Education
Schools Are In Trouble: Here’s What You Personally Can Do About It
A proposal to help teachers, parents, kids, and taxpayers
Children’s test scores are down, at least partly due to the pandemic, and teachers are burnt out and leaving in droves. Meanwhile, working parents are at their breaking point.
I have a solution.
First, let’s agree there is a problem.
We all agree that the current school schedule serves nobody. It is a legacy of our agricultural past, but the majority of families do not run farms anymore. It’s a classic example of “we’ve always done it this way” that needs to change.
Many countries around the world have much shorter summer holidays. Japanese kids get six weeks. In Europe, it varies, but shorter vacations are common.
Why do schools let out so early?
The length of school days, too, seems to have been chosen randomly. Schools often let out as early as 2:30 or 3:30 p.m. Why?
Working parents have to scramble to fill the hours after school lets out for younger kids. For teens, that period of time between school letting out and parents getting home is a golden opportunity to engage in all sorts of things they’re not supposed to be doing.
What if we cut summer vacations to six weeks and extended the school day? As long as we add plenty of exercises and generous social interaction time (a longer lunch, recess, physical education, music) I see no downside.
Schools aren’t babysitters.
I get it, but we’ve chosen to set up an economic system that demands both parents to work long hours, and the flip side to that is parents need some help.
The current system serves nobody well and particularly screws mothers. Parents are stressed out trying to cover their work and make sure there are no holes in their childcare arrangements.
Unless they have enough money to hire a nanny, most parents inevitably face tough decisions, like having to drop the ball at work to deal with a snow day or a holiday they don’t have coverage for.
This, incidentally, is a very big part of what hurts mothers’ careers — moms living in this reality know better than to take a job in which they have no flexibility. The female wage gap is real, and this is a part of it.
But the cost!
Yes, teachers will demand and deserve more pay if they’re working more hours. Currently, many younger teachers take a summer job to bolster their finances. This varies widely by state, but teacher pay is more generous than people recognize in some areas after the teacher has worked for many years and has obtained a master’s degree.
I was married to a chemistry and physics teacher for 15 years. The first few years were very tight, and he worked in a lab or mowed yards during the summers and sometimes did tutoring until his pay caught up. But by the time we divorced, his pay was quite generous and he didn’t need to work any extra jobs.
Here’s what we do about all this.
We don’t have enough funding to hire more teachers. But we can hire many more teachers’ assistants/paraprofessionals/teachers’ aides. These people have less education but typically have some college, and they don’t command salaries as high as those of accredited teachers.
Every teacher should have at least one assistant, depending on the subject and grade level. Let the paraprofessionals help with keeping elementary students engaged, giving one-on-one help to struggling kids, grading papers, and whatever is helpful or necessary for each individual teacher.
Teachers should be seen as professionals who require skilled assistance. Teachers should not be doing things like supervising lunch and recess. Aides can and should perform such duties.
Let me ask you this.
When you make a medical appointment, how often do you see your doctor? Personally, I sometimes go years without seeing mine. Instead, I see nurses and nurse practitioners most of the time.
My doctor is involved in my care, but she doesn’t have to be the one to take my blood pressure, hand me a gown and ask me preliminary questions.
The nurses handle all the routine things under the supervision of my doctor. I think we should adopt a similar system for education.
Here’s where you come in.
We have a lot of local control in this area. School boards make many decisions locally, although there are state and federal rules. Most schools get the majority of their funding from local property taxes.
Consider running for school board. It’s a thankless job; I attended countless school board meetings at multiple school districts as a reporter back in the day.
It’s not a fun time.
But it’s important.
Some agendas are better than others.
However, lots of people running for school board nowadays have a political/religious agenda. It’s not that they are passionate about education; it’s that they want to ban books and masks and police the bathroom usage of trans kids. Sometimes they want to campaign for more religious instruction.
If you’re on Medium, I suspect you’d make a better school board member than many of the people now running. Most of us believe in education. And unless you live in a metro area, these board positions are easy to get.
In my area, there’s usually little to no competition and sometimes boards have to appoint someone because nobody even runs for some seats.
As a school board member or at least as a concerned citizen, make the case to the taxpayers in your local district.
People do care about their local schools. Even if they’re childless, they mostly understand that their property values are affected by the reputation of the local schools.
There are more benefits to this.
Getting more pay (albeit for longer hours) and more assistance cannot help but stem the flood of teachers abandoning education.
But there’s another benefit. Districts that are having trouble hiring enough teachers can offer help with tuition for any assistant who wants to pursue a teaching degree.
Many districts already assist teachers in getting their master’s degree; my ex was reimbursed for much of his tuition, which was helpful. We can do the same for assistants, in return for requiring them to teach at the district for a certain time period.
This would give schools a pipeline of future teachers, plus it would allow them to encourage the most promising candidates.
This is not a pie-in-the-sky idea.
I have lots of ideas for changes our society should make. Most of them don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.
But because any citizen can run for school board, it’s possible to have a real effect here. Particularly if you round up several like-minded friends and you all run together, over a few years you can make real change happen.
I’m not saying it would be easy; I’m saying it would be possible. Much of school board business is tedious and boring but important. I’ve seen a lot of board members who are uneducated and distrustful of education.
They shouldn’t be there.
Start by attending your local board meetings.
Take notes. Be interested. See how the board functions and size up the current board members.
At one local school board we covered when I worked as a journalist, it was suggested that the board stop getting the thick paper packets before each meeting that wasted paper and had to be physically picked up.
Instead, the idea was to issue a tablet (relatively new tech at that point) so that board members could receive materials electronically.
Multiple board members did not want to do this because they didn’t know how to use the internet. This was probably about 10 years ago; long after you would expect almost everybody to have learned at least the basics of email and computers.
I said at the time that anybody unwilling to learn to use a tablet wasn’t a fit board member. I tell the story to illustrate that not every board member should be there.
But again, there’s a cost.
Yes, hiring classroom aides and extending instructional hours will be expensive. One possible way to capture more funding would be to charge — on a sliding scale — for end-of-the-school-day enrichment.
Parents often do pay for after-school programs already. That part isn’t a new idea. But the district could structure things so that the last two hours of school are optional.
A stay-at-home parent would have the option of picking up children at the end of the traditional school day, or the child could stay for additional recess/tutoring/study hall/music/sports/foreign language enrichment/consumer education or whatever would be appropriate in each case.
Are you a teacher?
I’d love to hear what teachers, parents, school board members and others think of this.
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a copywriter, proofreader and editor in central Illinois. Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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