It was one of those “You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me!” moments that happen all too frequently when listening to political talk radio. Former Arizona State Senator Frank Antenori was on the air talking about how his son’s teacher had been in education, but had left because he couldn’t make a decent living at it.
The blunt-speaking Antenori has been called many things, but hardly ever is he disingenuous. I just assumed that he had somehow compartmentalized things in his head. Back when he was in the State Legislature, he was one of the grunts leading the assault on public education. He and his fellow haters—all dressed up in ideological camouflage and spouting vapid battle cries about charter schools and vouchers—managed to gut Arizona’s public school system, destroying teachers’ unions (and teacher morale) in the process. Using a bad economy as an all-purpose excuse, the Legislature openly disobeyed the law which their members had sworn to uphold. They withheld hundreds of millions of dollars to which the public-education system was entitled while, at the same time, finding enough money in the budget to fund pet projects, including one that would help their rich buddies send their kids to private school for free.
It’s not surprising that Antenori’s son’s teacher would run away from the wasteland that their dad had helped create. The real question is: Why would anybody want to be a teacher in Arizona these days?
History
In the 1990s, Arizona’s public schools were muddling along, about halfway up (or down) the list of state systems throughout the country. Across America, schools were faced with various challenges, including a slip in student discipline brought on by fractured homes and many other societal shifts. (In the old days, if a kid got in trouble at school, he went home and got in trouble at home. But in the 1990s, if a kid got in trouble at school, Mommy showed up at the school with a lawyer.) There were other problems throughout the country, including a decaying infrastructure, attacks from political ideologues on things like the teaching of “creationism,” and the inability of the funding structure to keep up with increased demands for everything from technological upgrades, skyrocketing insurance, and teacher pay.
Arizona’s schools were experiencing all of those things and also had the added burdens of a rapidly growing student population, a constant influx of students who spoke little or no English, and a transient population that exacerbated the other two situations.
Nevertheless (or perhaps because of the combination of things), Arizona’s voters, facing a Legislature that was unwilling or unable to act, took it upon themselves to do something about it. They passed Proposition 301, which called for a permanent six-tenths-of-one-percent sales tax to cover the cost of inflation and to help fund everything from new school construction to long-overdue raises for teachers.
Prop. 301 passed by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, which, at first, might seem modest but is actually quite impressive seeing as how it was a Presidential election year and Arizonans flocked to the polls to vote for conservative Republican George W. Bush. (Bush won Arizona by a margin of 51-44 percent, making the 301 vote even more surprising.)
From the very beginning, Republicans in the state Legislature chafed at having to provide that funding for the schools, but for years they did what the law instructed them to do. Then came the economic crisis of 2007-08. Tax revenues plunged in Arizona and across the country. Facing some very difficult choices, the Legislature asked the schools and teachers if the lawmakers could just ignore Prop. 301 just this one time in an effort to make ends meet. The educational professionals, acting on what they believed to be civic pride and responsibility, agreed to let the Legislature off the hook that one year.
That one year is now coming up on a decade.
English
The story is told of a carefree swan swimming near the banks of a wide river. A poisonous snake slithers along the ground and approaches the river. The snake asks the swan for a ride across the river. The swan, aware of the snake’s character and deadly abilities, says no. The snake persists, saying, “You have nothing to fear. If I were to bite you in transit, we would both die.”
The swan finally agrees and the snake climbs aboard the swan’s back. About halfway across the river, the snake bites the swan and they both die. Just before slipping under the water, the swan asks, “Why would you do that?”
The snake replies, “That’s just who I am.”
In this story, the public schools are represented by the swan.
Psychology
Most teachers I contacted for this article were skittish about going on the record, even in answering generic questions. (See sidebar.) There is an underlying current of fear and mistrust in Arizona’s schools and it can easily be traced back to the state Legislature. In two coordinated steps, lawmakers first eviscerated teachers’ unions and then put the power to hire and fire in the hands of people who probably shouldn’t be trusted with such responsibility.
For most of the past half-century, Republicans have hated unions in an inexplicably visceral manner. And if they hated unions, they absolutely despised teachers’ unions. Teachers, with their unholy mix of high education and relatively low pay, not surprisingly tend to vote for Democrats. So, the right-wing legislative train of thought (if such a thing is possible) has been “Kill the unions, then pick off the teachers, one by one.”
