Dan Hale has been a teacher in Fairfax County Public Schools for 20 years, but he’s never felt or seen his colleagues as overwhelmed as they are today.
He used to know his students as readers and as writers, he says; now he only knows them as bits of data or ECART scores; pacing points and percentages.
And after spending far more than eight hours at school, he leaves (with work in tow) thinking ‘What am I doing tomorrow?’ — planning time in the context of the school day, he says, is nearly nonexistent.
The story was one of many shared by a few hundred teachers Monday night at a town hall sponsored by one of the county’s largest teachers unions, an effort to better connect school board members with teachers and workload issues that have persisted for at least half a decade, the union says.
For years, both the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers, which sponsored Monday’s event, and the Fairfax Education Association have asked school board members for help in reducing some of their requirements and responsibilities and the shrinking amount of time in which they have to do it.
This year, teachers said Monday, has been the worst year yet.
And morale is low.
“I used to get up in the morning and go, ‘I love my job,’” one longtime teacher told school board members Monday. “That’s not the case anymore and that’s sad.”
School Board member Elizabeth Schultz (Springfield), one of 10 members who fielded teacher concerns in a ballroom at the Fairview Park Marriot in Falls Church, said it was time for a solution.
“This has been brewing for quite some time,” Schultz said after the event. “We need to fix it.”
The board is planning on a work session on the issue in April.
Growing Responsibilities, but No Extra Time
Along with keeping pace with the state of Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests and a new teacher evaluation system, teachers are also dealing with new elementary school report cards that make grading take three times as long as it used to, assessment tools that require more data and analysis and the rollout of online textbooks, among other technology tools.
As enrollment swells, so too have class sizes, and with each additional student comes even more hours to prep, coach, test and assess them.
Yet no responsibilities have been taken away, nor has more time been given to accommodate them, teachers say. Pay also been more or less “stagnant for years,” they say
One teacher said he once had two and a half hours of planning time each week; now, it’s about an hour and 20 minutes.
Tasks have “been piling up like one rock after another on our chest while [we’re] being told ‘you better do well or else,’” one teacher said.
Since the beginning of this school year, Lynn Schmauder, a math teacher who has 130 students this year at Woodson High School, has spent at least 36 hours giving after-school help, nearly 20 in parent-teacher conferences, 37 hours replying to parent emails — and what amounts to 41 days, on top of her day to day responsibilities, grading papers.
The number of weekends she’s been able to put the work away: 0.
Schmauder, who is in her third year of teaching after 15 years with the Department of Defense, said she either needs more help or less students. Neither is an option about which she is optimistic, given the system’s budget forecast.
“What I know is that I can’t sustain this,” said Schmauder, who said she feels like she is missing out on her children’s lives.
Outlook and Solutions
The system’s proposed budget includes a 1 percent market rate adjustment for all teachers — but
Administrators have also said
Teachers called on administrators — from the superintendent to the leadership team to the leaders of each of the system’s clusters — to spend more time in schools, shadowing teachers to get a better understanding of what their day is like.
When teachers do give leadership feedback about best practices or pilots, it’s often not reflected in what is handed back to them, teachers said Monday, pointing to the recent widely-criticized rollout of an online math textbook program.
Megan McLaughlin (Braddock) said Monday it seemed “the feedback that comes from the front lines doesn’t always come back effectively at the top.”
What’s more, teachers said, students are suffering, too. There’s no time left to host colonial days, or work math into a lesson on cooking — the kind of hands-on activities that bring concepts full circle and keep school experiences from being a string of “factoids,” teachers said.
Schultz said the board is in a better position than in years past to act on some of the issues outlined because “the tenor of the board has changed,” she said.
There are more people willing to ask difficult questions and have “actual engagement,” she said.
“The reason we ask difficult questions is because our decisions have consequences, and this is the bad side of those consequences,” she said. “We need to have actual engagement. We need to listen to the public.”
FCFT President Steve Greenburg and school board members said Monday was not the end of the dialogue — it was the beginning of a path that would hopefully lead at last to some solutions.
