It’s come to my attention that one proposal in our current teacher contract negotiations requires teachers to arrive at school 30 minutes before the school day and remain at school an hour after the school day has ended.
Happily, I don’t know where this idea originated, so I am attacking its stupidity and cruelty rather than the specific person responsible for it.
The person responsible for this idea may feel attacked if they ever read this, but I can’t help that. If you have a stupid idea, that is your fault.
First, and perhaps most important:
Most teachers arrive 30 minutes before the school day begins and remain at school an hour after the final bell rings.
For transparency, I arrive at school about an hour before the school day begins but only remain in the building for 15-30 minutes after the final bell has rung. But I have been teaching for 26 years — the last 16 at the same grade level — so things have become easier over time. When I first started teaching, I would arrive at school at 5:00 AM — alongside my principal at the time — and leave around 5:00 PM.
But I was inexperienced and dumb back then. I needed every minute I could get.
But I’m also married to a teacher who arrives an hour before the school day begins and usually remains at work more than an hour after the day has ended. She also frequently works on weekends to prepare for the coming week, goes to school on Sundays to ensure her lessons are ready, and routinely spends unpaid summer vacation days in her classroom, preparing for the coming year.
And herein lies the stupidity of this proposal:
It ignores the endless number of hours that teachers already spend working outside the school day.
They correct papers after dinner, plan lessons after their own children have gone to bed, go to school on the weekends to prepare materials, search online for new ideas into the wee hours of the night, and work in the summer on their classrooms and plans. They call parents and respond to emails in the evening, on the weekends, and everything in between.
These are the last people who should be nicked and dimed regarding their time.
All they do is give their time.
I don’t know a single teacher who doesn’t work outside the school day.
I don’t know a single teacher who doesn’t surrender summer days to prepare their classrooms since school districts never allow adequate time to complete this task.
The average teacher spends enormous amounts of time outside of the school day already.
Administrators know this. If they don’t, they need to open their office doors and take a look around.
These are people who also routinely spend their own money on their students and classrooms. These professionals often turn to online resources like Teachers Pay Teachers for quality curriculum and practice problems when the curriculum provided by the school district fails them. They purchase pencils and notebooks for students, posters and fabric to make their classroom more bright and inviting, and even furniture and storage units when needed. I know teachers who spend their Saturday mornings scouring garage sales for books to add to their classroom libraries because almost every classroom library that has ever existed has been paid for by teachers or acquired via donations.
If anything, administrators and school boards should be ashamed of themselves for failing to adequately support teachers. Every dollar a teacher spends on their students and classrooms — and nearly every teacher I know (including the teacher I live with) does this — should serve as a source of embarrassment to school districts and a clarion call that basic needs are not being met.
These are people who routinely prioritize their students over themselves and their own children, sending dollars back into the school instead of pouring them into retirement accounts, vacation spending, and college funds for their children.
They do all this, and then some fool says that these angels of humanity must stick around after school for an hour every day.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants, branding specialists, FBI agents, salespeople, CEOs, web designers, rabbis, marketers, politicians, and nonprofit leaders—all people I work with regularly—are not required to spend their own money on the needs of their customers or clients.
They do not spend their own money on their workspaces.
Teachers do this every day.
None of these professionals punch a virtual time clock or are required to remain inside a building when their work can be completed whenever and wherever they want.
I know this because I work with these people every day.
If teachers began adhering to their actual contract — only working at the designated time for the required number of hours — and ceasing to spend their own money on their classrooms, the punch to the gut to the school system would be astounding.
Students would feel it immediately. Parents, too.
If the work that teachers do outside their contracted hours evaporated overnight, children would suffer mightily. Education would degrade rapidly. Test scores would fall precipitously.
But this would never happen, and administrators and politicians know this. Teachers care too much about their students to allow it to happen. It’s this level of concern, commitment, and authentic, genuine love teachers feel for their students that allows terrible people to routinely take advantage of educators, knowing that whatever demands are placed upon them will likely be accepted because children’s futures are at stake.
I know a teacher who was crying in school this week—not because she was upset about a work issue — but because her back hurt so much that she was brought to tears.
Why was she at school?
She loves her students.
I returned from hernia surgery two weeks early and spent those two weeks in pain, mostly rolling around in a swivel chair while I taught. I’ve returned to school early from pneumonia twice despite my doctor’s protestations to stay home and rest.
Why? I love my kids.
I know a teacher who has put off surgery to alleviate great pain and deal with a serious health issue for months to avoid being absent from their students, even when they had more than enough sick days to accommodate the absences.
I know teachers suffering from COVID who continued to teach remotely during the pandemic despite high fevers and other serious symptoms.
Why? They were worried about their students, trapped at home, missing a lesson or a wellness check.
Most teachers have dozens—if not hundreds—of contractually allotted sick days banked that they will never use and never be paid for. Similarly, most never use their contractually allotted personal days.
I currently have 204 sick days in the bank. I’ve used about a dozen of the 54 personal days allotted to me over my career.
Why?
When I’m not feeling well or am injured, I try like hell to go to school.
I try to schedule doctors and dentist appointments after work or in the summer.
Most, if not all, teachers do the same.
If every teacher in my school district began taking every contractually allotted, legally allowed sick and personal day every year, the district would collapse.
Teacher shortages would be overwhelming.
Students would suffer.
There are likely tens of thousands of unused sick days in my school district — unused because teachers love their kids and want to be in school.
But now, someone thinks it’s a good idea to nickel and dime teachers on work hours when we exceed our contractually required work hours every damn week?
Are they blind?
We live in a world where inflation has exceeded 14% over the past three years, and the average American’s average wage growth has matched or exceeded that number.
The average American wage has increased by 13.5% over the past three years.
Yet school districts routinely offer annual salary increases of 1 or 2%.
The United Autoworkers Union—which works in an industry the government recently bailed out—won a 23% pay increase in 2023.
They do important work — building cars and trucks.
But teachers do pretty important work, too. They educate children, teach future UAW members, and prepare UAW leaders to negotiate for better pay.
Nevertheless, teachers are asked to accept minuscule pay increases, which means that, relative to inflation, they have taken at least a 12% pay cut every year for the past four years.
In the shadow of this absolute economic reality, the asinine stupidity of trying to extend a teacher’s required school day while failing to compensate them enough to simply match inflation is shortsighted, cruel, and stupid.
The proposal will likely never pass. Teachers would never agree to such nonsense. But the damage has already been done. The message is clear:
You may already be working outside of your contracted work hours—before school, after school, and in the summer—but we don’t care. We want to lock you down and dictate where and when you work at all times.
You may be piling up sick and personal days because it’s more important for you to be with your students, but we don’t care. We want you correcting those papers and preparing those lessons at your desk, damn it.
You may be doing all this while your salary increases lag behind the national average by at least ten percent and during highly inflationary times, but we also don’t care. We want to put you on a time clock.
We want to treat you like students — dictating where and when you’ll complete your work.
In short, we don’t see you as professionals.
That is the dumbest part of the proposal. It reminds teachers they are undervalued and underappreciated and not seen as professionals. It tells teachers that all the sacrifices they make for students and their schools—both with their time and wallets—are irrelevant in the eyes of administrators.
It’s a proposal that damages morale. It makes teachers question their choice of career, and it makes future teachers hesitant about entering the profession.
It’s shortsighted, stupid, and lacks any semblance of decency.
I can’t begin to imagine what the person proposing this was thinking.
My hope: They weren’t thinking.
My worry: They were thinking clearly, and this proposal reflects their perceptions of the educators.
Either way, the damage has been done.
