CPS teacher strike and Illinois area....

TracyK said:
They must live within the city limits - so they cannot reside in Winnetka or Evanston (for example). But near North side yes.
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Interesting...because several union reps have commented on commuting costs from the suburbs as a problem. Perhaps the union reps were lying. :dunno:
 
TXgolfer said:
Chicago teachers qualify for their pension after 20 years of service according to news reports. Even 35 years would be a normal career. And the pension pays far better than SS.
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Retiring as police officer or MTA worker on pension is easier to put up with than as teacher.
 
Jiro said:
It's really apple-orange to compare teachers with contractors/small business owners/labor workers/etc. Teachers should not be on the same level as them. Teachers go to college and take certification and teach the young minds to be the next future for this country.

No teacher. No future.
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And chose a career in public service.....
 
TXgolfer said:
Interesting...because several union reps have commented on commuting costs from the suburbs as a problem. Perhaps the union reps were lying. :dunno:
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source please?
 
TXgolfer said:
The students are stuck with bad teachers now thanks to unions. You get what you pay for is exactly correct.....and right now taxpaYers are paying for union red tape.
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bad teachers.... how you know? I see a lot of parents standing behind their teachers.

Union to weigh offer in Chicago teachers strike - CNN.com
"Besides the daycare issue, they just need to be in school," said Rich Lenkov, a parent who took part in a protest outside the school district's headquarters on Monday. "Their competitors in charter schools and private schools are learning, while our kids are not."
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But Nancy Davis Winfield, the mother of another student, said she stood behind the teachers and the union.
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Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States
Earlier this summer, bells rang in schools across the nation to mark the end of another academic year. Students and teachers left to enjoy their summer vacations, but for too many teachers, fall will not mark a return to the classrooms in which they taught last year. Every school day, nearly a thousand teachers leave the field of teaching. Another thousand teachers change schools, many in pursuit of better working conditions. And these figures do not include the teachers who retire.

The exit of teachers from the profession and the movement of teachers to better schools are costly phenomena, both for the students, who lose the value of being taught by an experienced teacher, and to the schools and districts, which must recruit and train their replacements.

A conservative national estimate of the cost of replacing public school teachers who have dropped out of the profession is $2.2 billion a year.2 If the cost of replacing public school teachers who transfer schools is added, the total reaches $4.9 billion every year. For individual states, cost estimates range from $8.5 million in North Dakota to a whopping half a billion dollars for a large state like Texas.
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Why is teacher turnover so high? Many assume that retirement is the primary reason for teacher attrition, but when the facts are examined closely, it becomes clear that the number of teachers retiring from the profession is not a leading cause.4 In an analysis of teacher turnover, teachers reported retirement as a reason for leaving less often than because of job dissatisfaction or to pursue another job.

Among teachers who transferred schools, lack of planning time (65 percent), too heavy a workload (60 percent), problematic student behavior (53 percent), and a lack of influence over school policy (52 percent) were cited as common sources of dissatisfaction
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Many teachers who see no hope for change leave the profession altogether. While it is true that teachers of all ages and in all kinds of schools leave the profession each year, it is also true that

• the rate of attrition is roughly 50 percent higher in poor schools than in wealthier ones;7 and

• teachers new to the profession are far more likely to leave than are their more experienced counterparts.
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But nearly half of all teachers who enter the field leave it within a mere five years, and the best and brightest teachers are often the first to leave. Why do teachers—particularly those who have taught for only a few years—leave the classrooms they worked so hard to enter? Teachers cite a lack of support and poor working conditions among the primary factors.
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Comprehensive induction has shown to more than pay for itself.19 And yet, across the nation, states spend millions of dollars each year to replace teachers who leave the classroom instead of investing in these programs, which simultaneously retain newer teachers and help them become better, more effective teachers in a shorter time. The loss—to taxpayers, schools, educators, students, and communities—is immense.
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http://nctaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/NCTAF-Cost-of-Teacher-Turnover-2007-full-report.pdf
In this paper, we report the results of a pilot study of the cost of teacher turnover in five school districts. We examine the rate of turnover, the relationship between turnover and teacher and school characteristics, and the costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training replacement teachers. We find evidence that turnover costs, although difficult to quantify, are significant at both the district and the school level. We also find that teachers left high minority and low performing schools at significantly higher rates. This has implications for the differential impact of the costs of teacher turnover on high-need schools. The relationship between teacher turnover and other school and teacher characteristics varied across the five school districts.
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Low performing schools rarely close the student achievement gap because they never close the teaching quality gap – they are constantly rebuilding their staff. An inordinate amount of their capital – both human and financial – is consumed by the constant process of hiring and replacing beginning teachers who leave before they have mastered the ability to create a successful learning culture for their students.