Today, teachers’ unions in Arizona exist in name only and have no power. Teachers, stripped of protection, now find their careers and futures in the hands of sometimes-capricious administrators. Thus the unwillingness to speak out in public.
With teachers reluctant to speak on record, I got a few of them together at a pizza place and promised them anonymity (and food). Teachers, like students, are always hungry, but, on the plus side, the teachers hardly ever eat like convicts.
There were two high-school teachers, one from a middle school, and one from an elementary school. All four said that they love teaching, but all said that they could see themselves leaving the profession someday. The pay is OK, but not great. One older teacher is concerned about her retirement, since the amount she will receive is based on the amount she is paid over her last few years of service. Because of cuts from the Legislature and the slashing of funds for Career Ladder, she is making several thousand dollars less than she made just a few years ago. She says that it shouldn’t work like that here in America.
They all agree that the Legislature—specifically Republicans in the Legislature—are the problem. While respect for teachers by students and parents has declined in recent years, it is non-existent when it comes to Republican lawmakers. One teacher said that most of the lawmakers at least have the decency to not even pretend that they give a crap about teachers, there are some Smiling Faces who will lie right to your face.
The biggest complaint is the piled-on workload that keeps them from just teaching. There is the testing, both for the state and soon, in some form or another, for the country. There are mandatory workshops and seminars, lunchtime duty, after-school tutoring, mandatory sponsoring of student clubs, and clerical work that used to be done by office personnel but, after cutbacks, now falls to the teachers. Sociology
Over the next decade in the United States, 1.6 million teachers will retire. Replenishing that work force will be a daunting task. Studies have shown that teachers hit their professional stride after being in the classroom for at least five years. Unfortunately, 14 percent of American teachers leave the profession after just one year and the turnover rate is 46 percent by the fourth year. (Besides the fact that students miss out on being taught by top-level teachers, school districts around the country spend more than $2 billion a year on teacher recruitment and training replacements.) By comparison, in countries with the highest scores on international tests, the teacher turnover rate is around 3 percent.
Throughout America, teachers cite five main reasons for leaving the profession—burnout, threat of layoffs, testing pressure, poor working conditions and low wages. In a survey of 40,000 teachers conducted by the Gates Foundation, a majority of respondents said that supportive leadership, access to high-quality curriculum and resources, time for collaboration, relevant professional development, and a clean and safe work environment all came in ahead of higher pay.
Joshua Warren spent most of his adult life as a lawyer. He practiced law, got married, raised a family, and when it came time to retire, he decided it was time to do what he probably had wanted to do all along. He became a teacher. He went back to school, got a Master’s degree in education, and learned a whole lot of math. He now teaches math at Sunnyside High School.
“I guess I always wanted to teach. A lot of people in my (close and extended) family are teachers and I’ve always respected them a lot.”
He doesn’t have to worry that much about money what with his retirement income and his teacher’s salary, but he understands what others are going through. The starting pay for teachers in the Sunnyside District is just less than $32,000 a year. Projected out over a year, with all the demands on teachers’ time, that comes out to around the $15 an hour that fast-food workers are demanding.
Warren realizes that teachers don’t expect to get rich in their profession, but neither should they have to take a vow of poverty. He could retire from teaching tomorrow, but keeps doing it for the love of the profession.
I was out at a store a couple weeks ago,” he says, “and I ran into a former student of mine. He and I had bumped heads a bit in the classroom, but he came up to me, big smile on his face, and told me what a positive influence I had been on him in school. That’s worth all the money in the world.”
But it doesn’t pay the bills.
Math
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says that teachers should make somewhere between $60,000 and $150,000 a year. If Arizona teachers heard those figures, they would develop one giant collective hernia from laughing. The average salary for a starting teacher in the U.S. is around $36,000. It’s appreciably less in Arizona.
The numbers that are most striking are these: In Los Angeles, a part of the country not necessarily known for stability in just about anything, the annual teacher turnover rate hovers around 15 percent. In Arizona, it’s more than twice that, with one in every three teachers leaving the profession and/or the state every single year. In Pinal County, just up the road from Tucson, the annual turnover rate is 44.2 percent. If your kid’s school has 40 teachers, by next year, 18 of them will be gone.
