See also: public school teachers. You either need to be insanely passionate or incredibly stupid to take ~$55k/year for long hours as an educator that is also a babysitter. And insanely passionate teachers are in short supply.
“Teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).”
That’s leaving out the benefits of incredibly strong union protections, it being a state job with matched benefits, absurd job security even in the face of terrible performance, etc.
Lol, try saying that to an alaskan teachers face and watch yourself get slapped for the absurdity of the claim.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/how-strong-ar...
Nonsense research showing how crappy academic research has become
Why are teachers special to merit any "protections" that aren't afforded to all employees, public or private?
1) Resources and Membership: Membership is essentially compelled, and the resources of the union rarely support member teachers. Three of the anchorage teachers in my life say their union reps are useless and they have little agency in rectifying the problem.
2) No comment: Politics in AK is FUBAR, and as an aside I imagine less gets spent on politics because we all know the oil companies own it all.
3) "Alaska education leaders value bottom-up decision making (see sidebar);" Absolute nonsense. Decision making is almost entirely dominated by outside economic concerns and the behavior of the state and federal government from year to year. I say this as someone whose brother has participated in nearly every union negotiation for the last 20 years at ASD.
4) Irrelevant to the livelyhood of alaskan teachers, AFAICT
> Why are teachers special to merit any "protections" that aren't afforded to all employees, public or private?
Teaching in public school, like serving in the military or working in emergency services, is a career that we should maintain for the well-being of our country and citizens. If teachers cannot earn a living wage -- to have the basic dignity of owning a home and raising a family should they want to -- then we are worse off as a country over time.
To be clear, I am biased here. I started my career working for ASD, have lots of family that work for ASD in both admin and teaching, and many friends directly involved in education in Alaska. Public education in Alaska is a shit show, and seems to be on the an accelerating downswing since covid. The unions aren't helping the situation either, hence my opinions.
The only thing that report does for me is show that our metrics for what makes a good teachers union or a strong teachers union are wrong.
Even by your own example, you're only at 35 hours a week, and that's before you subtract out the weeks of summer vacation, winter vacation, spring break, etc; where the workload is certainly far less than 40 hours a week.