“We all want our kids to succeed,” board member Patty Reed (Providence) said, offering her support to a better classroom environment. “Let’s not forget that.”
See also:
Teacher Pay a Heavy Topic at Schools Hearing
Teachers To School Board: 'Our Members Will Be Heard One Way Or Another'
Teachers Say They’re Overworked
This article has been updated.
As for your personal aspersion on my education, HS was many years ago and nowhere near here. Sorry.
Inexperienced teachers are challenged by such students in a combination of ways sometimes subtle, sometimes overtly to create a classroom environment that disrupts learning. They are loud, obnoxious, mocking, intimidating all for effect. They are of course operating outside of the decorum that permits a civil and fair classroom environment that permits for an open expression of ideas without being insulted or threatened. Once challenged, they are the 1st to go running to the teacher to enforce upon the challenger the rules that they consistently ignore. When they are put in their place the first thing they do is disengage and go off by themselves to pout. This dynamic is called bullying, a human behavior across all age groups. You see them in schools, the workplace, the community and on the internet. They almost always conduct their shouting with anecdotal information, not primary sources or the citing of credible sources. Internet communities use the word troll for bully. Trolls rely on constant affirmation that they are being heard. The only effective way to challenge the internet troll is to simply stop feeding them by acting as if their shouting is meaningful dialogue.
On the other hand, if there is no money, that's it. And today, that seems to be it.
This last one really gets to me. This is cultural. Where are the parents? When there isn't both a mother and father in the child's life there is a big chance of failure. I don’t know a way to fix that. It has to be done by responsible adults within the community. Not teachers, police, lawyers….. The community has to want success for their kids and are willing to make it happen. Didn’t someone write a book, “It takes a community”. Thanks for being a teacher.
Bad education results in badly-educated people. Badly-educated people will have a hard time making educated decisions. If you don't want our nation to spiral downward as far as education, ability, and competence, if you don't want ours to become a nation of stupid people, SUPPORT SCHOOLS!!! Otherwise, you're asking for Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/). http://pandawhale.com/post/16158/i-like-to-pay-taxes-for-schools-even-though-i-dont-personally-have-a-kid-in-school-john-green (just the image: http://imgur.com/naquJhP)
Just look at all the money poured into the Department of Education. Since its formation, education scores have gone down. Look at Head Start--for forty years we have poured money into this program. Guess what? It is not working. The myth is that more money translates to better education. That should be true, but , in reality, it allows people to throw money at programs that aren't working. Our property value went up this year and the state has now passed a law which will increase our real estate taxes for transportation. The Affordable Health Care Act is proving to be full of unmentioned taxes and the cost of health care is rising as a result of this law. The payroll tax has been reinstated(I agree with this one). As the Tea Party says: We are Taxed Enough Already.
1. Salaries – Some people have cited various salaries that they make as a teacher. A beginning teacher with a Bachelor’s degree starts at $45,000 in Fairfax County. They don’t break into the $51K range until at least year eight. Those with higher degrees (Masters and PhD) will earn more. 2. Having summers “off” – Teachers are not paid for the two month that they are “off.” They get paid a 10-month salary. If a teacher gets a pay check for 12 months, that means that they opted to have their 10-month salary divvied up 12 ways. 3. Hours – Teachers do not work a regular 8 or 9 hour day. Far from it. Most stay late at work, and most take work home over the weekends, grading papers and such. For instance, I typically had about 36-40 kids in each of my classes, for a total about 180-200 students. If I spend just ONE minute grading each paper, that would equal about 200 minutes of grading time for just one assignment. That’s how I spent my weekends. If I had been compensated for all those hours, I would be a rich girl.
I, too, taught school for a number of years. I know it is tough, tough work. I agree that teachers deserve more money, but, I think the problem is not the lack of funds, but the way the funds are allocated. Also, there are a lot of other jobs where people work many,many extra hours without compensation. My husband is one of those. Saturdays and Sundays were not uncommon and ten to twelve hour days were the rule. He was not a teacher. As far as the starting salary for teachers, it is not out of line with starting salaries for other professions--especially, as you point out, that teachers only work ten months. And, in those ten months, they get Christmas vacation, Spring vacation and almost all of the Federal holidays. Few jobs give that kind of leave.