The Tucson Unified School District, which has been shrinking for years, opened the school year with a shortage of 150 teachers. Other districts around the state faced similar shortages.
Michael Steward was a teacher for several years, but is now the Assistant Athletic Director and Assistant Men’s Basketball Coach at Tohono O’odham Community College in Sells.
“I loved teaching, but I definitely didn’t love all the other (nonsense) that went along with it. I especially hated all of the in-services and workshops that have somehow become part of the process. You’d want to stay after school to help some kid catch up on his work, but you have to go to an in-service that is absolutely useless. You get there and some person gives everyone a handout … and then reads the handout! Or they put on a PowerPoint presentation and then read the PowerPoint to you, like we’re morons or something. “The amount of wasted time is staggering, and then you find out that the person doing the in-service is making $1,000 to do so. It’s a giant scam, this industry that has sprung up around it. I went to one in-service where they taught us to do something a certain way and they called it whatever. A couple years later, I had to go to another in-service where they taught us the exact same thing but called it something different.
“I think that most teachers would happily put up with the long hours and lousy pay if they would just be allowed to teach.”
Economics
One might think that the law of supply and demand would kick in soon, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet. Some districts would probably love to try to outbid others for top-level teachers, but after years of being squeezed by the state, they simply don’t have the money to do so.
The proliferation of state-sponsored charter schools, coupled with the crappy economy, has actually had the perverse effect of driving teacher salaries down. Some charter-school teachers start in the low-to-mid 20s with little opportunity to advance.
In Arizona, the rules of economics, like the rule of law, can be suspended if you have a veto-proof majority and/or a sympathetic governor.
Political Science
Educators are watching with great anticipation the pummeling that the Legislature is taking in the courts. After denying the schools (for several years) the 301 monies dictated by law, lawmakers now have been ordered by the courts to pony up at least a third of a billion dollars and perhaps as much as $1.6 billion.
Twice the courts have ordered the state to pay up for at least one year of back money owed and will take up the matter of the full amount in October. The lawyers for the lawmakers tried the novel approach of claiming that the Legislature didn’t have to pay up because they don’t have the money to do so. (That’s actually a lie, because the state has a half-billion dollar surplus just sitting around, waiting to be misspent on crackpot agenda items next year.)
Criminology
As I’m writing this, the front-page headline in the morning paper reads “Judge: AZ owes schools $317,000.” It’s actually $317,000,000 (everybody makes mistakes, including headline writers), but given the bent and temperament of the Legislature, one gets the feeling they would refuse to even pay that amount.
The Legislature and Governor Jan Brewer have said that they will appeal the decision. Anything to keep from having to do the right thing.
WRITERS NOTE:
The first two teachers I contacted from the Amphitheater School District both had the exact same reactions. In casual discussions, they both spoke very highly of their district and the administration’s attempts to mitigate the damage done by the Legislature. However, when it came time to go on the record, they both begged off, stating that it was in their contracts that they could not speak to the media without prior approval from central administration. (Like most people, they admitted that they hadn’t actually read their contracts before signing them. Most people just do a cursory check to make sure that the numbers are correct.)
After double-checking that the Amphi District is indeed wholly within the U.S., I contacted Todd Jaeger, who is the associate superintendent and general counsel for the Amphitheater District. He was a bit amused. He responded: “To my knowledge (and my knowledge is pretty spot on in this respect, since I write (his italics) the contracts, we have no such contractual provision for our teachers.”
He went on to explain that the district does have a governing board policy that provides for coordination of media relations. It used to run through his office, but is now the responsibility of the Community Relations office, headed up by Mindy Blake, who used to be on Channel 13 News.
When I went back and told the teachers about what Jaeger said, they were still skittish, even after I told them that Jaeger offered to provide a sworn affidavit from him confirming that they would not void their contracts if they spoke to me.
As Stephen Stills once sang, paranoia strikes deep. Such a deeply held urban legend might have benefited the district at one time, but not now. There is a strong sense of “We’re all in this together” against the public education-bashing Legislature. (And when you read “We’re all in this together,” please don’t dance like Zac Efron.)