Student achievement suffers, but high turnover schools are also extremely costly to operate. Trapped in a chronic cycle of teacher hiring and replacement these schools drain their districts of precious dollars that could be better spent to improve teaching quality and student achievement.
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A Texas analysis is the first large scale study to have addressed the topic of teacher turnover costs by using actual data on the rate of teacher turnover in public schools (Texas Center for Educational Research, 2000). The study was flawed, however, because it used an industrial model to estimate costs in schools, and because it failed to account fully for costs in its more in-depth study of three school districts. A Chicago study used three models for estimating teacher turnover costs, where the actual teacher turnover data was available for sixty-four elementary schools (ACORN, 2004). None of the models used actual costs, however, and the assumptions for estimating costs under each model produced widely varying results. A third study of turnover costs – based on a formula and not actual cost calculations – was produced by Breaux and Long (2003). The study drew on the work of human resource specialists in industry and concluded that the loss of a teacher costs nearly 2.5 times the teacher’s initial salary in recruitment, personnel expenditures and lost productivity. In a 2005 policy brief on turnover costs, the Alliance for Excellent Education tapped a US Department of Labor estimate “that attrition costs an employer 30% of the leaving employee’s salary”. The Alliance estimated national teacher turnover costs at $4.9 billion, only about twice as high as the upper bound for the Texas report of annual costs for Texas alone.
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sounds familiar, TXGolfer? :lol:
 
Jiro said:
since you disagree.... are you saying most are not in debt?
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I didn't say that I disagreed. I'm saying that without a source I can't know one way or the other. So, what are the figures for the student loan debt that the teachers have? What percentage teachers still owe on student loans, and what size balance do they owe?
 
Cost of Being a Teacher

The true cost of being a teacher - San Francisco Secondary Education | Examiner.com
One of the aspects of teaching that is hard to comprehend is the sheer amount of money it costs to be a teacher. You must have your BA for example, which isn’t so ridiculous unless you realize too late you spent $100,000.00 on your education (thank you NYU) to be a teacher and bring home $40,000.00, which is, in case you are bad at math (see above NYU example) is around $3,000.00 a month. Once the BA part is over if you decided to be a teacher without getting your credential as part of your program then you have to go back to school for this (which can run $10,000.00 depending on the school).

Once you have the credential (by the way this autographed piece of paper from Arnie costs $55.00 which you have to spend twice), you then must be fingerprinted for a fee, which is not transferred from county to county, and thus you must pay and be fingerprinted separately for each county you apply to. Once you are "in" and then receive tenure you are now responsible for professional development and the expectation of an MA to be received within a certain number of years. This means enrolling in school once again to the tune of upwards of another $5 – 7,000.00 provided you learned your lesson the first time out and opt to go to a less expensive school. Sure, over the years you have moved from 40 to 45,000.00 a year, but add to this your rent (who can buy a house even with the economic crisis on this money?) cost of living, etc…and now you know why teachers get summers off. So they can work a second job and make more money!

In the end your sympathy is all a teacher has. They do their jobs out of passion for the future, for the students who rely on their presence everyday, which for some is the only consistency they have in their lives, and above all teachers teach for the art. Art that sometimes gets them a free drink and an appreciative nod "for all you do". So tip one out to a teacher today, not too much though, after a long day in class they really need every drop they can get!

For more information on teacher credentialing costs and procedures, visit : California Commission on Teacher Credentialing
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The Cost of Becoming a Teacher | The Teacher's Go-To Page
The Debt

Sarah spent big money to become a teacher. Just the bare bones cost of her tuition would support a middle class Bombay household for years. Despite living frugally, she’s tens of thousands of dollars in debt as she starts her career.

