Teachers Contracts Enable Delinquent Teachers

Hey, if teachers are sick so much of the time, maybe it's that they aren't paid enough. Maybe if we raised their pay by 100%, they will be more dedicated to teaching? What a hoot -! Do union contracts really have anything to do with teaching?

Just like the teachers in Wisconsin when they left their class rooms to protest at the capital for months, they called in sick - they even had real doctors meet with them on site to write sick notes so the school district wouldn't charge them with sick days.

The doctors came from the university hospital staff, and by writing false sick releases for the protesting teachers, they were accused of failing their oath as a doctor - yikes - of course nothing came of it, everyone skated excepted the taxpayers, they got stuck with the bill. Who knew? It's Madison, Wisconsin.

WOW - how cool is that. And wait, there's more cool stuff, when the news got out that this was a fraud, it wasn't hardly covered by the media, but it was mentioned, it was in the abstract, nothing to see here, then it just seemed to go away. Yeah, we need a stronger teachers union and more progressive socialist Democrats in power to make our lives better.

Teachers actually teaching, a lot of them do, but is the prevailing attitude 'the kids come first', hardly, its hog wash - Little wonder why America is ranked 19th world wide for education excellence.

No Substitute for a Teacher
March 6, 2013
Source: June Kronholz, "No Substitute for a Teacher," Education Next, Spring 2013.

School districts around the country struggle on a day-to-day basis to find enough substitute teachers to fill in for their contract teachers who have called in for one reason or another. These substitutes do not provide the same quality education, but the deeper issue is why so many substitutes are needed, says June Kronholz at Education Next.

• The Education Department reports that 5.3 percent of U.S. teachers are absent on any given day, but what counts as an absence varies from school to school and district to district.
• In Camden, New Jersey, the school board said that it needed to find substitutes for 40 percent of its teachers each day, and a subsequent report by Brown University's Urban Education and Policy program verified that teachers took an average of 21 days off per school year.
• Nationally, 36 percent of teachers are absent more than 10 days per year.

Two studies concluded that teachers in bigger schools were absent more often than in smaller schools, elementary school teachers were absent more often than high school teachers, tenured teachers took off 3.7 more days than those without tenure, female teachers under age 35 averaged 3.2 more absences than did men and teachers who have a master's degree took off less time than those who didn't.

• Teachers claim that they are absent so often because they are exposed to an increased amount of germs, but researchers point out that teachers are frequently absent because of generous leave provisions in their contracts.
• According to the National Council and Teacher Quality, 113 large school districts' collective bargaining agreements provide an average of 13.5 sick days and personal leave per school year.
• A Harvard University study indicates that most days taken off are "personal illness" days but only last one or two days because most districts require a doctor's note on the third day of illness.

Substitutes are not required to have a teaching certification, teaching education classes, and in some districts, nothing more than a high school GED. Substitutes who are qualified are often required to administer busy work or babysit the class instead of utilizing their skills.

Districts that reward teachers for not taking sick days see a decreased need for substitutes while districts that cap the number of sick days that can be traded for a payout notice teachers continue to take days in a use-'em-or-lose' em situation.