[quote=bearishgurl]
Let me ask you something, livinincali. Are you, by chance, an “engineer” yourself? What if your employer told you that you would have job protection for life with incremental pay raises (+/-3% every 3-5 yrs) if you took a long-term post (10-20 yrs) working at a worksite which was lined with shopping carts of the homeless just outside the entrance and perhaps surrounded by garish billboards, 2 tattoo parlors and streets patrolled by the city vice squad. Would YOU take your employer up on the offer? And would YOU spend your time and money trying to get a Masters degree or Ph.D in your field whilst working in this environment, in order to “better yourself” to contribute more fully to the problems of your newly-adopted worksite??
[/quote]
First of all teachers in SDUSD get step and column which is basically a guaranteed 4% raise per year. If there’s money in the budget they’ll get some union negotiated wage increase on top of that.
As for the terrible working conditions and tatoo parlors, you have to be kidding. There’s maybe a couple schools in the entire SDUSD district that have those conditions. Maybe Wilson middle school or San Diego High fits that description but even then there’s a pretty major revitalization effort in those communities.
Exaggerate more please.
As for why I’m not a teacher or signing up for a job in those working conditions I don’t need to do that. I don’t have the patience to be a teacher and honestly I don’t think it would be the right kind of challenge to me. I think I’d be bored even if I was good at it and I don’t know that I would be good at it.
The reality is that teachers don’t come from the best and the brightest. They come from the average History or English major in college that gets out and realizes that one of the best career paths is teaching. Some have a passion for it. Some are great. Many are good but nothing special. Some are frankly terrible. Just like the typical bell curve.
As for a Masters or Ph.D tell me how a Ph.D in education increases your ability to teacher 3rd grade math. Why do a lot of teachers have Masters degrees? Because they get paid more for having one and it’s a fairly easy to do if you’re already getting your education credential. It’s maybe 1 extra year in school and some sort of relatively short dissertation. Honestly a Masters in education from National University that you did in your spare time probably isn’t helping you teach 6th graders English. It does get you a raise though.
I’ll agree that one of the biggest problem is the extremely weak leadership of the administrators. Most administrators are former teachers that really don’t have any management skills. Yeah they think they know what they’re doing but they’d run a private company into the ground in no time. It’s kind of silly that the teachers that run from the classroom because they can’t handle managing the kids are put in positions of leadership in school districts but that’s what happens. Play politics, kiss ass, and get promoted not because you’re good at what you do but because you played the game right.
The whole thing is a failure, but we must protect the status quo at all costs.
