Showing Class to the Classroom : Nobody goes into teaching for the money. Despite the budget crunch, we should find a way to honor those who mold the future.
The lady in front of me in a large toy store had a cart full of crayon boxes and drawing pads. “Exploring the child within?” I teased. “I’m a teacher,” she laughed, “this stuff is for my kids!”
I understood instantly. My mother, an elementary school teacher, did the same thing, because the school budget didn’t encompass luxuries like individual crayon boxes. Neither my mother nor the teacher I ran into in Culver City is atypical; I’ve seen variations on the same scenario each year I’ve lived in Los Angeles.
Which is partly why L.A.’s teachers are so upset at having to accept a 10% pay cut.
It is generally acknowledged that sane people do not teach public school to become rich. They do it because they like daily interaction with kids. Or, like Prof. Kingsfield of “The Paper Chase,” they want to turn “skulls full of mush” into people who can function intelligently in a world that often defies reason.
Money has its practical uses, to be sure, but it’s also a metaphor for the esteem in which teachers are held in modern society. We pay people with far less pivotal roles in society lots more. So in addition to deepening many teachers’ economic distress, the message the salary reduction gives rubs salt into the wound.
I cannot pretend to be impartial in this debate. I come from a long line of teachers, from kindergarten instructors to university presidents, and am well-acquainted with some of what we’re asking these people to do every day.
Teachers, I discovered when my mother entered the profession (on the East Coast) some 30 years ago, do not leave their work on their desks when the school day ends. Mother often spent afternoons being available for her students’ parents, or tutoring students who were too far behind. Sunday nights, when my sister and I were moaning about finishing up Monday’s homework, Mother was at the kitchen table, too--doing lesson plans to satisfy the bureaucracy.
Over the years, like many teachers, she spent her own money on stuff the school budget didn’t cover. The aforementioned art supplies. Small gifts to reward students who did especially well or encourage those who improved dramatically. Lunch for field trips, so poor children wouldn’t be embarrassed or go hungry. (I once helped her make 100 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a museum outing.)
In addition, there were quiet conferences with other teachers who shared siblings in classes, to see whether, jointly, they could figure out how to help a family that was slipping through the cracks.
It was tough then, and it’s tougher now. When she retired two years ago, my mother confessed there were things she would not miss: increasing numbers of physically violent students; indifferent parents; a school day so fragmented, thanks to bureaucratic requirements, that only a fraction of teaching managed to get done. She worried about what would happen to her kids. A 9-year-old boy who was a daily horror confessed, when she took him aside, that he acted angry all the time “because I’m scared; there’s drugs and shootings in my neighborhood. I’m scared all the time.” It’s more than the school system was designed to cope with, but teachers have to anyway.
Back when my mother began teaching, public school teachers were expected to provide learning instruction and, occasionally, mild discipline. Today, they’re also expected to be ad hoc psychologists, physician’s assistants, custodians, wardens, social workers and surrogate parents--in classrooms so overcrowded that learning is difficult, even on a good day.
They’re also expected (like their students) to dodge bullets with impunity. A New York principal was killed by an errant bullet last year when he went to visit his student’s family. In the past month, two students have died at L.A. Unified high schools. Teachers have been killed in other cities; it’s probably a matter of time before it happens here.
Mere money is not enough compensation for such working conditions, but it helps. Yes, the state and the city are caught in the pincers of a horrendous budget crunch, but I suspect that there’s money somewhere that can be shifted so L.A.’s teachers don’t have to be penalized for doing an increasingly difficult job.
When we can provide offices paneled in exotic woods and bullet-proofed, chauffeured cars for county executives--questionable expenses even in good times--we ought to be able to ensure that teachers’ salaries aren’t softening while their jobs continue to get harder. This isn’t altruism, it’s enlightened self-interest: These are, after all, the people who will be molding our future work force, the very kids who are supposed to make us, in Mayor Tom Bradley’s words, a “world-class city.”
The school board needs to show a little class of its own, and find other ways to make its budget cuts than via its teachers’ modest salaries.
