SCB~
Please don’t begrudge teachers the salaries they get for teaching over the 9 months of a school year. I’m a newly certified teacher in Texas (thankfully, a state in which teachers’ unions are not legal, as would be any teachers’ strike). Teacher put in lots of overtime over the school year in preparing lesson plans and materials, and many likely spend a fair amount of their own money for classroom materials. I don’t have a classroom of my own yet, but I’ve spent quite a bit on books for my future classroom library (you can visit my blog to see the types of books I want to share with/make available to my future students).
One of the reasons I decided to go into teaching (elementary education) is because I refuse to abandon public education to the left.
I agree that more money thrown at the problem is not the solution. The answer is parental involvement. When I did my student teaching, the kids whose parents/guardians came to parent/teacher conferences were, for the most part, the ones who were performing acceptably or better. The students who were not performing to even an average expectation, or were behavior problems? They are the ones whose parents didn’t come to meet with the teacher. Parental involvement is the key. Even a girl who was likely here illegally was one of the better students in the class – her mother, although she speaks only Spanish, came to see the teacher (and the 3rd grade daughter served as translator). Until we can figure out how to get ALL parents involved, we will still have failing schools. That is the $65 million question – how to you get these parents who think it’s all up to the schools/teachers to educate their children to understand they have just as much, if not more, influence on their children’s education…