I eventually decided to use the two teachers as unnamed background.
This article appears in Aug 28 – Sep 3, 2014.
It is a horrible time to be a teacher in Arizona. Not only are there unruly kids in the classroom who couldn’t care less about the teacher or the subject matter; they openly cheat, are on their phones, talking among themselves because they know that nothing will be done because of the fear from law suits or job losses. I consider myself a liberal, but the worst thing that happened to education despite the legislation and lack of parenting was social promotion. Kids should be taught all the subject matter, but at their own level. Inclusion, in theory helps to socialize and include all without stigmatation, but in reality; inclusion just shines a blaring light on the inadaquacies of certain students. One teacher in the classroom cannot address all the different learning levels of the students so nobody learns in the process. If they say that it can be done, somebody hasn’t been in the classroom. General Ed teachers are being forced to become Special Ed teachers without the training because of inclusion. They are suppose to adapt or modify lessons for those students on top of doing everything else that is demanded of them. I am not saying that all Special Needs students cannot function in a regular classroom because some Special Needs are smarter than the regular kids and are more creative, and have better manners and great hearts, but for the most part inclusion is a big failure without the resources to make it work. Teachers are working all of the time and when you can’t have a life after work; it is time to rethink job choices and until something is done – teaching isn’t worth it.
My beef is with the charter school industry and believe me it is an industry with powerful lobbyists, and a legislative agenda. This was all touted as “free market capitalism” but in reality its corporate welfare that undermines legitimate education.
If a public school administrator takes taxpayer money and buy a sports car he or she would be doing hard-time in Florence. In the case of a Charter School, say owned by a Turkish Muslim, (nothing wrong there) it doesn’t even need to be disclosed! Taxpayer dollars handed directly to foreign and domestic corporations with no oversight. That’s GOP capitalism.
Since charter schools do no better in getting kids to pass these ludicrous exams than public schools, let’s pull the plug and let the free markets fend for themselves in the free market.If your product is good, folks will buy it, if not, please leave our treasury alone.
Everything you said so true. Throughout the State teacher recruitment and retention is a tremendous problem. I asked one State legislator how many applicants there would be for a teaching job if the starting pay was $80,000 a year. Obviously hundreds of applicants. I said you guys are always after market based solutions. There it is. People with kids have to vote and stag involved. Otherwise the Tea party types, who represent old white people who had someone else pay for their kids, but now don’t want to spend a dime on their future caregivers, especially brown people, will always win out.
As long as there is a GOP supermajority in Phoenix, there will be a thinly veiled effort to kill public education and push charter schools. And the comment above is very true: charter school administrators are allowed enormous salaries (higher than many top public superintendents) that have never been properly investigated or reported. All they have to do is survive a few years and they get rich, all while they hire and fire low salary, uncertified teachers and enjoy far less documented oversight. Why has no responsible reporter EVER investigated this?
Several years ago, as a Senior Vice President of a consulting engineering firm, all of us “executives” were called into a conference room by the CEO and told in no uncertain terms that we all worked for the project managers (who were subordinate to us). He went on to state that if we were to be successful as a firm, our success would be determined by our project managers.
This wisdom applies today to our teachers. If we are to be successful as a community and as a nation, our success will be driven by our teachers. I think we need to stop dithering over Common Core, NCLB, high stakes testing and all the buzz words and alphabet soup the education industry inflicts on us and let our teachers teach.
And pay them for their contributions.
Charter schools provide one avenue of escape for parents and their kids trapped in low performing districts and schools but yes, they need to be tightly regulated on the same dimensions as the other public schools and held accountable to the same standards of student achievement.
That said, comments focusing exclusively on charters and Republicans miss the mark. Under Bush and now Obama, public K-12 education (non charter) has been sold to private concerns, e.g. Pearson, who’ve commandeered assessment, curriculum and professional development under both administrations. Pearson, again for example, has donated roughly $100 million annually in lobbying; 94% to Democrats! They have spent additional millions sending school administrators on luxury junkets to Australia and Indonesia for “international conferences” with global educators. In return, these districts embrace and purchase millions of dollars from the vast catalog of Pearson education products.
