Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for April 7, 2009 REAPING WHAT YOU SOW

When you spend an administration bashing teachers...young and old...saying they aren't worth having, you are surprised when they bail?

When you spend several administrations undermining teachers...young and old...telling them to teach, yet removing any and all controls that they might have used to maintain discipline so that they could teach, you are surprised they get frustrated and bail??

When administrations (federal, state, and local...i.e. school boards) allow students and parents, relatives and friends, to rule the classrooms making sure that their lazy, spoiled, and underachieving children get "A+" grades for "C-" work (or passing grades for little or no work) and harass any teacher who dare stand in the way, you are surprised when caring professionals throw up their hands and bail???

Outsiders, aided and abetted by hired-gun administrators unwilling to "fight the battle" and jeopardize their high-paying positions, have created a monster...an unruly beast that defies any attempt by teachers to teach, burdening teachers with mountains of busy-work paperwork that insults their intelligence and takes away from their vocation...teaching.

The one thing that any and all politicians and pundits overlook...teachers are educated people. Most entered the profession with idealism...the proverbial zeal to make a difference in the lives of others...the wide-eyed innocence that gets thrown back into their faces when they ask for or expect a livable wage. These idealistic, educated professionals are verbally dismissed with "You knew you weren't going to get rich teaching!"

The clear implication is that teachers are supposed to be rewarded...filled with warm and fuzzy feelings...to be satisfied when the sweet, innocent child in their classroom learns his/her "ABCs" or learns to count to 100.

Well, maybe they would have been...if you had afforded them some respect and did not daily belittle their efforts. You know, like "back in the day".

Classrooms today are not your mother and father's classrooms...your grandmother and grandfather's classrooms. Classrooms of today are HELL on earth with constant pressure to do the impossible without benefit of any effective educational tools. Today's teachers are thrown into the lion's den without benefit of chair and whip. (The kids have the pistols!)

Teachers, young and old, are expected to take a child with no organized "home life", allowed no means to maintain discipline in their own classroom (due to threats to one's livelihood should teachers have the audacity to offer words of correction to precious little Janie or Johnny)...and produce a miracle. (Bans on religion in the public school don't actually allow the use of the term "miracle". It's called "meeting or exceeding state standards"...achieving AYP.)

After all this...

Is it really "newsworthy" for the New York Times to report that teachers, young and old, are abandoning "the system"?

The young know better than to attempt to spend the next 30 years of their lives banging their heads against a wall of tyranny. The old want to survive...want to be able to enjoy the "burdening pension system" that was so graciously granted to them to sucker them into "the system". Ain't it funny...how us "oldsters" are now supposed to feel guilty about accepting those pensions. (Kinda like the veterans who literally risk life and limb in war and then are made to feel guilty about receiving medical care or veteran's benefits when they return...if they return. It's all a matter of "What have you done for me lately?")

The outsiders are so angry at us...for "living large"...for breaking the budgets of those school districts who wouldn't pay us a living wage for the 30 or so years that we taught, all the while suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune! The outsiders are now huffing and puffing trying to find a way to stop us from collecting what was promised.

You know...if outside forces would quit doing all the aforementioned indignities to teachers, young and old, maybe they wouldn't have this "problem". If they would quit bashing us, quit trying to make us leave, maybe we wouldn't go.

It's kind of like a "Well, duh!" moment.

You reap what you sow. Soooo, until you decided to change the error of your ways..."So long!"

Report Envisions Shortage of Teachers as Retirements Escalate

By SAM DILLON

Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation's 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems, according to a new report.

The problem is aggravated by high attrition among rookie teachers, with one of every three new teachers leaving the profession within five years, a loss of talent that costs school districts millions in recruiting and training expenses, says the report, by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a nonprofit research advocacy group.

"The traditional teaching career is collapsing at both ends," the report says. "Beginners are being driven away" by low pay and frustrating working conditions, and "accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems" that encourage teachers to move from paycheck to pension when they are still in their mid-50s, the report says.

To ease the exodus, the report says, policy makers should restructure schools and modify state retirement policies so that thousands of the best veteran teachers can stay on in the classroom to mentor inexperienced teachers. Reorganizing schools around what the report calls learning teams, a model already in place in some schools in Boston, could ease the strain on pension systems, raise student achievement and help young teachers survive their first, often traumatic years in the classroom, it says.

"In the '60s we recruited many baby-boom women and men, and the deal we made was, 'You'll have a rewarding career and at the end, pension and health benefits,' " said Tom Carroll, the commission’s president. "They signed up in large numbers and stayed, and now 53 percent of our teaching work force is getting ready to collect. If all those boomers walk into retirement, our teacher pension systems will be under severe strain, with the same problems as the auto industry."

This is not the first report to predict widespread teacher shortages unless policy makers took quick action. In 1999, an Education Department study warned that the impending retirement of millions of teachers could lead to chaos, a dire outcome that never materialized.

One economist who spoke out skeptically then was Michael Podgursky, who studies teacher retirement at the University of Missouri. The latest report, too, may overstate the case somewhat, Dr. Podgursky said in an interview. "There’s a bit of hyperbole" in the assertion that the teaching career is "collapsing at both ends," he said.

The recession may help ease potential teacher shortages because the profession's relative job security and generous health benefits will probably attract more new college graduates and career-changers than when plenty of good jobs were available.

"Still, the authors make a credible case that the number or teachers who retire will rise in coming years," Dr. Podgursky said, "and it makes a good deal of sense to develop phased retirement systems that permit retired or semiretired teachers to mentor new teachers."