Why are public schools failing - Part One

Posted by admin on March 13th, 2009 filed in Technology

1. The laws of physics apply to teachers

By this I mean they do not have some special portal that allows them to extract more hours from the day than anyone else.  They have the same amount of time in a day as you or I.

It amazes me that people still have a childlike perspective that teachers arrive at 9 and leave at 3:30.  No.  That is what the students do.  Teachers put in much longer hours.

But the economics of education is screwed up.  Let’s assume a 10 year teacher is making $90,000 in Ontario, Canada.  That’s about $45 an hour.  Decent pay for any occupation.

I’ve never seen an industry where there is more time wasted than by teachers and administration.

Picture this scenario.  Report cards go home and when the parents sign them they get returned and filed in the office.  Seriously?  You are paying someone $45 an hour to push report cards into folders?  Copying work in the morning.  Seriously?  You are paying someone $45 an hour to photocopy papers?

As a teacher, you have limited time in your day.  As boards offload a lot of this work onto the teachers as ‘cost savings’ by not hiring administrative staff, they see it as ‘money saved.’  However, the time comes out of somewhere.

It comes out of a quality program.  It comes out of decent assessment and planning.  It comes out of marking.

I worked at one secondary school.  The administration INSISTED that we walk down and check our mailboxes before school, at lunch, and at the end of the day. The reason was there might be some important information in the boxes or some papers that need to go home for the students.  More often than not, the papers that needed to go home were LAST MINUTE “Oh shit, we need to send a paper home about the winter carnival tomorrow.”  There was no surprise the winter carnival was coming up… It’s been booked for months!  Give me the papers in the morning so I don’t need to go down in the afternoon.  Other times the notes were things like “The library will be closed tomorrow.  Staff Meeting Wednesday.” Now, I’m not being lazy… but high schools are big places. It took me 10 minutes round trip to walk to the office and back - assuming my time is not wasted by other people along the way.

10 minutes of my time at $45 an hour is $7.50.

Doing this 3 times a day cost $22.50

Doing this 3 times a day for the 60 staff members at the school is $1350 PER DAY.

180 days in the school year: $243,000 per year.

Almost a quarter million dollars a year in wasted time checking a damn mailbox!

Here’s a solution.  Email me the notice about the staff meeting.

Here’s a solution.  Have a pair of students walk the sheets to a class if - on the one day a week - they need to go home.

If you aren’t concerned about money, consider the time.

10 minutes round trip, 3 times a day = 30 minutes. With sixty staff that is 30 lost hours DAILY.  Over the year 5,400 teacher hours lost.

And that is just ONE item.

It’s 2009.  Why am I the *only* teacher that walks around with a laptop?

On average, teachers do not have computers on their desks.  Yes, some schools force this, but many don’t.    If we worked in an office wouldn’t we have had computers in the late 80s?

School administrators have virtually (or actually) no business training.  The concept of lost time is foreign to them.  From their perspective firing a $25,000 clerical person looks like a savings.

Rebuild the system from the ground up.