How Does Cutting Benefits Help Recruit Teachers?

North Carolina educator Shalon Matthews had her salary frozen not long after she started teaching several years ago.  Last week, the North Carolina legislature passed new law that will cost teachers more to receive the same benefits.  Shalon is beginning to run out of reasons to stay in the profession.  “The pay isn’t great.  Benefits were a perk, and now that’s gone.”

She is not alone in her frustration.  And this blog post does not purport that there is anyone specific to blame.  When money and budgets dwindle, hard and unpopular decisions have to be made.  People suffer.

The point of this post is to reconcile the events in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and other states with the current Administration’s plans to make becoming and staying qualified as a teacher or principal more difficult and expensive. 

Becoming and staying a teacher continuously becomes less attractive.  Shalon adds, “Whenever there is a change, its never good.”  She has a point.  Never in her career has there been any news of a pay increase, benefits increase, or new policy that reduces the schools’ overwhelming responsibilities. 

In the mid 1990s, then governor George W. Bush issued changes that increased teacher pay significantly in Texas.  Other than that, all news had been bad news.

Laws continuously change to hold schools more accountable for student learning, well being, and safety.  Fair enough.  The laws also keep increasing the school’s culpability for what happens in a student’s home, how they get to school, how much they eat, what they are eating, the decisions that they make outside of class, what they are wearing, what NOT to say to them regarding what they are wearing, etc.

Teachers' jobs are often held over their heads because of these matters.


Again, its hard to find one person to blame.  But it is the reality of the situation.  Where do we get teachers who want to do all this…and keep doing it when the number of hoops they have to jump through increases while pay and benefits don’t?

Need another reason to question the attractiveness of teaching?  Read this article about abused teachers.

If you have a solution, please leave it here.  The world will be better for it.

What We Can Learn by Watching the Japanese

Unless they were living near Hiroshima or Nagasaki in 1945, the people in southeast Japan have not seen a worse time.  The have faced a magnitude 9 earthquake, devastating tsunamis, and a perilous situation with a nuclear reactor.  Any one of those individually could mark a worst time in anyone's life.  They faced all three in the same day.  The troubles brought by the first two are still very real, as is the third.

So the people wait in line for hours to get the barest of bare essentials.  Water, food, fuel.  Some come up empty handed despite the wait. What is amazing about how the people of Japan have handled the crises thus far is what they have NOT been doing.

To date there are no reports of a single incident requiring law enforcement.  The people are not shoving each other to get a better position in line.  They are not looting stores.  They are not fighting.  They are not going on TV to pronounce that their current leader is the reason for the suffering.  They are not blaming the rest of the world for not coming to their aid fast enough.

Instead these people wait their turn.  They share what limited amounts of food and water that they have.  They hold each other's place in line.  They help their neighbors carry the heavy loads. 

There isn't enough space on this blog to justly qualify how incredible the Japanese people have been.  So why try? 

The Japanese people have absolutely been an incredible testament to what the best of humanity can be.

The Real Value of a Simon Cowell

In his mega-best seller The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman described the “American Idol Effect.”  It happens to people who are facing criticism for the first time and are shocked to hear that they aren’t perfect.  He pulls the comparison to wannabe American Idols when they faced Simon Cowell for the first time and were not ready for what they heard.  

Some huffed, some threw water, and some just melted down and yelled obscenities.  

Friedman was making the point that we are doing a disservice to American high school students when we leave them to incorrectly think that they are performing at a high level.  The longer we put off telling them the truth, the harsher their American Idol moment.  

Simon Cowell delivered American Idol moments like no one else could. He was blunt, succinct, and sometimes over-harsh.  But he told the contestants what they needed to hear.  He send extra sharp words to contestants that didn’t seem to hear normal critique, he used colorful analogies and metaphor for contestants that didn’t seem to “get it”, and sometimes he would say what a contestant needed to get a fire lit under their butt.  He was the best at it and sometimes hated for it.

What Simon did so well is not easy.   By nature people prefer to deliver good news and be liked.  Teachers, parents, friends included.  But everyone needs a Simon.  Whether it was the whiner who Simon told, “never beg” or the many who were informed that they’d be better suited for cabaret singing.  They all needed to hear it.  It is too bad that they had to wait until adulthood.

On the occasion that Simon laid out a compliment or offered a “well done”, everyone knew that it meant something.  It was earned and was a fail-proof sign that a performer was “getting it done.”  The same cannot be said for the multiple (over) affirmations students receive in their daily lives.  They come so often and for so many reasons, the students sometimes never grasp where reality is.

The exception to the rule is students who perform in front of others and allow themselves to be judged.  Kids who perform and compete in band, drama, choir, debate, public speaking, and sports are told daily where they need to improve.  They are also judged (sometimes unfairly) by spectators.  These kids get it.  They face it at an early age and they get the reality of where their performance is.  They also grow as people.

In the cycle of correction, adjustment, performance, and critique are lessons that so many American Idol wannabes don’t get.  And they show the ill effects in the first round, to the sadistic delight of television viewers everywhere.  

What says you?  Leave a comment and let’s get to the bottom of this.