The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard

I met an early 30s teacher who plainly loved kids and loved his job in the Framingham (Massachusetts) Public Schools, which I think are fairly typical for suburban Boston. “Do you have any financial incentive to work?” I asked. He said “The kids inspire me.” But what if they didn’t? Could he do basically nothing at the front of the classroom without getting fired? “The principal can be pretty critical of teachers who don’t put in any effort,” was the answer. What if a teacher is inured to criticism? Could an old burned-out teacher keep cashing paychecks? “Absolutely and there are plenty of those. I could do nothing from now until I’m age 62 and then retire with 80 percent pay.”

[The chart confirms his statement, but it is unclear if this is 80 percent of the standard salary or, as with some other state employees, 80 percent of the final year’s actual compensation, including overtime or summer pay.]

Readers: Should we be grateful every day that a teacher does more than the bare minimum? I certainly felt that the kids in Framingham were lucky to have this guy.

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6 thoughts on “The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard

  1. Thank you for your service to education also – one reason I follow you is that you always strive to bring more than required to your endeavors.

  2. A teacher who doesn’t do their job can be fired by their principal. (apologies for modern pronouns.) In any profession, incompetence happens, and it has to be weeded out. I would say the frequency of bad teachers has more to do with negligent, cowardly principals than anything else.

    It’s 80% of the teacher’s compensation 3 years before retirement.

  3. They have a fixed curriculum to cover in an unrealistic amount of time, all set by administrators who never did any teaching. The media has always focused on the quality of the teachers probably to raise union wages, but it wasn’t as relevant to the outcome as the typical challenges of puberty, failed parental marriages & very old, poorly written textbooks. 1 thing that might improve the outcome is storing all the textbooks in a single e-reader. This of course competes with rising union wages, so the media will never cover it.

  4. My daughter’s middle school science teacher is playing on her phone most of the time during classes, hardly teaches anything to kids. She emails parents before tests so that they can get their child ready.

    She absolutely hates her job, and she is not even ashamed to show her disrespect. It seems like she would not care if she got fired but that never happens. She is old and dumb and probably laughing all the way to the bank..

  5. @Jack,
    Your comment about old textbooks reminded me of this story:
    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/06/289883.shtml

    A homeless father and his 12-year old daughter were lived for 4 years in a wooded section of Forest Park in Portland, OR. He used a set of thrift store encyclopedias to home-school her. Though the girl was only 12 (the story is from 2004) she was tested at an 11th or 12th grade level.

    I realize that a father’s motivation will be high, and a 1:1 teacher:student ratio is better than in public school. But newer textbooks, e-readers, internet access, etc. are not truly necessary for a child to learn. They may not be able to keep up with pop-culture, but they can learn the essentials.

  6. I retired from teaching high school some years ago. I don’t remember ever being motivated by the paycheque. However..
    every day was enjoyable at some level or another. The kids were mostly pretty good, and my real reward was having the feeling that I’d done a good job, and the kids were the better for what we did together. I never, ever went to work wondering why I was doing it.
    There were a few people who were mailing it in, and they weren’t all the old ones either. There were also a few more who were arrogant enough to feel they had found the secret to effective teaching. Usually they’d just learned to be carefully-controlled assholes.
    Your question is backwards. You should really be asking how you can get more of that kind of individual into the teaching profession. Not everyone is a pure-bred example of homo economicus, and lots of people do things because they are fun, interesting, satisfying and worthwhile. The majority of my co-workers fell into that category.
    Did I fight for more pay? Damn right. I had my own kids to raise and educate, and I went on strike twice. It was painful each time, but no-one was looking out for us except the union. Especially not the trustees or the politicians.
    When you figure out a way to supervise a school at the same level as you would a small company, and guarantee fair treatment for your employees at the same time motivating them to perform at a high level amidst insanely competing demands on their resources (yes, teach AP physics, but damn, keep that cafeteria from busting out into a riot, and oh, by the way, we’d sure like a winning season out of your wrestling team. And call those parents, each and every one, once a week at least), maybe then we can discuss the evils of teacher’s unions.
    I’d do it all over again. I do have a decent pension (70% of my best five, indexed) so no dog food for us. I deserve every nickel (half of which I contributed out of my pay, directly). And my former students would mostly agree with that statement.

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