NYC, LA and Chicago – hardly cities in red states – have embraced the Common Core standards and are deep in bed with corporations and privateers pushing CCSS. LA recently retreated from its $500 million deal with Apple and Pearson in the face of what has been labeled in the press as a fiasco and is now subject to investigations into procurement irregularities. And on and on.
Today’s actors, Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill and Melinda Gates et. al. have continued the sell out of public education to private interests under the guise of school reform. My suggestion? Begin by radically reforming the roles of federal and state authorities in the funding of public education. By reform I mean gut all federal and state intervention to the bare bones and pipe those funds now spent on the alphabet soup of reform (NCLB, CCSA, PARCC) directly into public school districts. Eliminate the middlemen and their bureaucracies of compliance officers. Let local educators in districts and schools decide where and how to spend the money beginning with teacher salaries and supplies for their classrooms. Let administrators be paid as support staff and mid level bureaucrats.
Teaching should be viewed as a profession and teachers should be compensated as professionals. That will not happen until salaries and benefits are commensurate with the responsibilities faced by teachers every day.
I am a public school teacher in TUSD teaching at one of the top three public high schools in the state (that should narrow it down for you). Not only is my school overcrowded and underserved, but our resources have been so thoroughly slashed that we have no paper, ink, books, or tech to speak of. We must exit the campus to use the restrooms, as none exist near most “classrooms,” many of which are discarded (and possibly moldy) Katrina portables. Despite all of this, our students out-perform most and are generally unaware that they have been taken to the cleaners by the backwards-thinking legislature. Most of our faculty are seasoned veterans like myself, and each has fought fiercely and valiantly to remain in the classroom where we are most effective. I have in my possession a promissory note from the District that shows what I am owed in back pay even BEFORE the grand theft that occurred over the last decade. Short of a class-action lawsuit, our hands are tied because if we do leave, the back monies we are owed may never be paid. We used to call this indentured servitude, but now we call it teaching in the public school system.
“Republicans have hated unions in an inexplicably visceral manner.” Wrong adverb, Tom. You are the Prince of the Royalty that reigns over the ‘Lie with statistics’ realm. The last time I checked, the average salary for teachers in Tucson was well over $50,000. Harping on starting salary may bolster your preconceived conclusion, but it is hardly enlightening. More than any other institution, even more than the legislature, Teacher Unions are the cause of the demise of public education, presently a 150 year experiment that has failed.
Every public school teacher I ask complains more about admin, parents and the kids, than anything else. But then they go on to blame it on funding. I think they believe if more money flowed they would get it.
Public schools? Never happen. They are a “for profit” business. It’s just hard to account for how they hide the profit. Some of them steal food from the lunchroom. Some steal computers.
There is such poor accountability…
http://www.kvoa.com/news/64-laptops-stolen-from-tusd-schools/
http://tucson.com/news/blogs/police-beat/ex-tusd-worker-gets-probation-in-theft-case/article_f31305e9-d963-581b-b95c-8e2287005773.html
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/failure-to-report-allowed-tusd-property-theft-to-go-on/article_cd8d79e5-7ab6-5e9c-a00b-88ce7e09c6b7.html
In 2009, TUSD agreed to report to the state Attorney General “any violation of Arizona procurement statutes or rules, conflict of interest statutes, antitrust statutes, the Consent Judgment, or the intentional destruction of public records within five (5) business days.” The Arizona Attorney General may accordingly receive copies of complaints received by the Audit Committee as required to comply with this agreement. (from TUSD website)
If the state would be willing to cut school admin in half and put that money towards teacher’s pay and school supplies (teachers have to buy their own today) I know many teachers who have either retired early or changed jobs because they can’t afford to make ends meet on a teacher’s pay. Not to mention the out of control kids, the kids who need special ed (teachers are no longer allowed to recommend this or ask that the child at least be tested), they can’t complain about kids who miss half the school years and so on…. Now AZ is basing their pay with the kid’s grades – how can you deal with that when you have kids who don’t belong in a regular classroom? Their pay gets cut because of the ignorance of the schools! I have friends who teach college level too. They are getting students who don’t even know what a paragraph is, much less the other basic skills you need in college. What a mess!
