teachers: not what they used to be

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri May 18 22:58:42 PDT 2001


Carrol wrote a while ago:


>Bob Morris wrote:
>>
>> Another friend, a married woman, like you describe, tried teaching in L.A.
>> schools, as she enjoys teaching and kids. She gave up after a year. The
>> bureaucracy was lunatic, no supplies, long commutes, endless paperwork,
>> etc... Sad.
>
>Many leftists (let alone the general population) still exhibit a
>lurking, perhaps not fully conscious, adherence to the 19th century view
>of the schoolmarm as someone who essentially sacrificed the good of her
>life for the good of the students. This has been implicit, perhaps even
>explicit, in many or most of the posts in this thread, in their
>suggestion that teachers are not only in the lower quarter of their
>college classes but that they are somehow inferior human beings. If they
>were proper teachers they wouldn't be deliberately stupid.
>
>We probably are not going to get decent schools in the next quarter of a
>century -- it seems the fairly conscious policy of the ruling forces to
>degrade the system. But if leftists want to put up even a decent losing
>fight for excellence in the schools they are going to have to learn to
>treat teachers as part of the working class -- and as such more
>important than their "product" (the student). The same is incidentally
>true of almost all the other "service" jobs that actually are human
>services: nurses, medical technicians, nursing home aides, home care
>workers, social workers, etc. Only a working class movement that treats
>such workers as fully equal members of the working class will _also_
>create the conditions in which those workers will both want to and can
>be _forced_ by fellow workers to produce decent services. (And the
>unions will have to stop representing scabs, incidentally -- e.g.,
>prison guards, cops, and other human detritus. When a teacher is a jerk
>and "acts like" a cop, she does it as an individual. But cops by
>definition are scabs. There is no way to be a decent cop.)

***** The Nation

SUBJECT TO DEBATE | May 28, 2001

KATHA POLLITT

Happy Mother's Day

...On May 1, Worthy Wage Day for childcare workers, came a study from Berkeley and Washington, DC, that looked at staffing in seventy-five better-than-average California daycare centers serving kids aged 2 1/2 through 5. According to Then and Now: Changes in Child Care Staffing 1994-2000, staffers and directors are leaving the field in droves. At the centers in the study, 75 percent of teachers and 40 percent of directors on the job in 1996 had quit four years later. Some centers had turnover rates of 100 percent or more (!) from one year to the next. Half the leavers abandoned the field entirely--raising their incomes by a whopping $8,000 a year compared with the other half, who remained in childcare. Nor were those who left easily replaced: Most of the centers that lost staffers could not fill all their job slots by the next year.

The demoralization and turmoil caused by constant turnover stress both the workers who stay and the children. Making matters worse, the new workers are "significantly less well-educated" than those they replace--only a third have bachelor's degrees, as opposed to almost half of the leavers. Pay, say the researchers, is the main issue: Not only have salaries not risen with the rising tide supposedly lifting all boats; when adjusted for inflation, they have actually fallen. A daycare teacher works twelve months a year to earn $24,606--just over half the average salary of public-school teachers, who work for ten months (not that schoolteachers are well-paid, either). Center directors, at the top of the field, earn on average a mere $37,571; the recommended starting salary for elementary-school teachers in California is $38,000. (In France, which has a first-rate public daycare system, daycare teachers and elementary-school teachers are paid the same.) Daycare teachers love their work--two-thirds say they would recommend it as a career--but simply do not earn enough to make a life in the field.

It's a paradox: Even as more and more families, of every social class, rely on daycare, and even as we learn more and more about the importance of early childhood education for intellectual and social development, and even as we talk endlessly about the importance of "quality" and "stability" and "qualified" staff, the amount of money we are willing--or able--to pay the people we ask to do this demanding and important job goes down. Instead of addressing this reality, we endlessly distract ourselves with Mommy Wars. (You let your child have milk from the store? My child drinks nothing but organic goat milk from flocks tended by Apollo himself!) And because as Americans we don't really believe the rest of the world exists, when a study comes along suggesting that other-than-mother-care produces some nasty and difficult kids, we don't think to ask if this is a problem in Denmark or France, and if not, why not.

Two new books of great interest, Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood and Nancy Folbre's The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, point out that there is a crisis of care in America. Women are incredibly disadvantaged when they perform traditionally female work--childcare, housework, eldercare--unpaid within families. (According to Crittenden, motherhood is the single biggest cause of poverty for women.) The free market cannot replace this unpaid labor at decent rates, Folbre argues, because it would be too expensive: Even now, most families cannot afford tuition at a "quality" daycare center, any more than they can afford private school. And men are hardly falling over themselves to do their share--nobody's talking about the Daddy Track, you'll notice. Both writers call for recognizing the work of care as essential to the economy: Top-quality daycare should be funded by the government, like school, because it is a "public good."

Unfortunately, funding public goods is not exactly a high priority of government, which is busily cutting programs for children in favor of a huge tax cut for the rich. These days our main public goods seem to be prisons ($4.5 billion), the drug war ($19 billion, including $1 billion in military aid to Colombia), abstinence education ($250 million) and executing Timothy McVeigh ($50 million, not counting plane tix for celebrity death witness Gore Vidal). You can always find money for the things you really want....

<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010528&s=pollitt> *****

Yoshie



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