That said, I think Virginia Harlow nailed the nub of the problem. I have scoured the internet looking for the ratio of administrators to teachers that FCPS employs and cannot find it. But I bet we pay the salaries of approximately 6 or 7 administrators for every FCPS teacher. That is why we spend $13,000/student, and $300,000/classroom per year. Does it really cost $300,000 to educate a classroom of students? Of course not. This is what happens when a bureaucracy becomes so bloated - the end result is always waste: a waste of teachers' time, coupled with a waste of their efforts complying with policies that prop up the system instead of the students. The only way to stop it is to starve the beast of its lifeblood: money. So let's trim the fat, get rid of redundant staffers, and let the teachers do what they are paid to do: TEACH.
Also, I understand that some of these employees are labeled as "school-based" because they might spend some of their time in the schools. I would be very interested in getting this information.
Sometimes people address teacher issues by basing them on business models and that don’t always work. A perfect example is how some jurisdictions that try to link teacher’s salaries on student performance. That’s a good model to use in the business world because if an employee underperforms the employer can fire him/her. But in the education world, teachers cannot fire their students who underperform. So with regards to the issues that are discussed in this Patch article (which is teacher work load and morale), people have to understand what motivates teachers. It is not money. ‘Not that a teacher wouldn’t appreciate good salaries and benefit like anyone else, but teachers are very altruistic by nature and I believe they are more motivated by work conditions , which serves their primary end of being able to help kids. So throwing money at the problem is not necessarily going to solve what ails them. If you go back to the article you will see that teachers were talking about being overwhelmed with large class sizes, multiple assessment tools, not enough time to plan, etc. There weren’t saying “give me more pay.” Instead, they were asking the county leadership teams to shadow them around at schools to get a better understanding of what their day is like. It's like coaching a team -- you have to know what motivates your players to get the best out of them.
What a bunch of hokey pokey. teachers altruistic by nature and you can prove that by what means or are we just supposed to believe it's because of your vast wealth of superior knowledge that you can make uninformed statements that have no basis in fact and expect us to take them at face value because you say so? c'mon man
I never said I had a "vast wealth of superior knowledge." I'm just expressing an opinion, as are you. I'm just suggesting that educational leaders can better meet the needs of their employees if they understand what motivates them. I think that would be true in many employer/employee situations.
Thanks again for all of the discussion. We're doing a live chat on this issue at noon Friday — some of you might be interested in joining us: http://vienna.patch.com/articles/patchchat-live-fairfax-county-teacher-workload Thanks for reading Erica
Again, I was just stating an opinion, albeit a gross generalization. But if you wanted to look into studies on teachers and altruism, I’m sure you could Google it and find some. I’m not sure what “group” you think I am representing. I speak for myself. Like you (I assume) I simply occasionally see topics on Patch I am interested in and comment now and then. That’s it. No ulterior motives here.
There is both junk and good information on the Internet. I was not suggesting you read blogs. I said “studies,” and, in that suggestion, I meant legitimate studies. As far as other issues go, I was not trying to represent or align myself with any group, but simply clarifying some statements that were made here on this blog. For instance, some people earlier in this thread said they made $51K and $61K as teachers. I’m sure that is true but I wanted to clarify that such salaries are more of a seasoned teacher and do not represent starting salaries. I did not take a position on whether the salaries were too much or too little. Also, some were saying how teachers get the summers “off” and I wanted to clarify that teachers are not paid for the two months they have off. Some suggested if teachers were paid more money they’d be satisfied. My opinion was that if employers better understood what “satisfied” teachers then they might realize that money was probably not the primary answer. That's it, buddy. Have a good day.
Grades 1-3 Teacher, ES Cunningham Park Elementary School $58,303