 |
| courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain |
I dropped by my school today to pick up my county supplement
check and learned that my younger teammate from this past year has turned in
her resignation and taken a teaching job at a local private school. This news
did not surprise me. She’d confided in me last week that she had interviewed
for the position at the private school and, after they sweetened the
compensation offer, she’d decided to take the job.
What are some of the reasons she decided to take this position
with a private school and leave public education? According to what she told
me, the pay scale is nearly as good as what she is making as a second year
teacher in the public school system. Her two young children will also be able
to attend the private school for free. Tuition at this school amounts to a few
thousand dollars per student per year.
This alone, getting her young children out of public school, given
what she’s seen every day in the two years she’s been a public school teacher,
is probably reason enough for her to take the other job. Her oldest has already
been attending a small private school. Her youngest has been in day care but
will start Pre-K in the fall.
Another bonus for her in moving to this school will be a 50%
reduction in class size. The average home room class in the 7th
grade at my school this year was 30 students. The average class size at the
private school she is going to is 15 students. If you’re not familiar with the
effect of class size on class management, in a class of 30, 50 to 60% of a
teacher’s time is spent managing behavior, more if there are disruptive
students in the class, which there are in almost every public school classroom.
The result is 50% or less of the teacher’s time available for instruction. With
a class of 15, maybe 15-20% of a teacher’s time is spent on behavior, leaving
the teacher 80% or more of her time each class period to actually teach the
subject.
Paperwork is also another major factor favoring this move by my
former teammate to a private school. The paperwork burden on public school
teachers has reached such a point, many teachers spend hours outside of the
regular school workday catching up on all the paperwork required to meet state,
federal, and local regulations. This paperwork is in addition to the normal
grading of papers, writing of lesson plans, and staying in contact with parents
that teachers normally do every day.
With more and more churches and communities coming together to
found private schools as an alternative for responsible, concerned, caring
parents who feel the public schools are no longer capable of providing a
quality education due to those public schools being given over to the
disruptive, destructive children of parents who just don’t care, there will be
a growing opportunity for teachers who have grown weary of the public school
system to find gainful employment as educators in private schools.
If the private school pay and benefits are competitive, it is
hard, even for someone dedicated to toiling away in the public school system,
to convince other teachers why they shouldn’t leave the public schools for the
more academically friendly environment said private schools can offer.
For teachers like myself, only a handful of years from retirement,
the move probably wouldn’t be worth it. But for a young teacher with only a
couple of years invested in the public education system, the opportunity is
just too good to turn down. While they do become part of the discouraging
statistic of the 50% of beginning teachers that leave public education within
the first three years, at least the teachers who migrate to private education
continue to teach.
As for me, I will have to wait and see what this unexpected
vacancy will do as regards my teaching assignment next year.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
No comments:
Post a Comment