incompetent teachers to stay and pushes the younger, more competent teachers into saner professions. Finally, there is no feedback loop from the market to determine whether or not the services rendered are worth the cost (they aren’t).
Politically speaking, the idea that we need to bust the public unions that control teachers salaries, benefits, and job security is true, but woefully inadequate. Schools in most states spend over $10,000 per student per year. Do you believe that a free-market education industry could do a better job with $10,000 per student? I certainly do. The solution is to have the state give parents a certificate worth $10,000 that they can spend in any educational facility (definition for “educational facility” is fluid, at the moment) they elect. Schools would compete against each other for students and revenue streams. Parents (and private organizations) would monitor and publish objective metrics detailing the effectiveness of the schools in much the same way that Moody’s or Fitch publishes bond ratings. Teachers compensation would be market-based, and all would be well in the world.
I suppose the short answer is that being a teacher is the easiest job in the world.
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