Inside the life of a substitute teacher
Op-Ed Contributor - The Replacements - NYTimes.com
Comments are open on this one.
In 28 states, I told her, a principal can hire as a sub anyone with a high-school diploma or a general-equivalency diploma. In many places the person can be as young as 18. Not a single state requires that substitutes hold a teaching degree.
In some places, a substitute teacher’s daily pay is less than the school janitor’s.
And in my two years of subbing, I told Maggie, a principal visited my class only three times.
Before I started to sub — an assignment that always began with a 6:15 a.m. phone call from a district sub-finder, asking if I was available to take an assignment that day — I had never laid eyes on a lesson plan. But then, boy, did I see some doozies!
. . .
She begins with anecdotes about the terrible lesson plans left for her by the teachers she is subbing for, dovetails into statistics (with no source, of course) about the terrible problem absent teachers are, and then ends with a call to action to train subs better.
Part of me agrees (because education is important) but then most school districts can't even afford to keep the teachers they do have, so where will this substitute-training money come from? Also, check out her rather draconian suggestions in her final few paragraphs. Tell us what you think.
Comments
DISCLOSURE: I'm strongly biased here (I'm a former teacher, my wife is a teacher, as are several of our extended family and many friends). That said, most of this op-ed isn't unreasonable, just muddled by averaging. For example, although the author points out that:
"Nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, a rate three times as high as that of professionals outside teaching and more than one and a half times as high as that of teachers in Britain. Teachers in America are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays."
she neglects to tease this average apart in any useful way. Schools where I have taught/subbed/attended (e.g., prep schools, alternative private schools, well-funded public schools) had nowhere near this rate of absenteeism. Low-income schools where my wife taught fit this description perfectly, but a slightly more middle class school only 4 miles away (where she also taught) was much more like the schools I'd worked in. By the same token, most small business people I've talked to who have operations in low-income areas complain of similarly poorly explained work absences. Is this a crappy teachers problem, a crappy school culture problem, a crappy work ethich problem, or a crappy working conditions problem?
Also, this suggestion made me *very* suspicious:
"Principals should also try to arrange for other teachers to use their prep time to fill in for absent colleagues."
*Should*? I've *never* heard of a school that *doesn't* do this; every school I ever attended, and every school my wife, a friend, or I ever worked at insisted that teachers sub for each other, even if it consumed all of their prep time (thus forcing them to grade papers or pull together materials after work, and pushing them into uncompensated overtime), lunch, or bathroom breaks (I know a high school teacher who once had to stop at urgent care on the way home from work because she was so dehydrated she needed IV fluids; I've likewise known public school teachers with chronic urinary tract infections because of missed bathroom breaks). From a strict dollars-and-cents stance, the policy is obvious: Why pay for a sub when you get the teacher for free? (I've likewise never heard of a school giving you extra money for subbing; it's part of the job--although I want it to be clear that all of these anecdotes are in Michigan schools; maybe things are different where the author is working.)
So, in the end, I'm annoyed that this op-ed is so foggy in its research, but so crystal clear in its diagnosis and treatment. And I'm sadly unsurprised that the author is currently writing a book on her experience as a sub (which sounds like it's just gonna be a low-rent Barbara Ehrenreich clone). This op-ed is a marketing piece for that book. Wasn't print journalism supposed to be super ethical?
Posted by: dave-o | January 3, 2010 04:24 PM