Well Tom, YOU have typed a article that got some response. I guess that YOU have succeeded in YOUR mind and in YOUR editors minds. It doesn’t matter that YOU have put the proper spin and used the partial truth to do it. Right Tom. YOU made money for YOURSELF. No guilt, YOU did it for YOUR kids.
Hey Harlan, I think YOUR computer has a PROBLEM with the CAPS LOCK.
“..Moreover, when controlling for per-capita personal income (PCI), Arizona’s ranking jumps to 14th in the nation. Calculating these average salaries as a percentage of PCI is a common method that accounts for differences in the underlying wealth between states. This analysis also helps account for the differences in cost of living between states. It certainly would be inappropriate to directly compare a New York teacher’s salary against one in Arizona..”
Read more: http://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2014/07/21/arizona-teacher-pay-ranks-higher-than-reported/#ixzz3Bm2uKu20
It’s time for teachers to take back their classrooms. I just left a 30-year teaching career and have a masters in Educational Leadership. Charter schools are put together by frustrated teachers who want to practice their profession to benefit the future. Administrators, when they first become administrators, have the same mindset—they want to be in a position to make things better. I don’t know what happens. I was an association president, a union member my whole career, and STILL an advocate for teachers. Thank you for the article. I can relate to everything the teachers told you.
Just a few quick points. No discussion about school funding in Arizona is worth a warm bucket of spit…to quote former Vice President John Nance Garner…without reference to the Arizona Auditor General’s annual report on school district spending… which is available on-line for download. The report breaks down how much money each district gets from all sources and how districts spend the money they get. There is a huge range of funding and an even bigger range in how districts spend money.
Even though it enjoys huge economies of scale TUSD still gets the most funding of any local district…about $1600 more per pupil than Sunnyside and about $1700 more per pupil than Vail. TUSD and SUSD each spend less than 50% of their revenue in the classroom. TUSD spends so much more than the average for districts its size on administration that reducing that spending to just the average for very large districts would save about $12 million every year.
There is far too much in the way of missing or misleading information in both the column and the comments to respond to all of it, but here are two examples. The column talks about Arizona public schools being underfunded and that is surely accurate, but it fails to mention that the performance of Arizona students is ranked in the middle of the states. The relevant point is not how awful we are, but how great we could be if public schools were adequately funded. One of the comments urged the state to reduce the number of administrators. In this state that is the job of local school districts, and some of them do well at trimming administrative overhead, while others…TUSD being the prime example…spend more than 10 cents out of every dollar they get on useless administration.
These conversations would be much more productive if data replaced anecdotes, opinions, and impressions. The data is not hidden. It is available at the Arizona Auditor General’s website.
Actually, it’s good that fewer students are considering teaching. It’s a career with no future, given how little there is that CAN’T be learned by using a simple phone or tablet. Classroom teaching will go the way of travel agents, realtors and even banking, as soon as someone devises a better system than bitcoins.
Keep your chin up teachers. We’re all out there in the marketplace working for hacks and screwing on a smile to get through the day with low pay. Ya’ll still have a vote so keep hammering away at the school board and the superintendent.
There are plenty of teachers out there, empirically. We’ve just left the classroom, and we read the news–there’s nothing enticing about the idea of going back. I beat the odds and made it 7 years before I quit. I got a 25% raise when I went into the private sector, and 10 years later, I made money working in ed tech that I couldn’t have gotten with 25 years and a doctorate in the classroom. We’ve all got our stories about the problems, and what made us leave finally. But I suppose they can all be covered by the idea that if you’re not going to be rewarded financially for your work, you have to be rewarded psychologically. And there is very little of that left to be had in the profession, either. When business owners, and legislators, and parents, and even your own administrators, are actively working against you and attacking you, it makes it hard to keep at it.
I just spoke to a principal of a Tucson elementary school. She asked me to come back to Arizona and teach in Tucson because, “Tucson has a shortage of teachers.” I left Arizona after a mass lay-off of teachers coming up on their 20 years, in 2011. When I asked how much my salary would be, I was told $33,000. When I asked her how would I live on this, she said, “You can’t.”
after working for amphi schools transportation for 19 years with little pay rises, all school employees need a large rise!!!. remember”You can pay for education now ! or pay for prison later . steve b