Mr. Hand: What is this fascination with truancy? What is it that gets inside of your heads? There are some teachers at this school who look the other way at truants. It's a little game you both play. They pretend they don't see you, and you pretend you don't ditch! Now, in the end, who pays the price? YOU!
Jeff Spicoli: [Desmond re-enters; Spicoli follows with bagel stuffed into crotch; with open shirt, barefoot, holding Vans] Wait a minute, there's no birthday party for me here! Hello, Mr. Hand.
Mr. Hand: What's the reason for your truancy?
Jeff Spicoli: Just couldn't make it on time.
Mr. Hand: You couldn't, or you wouldn't?
Jeff Spicoli: See, there was a full crowd at the food lines.
Mr. Hand: Food will be eaten on YOUR time. Why are you continuously late for this class, Mr. Spicoli? Why do you shamelessly waste my time like this?
Jeff Spicoli: [long pause, but then with complete truth in his answer] I don't know.
Mr. Hand: [Mr. Hand goes to blackboard and writes the words 'I Don't Know', then underlines them]
[reciting]
Mr. Hand: I like that. 'I Don't Know.' That's nice.
[imitating]
Mr. Hand: 'Mr. Hand, will I pass this class?' Gee, Mr. Spicoli, I don't know! You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to leave your words right up here for all my classes to enjoy, giving you full credit of course, Mr. Spicoli.
Jeff Spicoli: All right!
How many wasted, brain dead Spicolis are we pumping out of our public school system into society? Too many. One of the major reasons for this result is non-caring tenured teachers, protected by powerful teachers' unions. We could use teachers who cared as much as Mr. Hand. It has been 28 years since I was in high school. I had mostly mediocre teachers, but two teachers left a permanent impression on me. Charlie McLaughlin's and Thomas McGrath's enthusiasm for learning, knowledge of the subject matter, and concern for the students generated a passion for learning in me. Being inspired by a teacher is what every student needs to get to the next level.
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Jeff Spicoli: This is U.S. History, I see the globe right there.
The average salary of public school teachers is approximately $53,000. The average salary of public school teachers in California leads the nation at $65,000. This gives the term pay for performance a new meaning. A full 32% of all public school students in California don't graduate high school. The California public school system doesn't even prepare the average student well enough to read a newspaper or fill out an employment application at McDonalds. Based on information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the following facts can be gleaned:
- The average public school teacher was paid 36% more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker.
- Full-time public school teachers work on average 36.5 hours per week during weeks that they are working. By comparison, white-collar workers (excluding sales) work 39.4 hours, and professional specialty and technical workers work 39.0 hours per week. Private school teachers work 38.3 hours per week.
- Compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less.
- Public school teachers are paid 61% more per hour than private school teachers, on average nationwide.
- The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.
With the highest average salary per teacher, Detroit must be turning out the best and brightest. Does a 75% high school dropout rate merit the highest salaries in the country? The district has 15,000 workers, an annual budget of $1.2 billion, and only graduates 25% of the 94,000 students it matriculates through its horrific system. Well done. I'm sure they will get big union negotiated raises this year. There is absolutely no evidence that average teacher pay is related to high school graduation rates. Due to their strong teachers' unions, salaries, benefits and tenure are fought for, while the interests of the students are disregarded.
"A lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent."
Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers
Excellent motivated teachers produce excellent motivated students. Incompetent, unmotivated, burnt out, tenured teachers produce dropouts and functionally illiterate students. Tenure allows bad teachers to stay employed for decades. It is virtually impossible to get fired. In ten years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey's schools. Newark's school district successfully fired about one out of every 3,000 tenured teachers annually. Graduation statistics indicate that Newark's graduation rate was a fabulous 30.6%. New York City's Chancellor has revealed that in that city, only ten out of 55,000 tenured teachers were terminated in the 2006-2007 school year. According to the New York Daily News, at any given time in New York City an average of 700 teachers are being paid not to teach (they instead report to "rubber rooms") while the district goes through the hoops (imposed by the union contract and by law) needed to pursue discipline or termination. A city teacher in New York that ends up being fired will have spent an average of 19 months in the disciplinary process. The Daily News reported that the New York City school district spends more than $65 million annually paying teachers accused of wrongdoing, in addition to the cost of hiring substitutes.
One highly destructive feature of the typical teachers' union contract is a system that forces principals to hire teachers who transfer from other schools within the district. Since these teachers frequently are transferring because of poor performance in their original schools, the practice is called "the dance of the lemons" or "passing the trash." One problem related to the destructive transfer system is a hiring process that takes too long and/or starts too late, thanks in part to union contracts. Would-be teachers typically cannot be hired until senior teachers have had their pick of the vacancies, and the transfer process makes principals reluctant to post vacancies at all for fear of having a bad teacher fill it instead of a promising new hire. Anywhere from 31% to almost 60% of applicants withdrew from the hiring process, often to accept jobs with districts that made offers earlier. Applicants who withdrew from the hiring process had significantly higher undergraduate GPAs, were 40% more likely to have a degree in their teaching field, and were significantly more likely to have completed educational coursework than the teachers who ended up staying around to finally receive job offers. Another common problem with the union contract is a "bumping" policy that fills schools which are more needy (but less desirable to teach in) with greater numbers of inexperienced teachers. In its report Teaching Inequality, the Education Trust wrote:
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