She’s a thrifty young woman, went to state college and followed up her four-year degree with her teaching credential. She lived frugally in an apartment with roommates and worked while she went to school. The money she spent was on the lower end of cost for an American teacher’s education.

The Damage

Undergraduate Tuition, California State University–$20,000.
Post baccalaureate Teacher Preparation Tuition–$5,000.
Books and other supplies–$5,000

More than thirty thousand dollars in debt she launched her career. She was lucky to land a job, which started at $39,586 a year. However, saddled with this monster debt, she’ll be in her late 20s before she pays it off.

As time goes on Sarah will be offered yearly raises on a salary schedule, but she will not make significant salary gains unless she continues her education. The average unit of continuing education costs $100, and that doesn’t include books and materials.

If Sarah decides to train for administration, it could cost between $6,000 and $10,000.
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Education RANT – The Price of Being a Teacher… - Writer's Corner: General Non-Fiction - Epinions.com
Okay, I really understand why there should be professional standards for teachers, HONESTLY, I get it. However, I have a bachelor’s degree (Prestige Comes with a Price Tag -- Not just a Monetary One - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Epinions.com), I have a master’s degree(Everything is Learned in the Classroom: Tufts University Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Review - Tufts University - Epinions.com), as a career student I’ve actually started on my second master’s, for fun. I have another 10 or so credits post-baccalaureate not counting the master’s. I’m a teacher because I really like kids, I enjoy creating curriculum and working in education. I like teenagers and all the dramas they come with. BUT THIS IS GETTING CRAZY. I haven’t started my new teaching year yet and having registered for a couple of the courses, one of the tests, gotten new fingerprints (I just moved, so the other state saying they cleared me with the FBI isn’t enough, which, okay, okay, but still…), etc. etc. I’ve already spent an extra $1,200. I don’t have a single paycheck from them, but I’m out another $1,200?

I guess I’m ranting because, post college, with my engineering degree, I had job offers that were nearly double what my salary last year, as a first year teacher, was. BUT, I wanted to teach, I like teaching. So I went back to school, took my education courses, and then entered the classroom. Also, I teach in a “needed” area, science, high school science… I mean, I’m probably going to stay with teaching, because I truly do like it, but I have to wonder, how are we going to attract teachers to areas like math and science when a) the pay is REALLY bad compared to industry or even some research jobs and b) we’re less respected and now c) there are MORE and MORE hoops to jump through thanks to all the state and national bureaucracy surrounding education right now.

I thank you for reading and truly, I’m not asking for pity here. I chose to teach, and I like it, but seriously, with all the hoops, the low-pay, etc. who out there (who are, unlike me, of sound mind and NOT masochistic) are going to enter this field considering the low pay, low respect and new tests and bureaucracy?

Final Score:
No Child Left Behind/ Bureaucracy -- 1
My wallet/ Free Time/ Tolerance for this -- 0
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and... I work for college where we have accelerated program for those who wish to be certified in teaching Grade 1-6. they will incur at least $8,000 in debt upon graduation.
 
Reba said:
I didn't say that I disagreed. I'm saying that without a source I can't know one way or the other. So, what are the figures for the student loan debt that the teachers have? What percentage teachers still owe on student loans, and what size balance do they owe?
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due to NCLB, it's required to have Bachelor degree to teach and in some fields... Master's degree. Typical college tuition cost is about $40,000 a year. You can do the math.

for private school, it's not required. just a certification is all you need.
 
TXgolfer said:
I don't believe the level of teaching would suffer by replacing Chicago teachers. In fact, I believe it would improve.

Exactly, teachers receive a pension tha pays approx $40k a year....Much more than most receive in Social Security. THAT is the difference.
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You may not believe the level of teaching would suffer, and that it may improve, I disagree. If it is really our goal to INCREASE LEARNING EFFECTIVENESS, it will not change the decrepit and violence ridden communities, change the home environment of theses students, nor allow students the materials they need in AND OUT of the classroom (starting with text books). All factors which contribute to student success and impact test scores.
 
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Jiro said:
due to NCLB, it's required to have Bachelor degree to teach and in some fields... Master's degree. Typical college tuition cost is about $40,000 a year. You can do the math.

for private school, it's not required. just a certification is all you need.
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It can be MORE than that if you live in dorm and have meal plan.
 
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