Lots of people think that competition between public and charter school districts motivates every district to improve the quality of their product and streamline their business practices. Examining whether this desired outcome is really being achieved is beyond the scope of this blog post. For now, let’s just embrace the current reality of school deregulation and focus on the question: How should we approach teacher pay as we move toward these new school models?
Most hourly jobs in the US have to follow hourly minimum wage laws, including overtime laws. Salaried workers, too, must be paid overtime for hours in excess of 40 per week, if their salary is lower than $23,660 per year. However, four categories of salaried employment in the US are not subject to the federal minimum wage or overtime laws: the arts, health care, law, and education. Teachers are considered “licensed professionals,” just like doctors and lawyers. The federal government trusts state governments (which issue professional licenses) to decide how teachers should be paid.
For most of the past century, this has worked pretty well. The public has never quite found the money to pay teachers what they wanted, but we’ve usually found a way to keep teachers fed, housed, and able to retire without having to eat cat food. Teachers with summer breaks could take summer jobs or part-time weekend work if they needed more money to make ends meet. Plus, teachers could count on state-sponsored pensions and good health insurance.
However, summer “vacations” are no longer guaranteed. Weekends are no longer reserved for Netflix, grading papers, and driving for Uber. Teachers might not finish their school day until after the plasma donation centers are closed.
As we collectively move away from the traditional school calendar and the brick-and-mortar school building, teachers (who have always brought their work home with them) aren’t guaranteed the right to go home at all.
Ask me how I know.
Speaking from my own recent experience as a teacher in Arkansas, I had a salary of $21,187.50 intended to cover 190 half-days of work. My contract didn’t have a lot of details in it, but the state of Arkansas established the specifics in the Arkansas Code.
Unfortunately, a lot of the laws governing teacher employment standards specify “full-time teachers” in their language. For example, the “Daily Planning Period” law guaranteed my school’s full-time teachers 40 minutes each day to prepare lessons and meet with parents as necessary. Half-time teachers, however, got zero planning minutes.
Okay, that’s pretty minor, right? But four months into the school year, the school got a waiver from the “Noninstructional Duties” law that normally limits extra assigned duties to 60 minutes per week. The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) asked the school to clarify how long it would require this waiver. The school responded it would only need the waiver until January 2019 — when campus construction was supposed to be completed. However, the ADE approved the waiver request until June 30, 2028, without giving any explanation of their decision to grant an extra nine years beyond the end of construction.
Suddenly, although teachers used to work from 8:00–3:00 plus a maximum of 60 additional minutes before/after school each week, the school could legally require every teacher to arrive as early and stay as late as necessary, doing any job they assigned us — including cleaning raw sewage after the sun went down. It wasn’t “volunteering.” It was assigned work. You do it, or you lose your job.
This (true sewage story) might not inspire much sympathy among other salaried workers who do dirty jobs with long hours. A job’s a job, and you do what you have to do for your paycheck, right? But at my school, three of us teachers weren’t earning enough (remember that $23,660 mark?) for the federal government to consider us exempt from overtime pay. At a low salary — like my $21,187.50 — workers need either a guarantee of extra pay for extra work, or the free time to work other paying jobs. That’s why the federal wage/hour standards exist in the first place!
“If it was so bad at your school, why didn’t you apply for a job somewhere else?”
After all, the school had a waiver from the “Teacher Fair Dismissal Act.” I was an at-will employee: I could be fired at any time, without cause — but I could also quit at any time, without cause. Why not quit and go work for another school district that would treat me better?
Well, the school might have waived the “Teacher Fair Dismissal Act” and lots of other employment-related laws, but A.C.A. § 6–17–304 was still in effect. This law effectively prevents school districts from hiring teachers who are already under contract with another district by requiring the new district to pay the old district for the privilege of hiring the teacher. Who would want to hire a teacher if you have to pay her salary PLUS a purchase price to her previous employer?
Honestly, this sounds more like chattel slavery than at-will employment.
To be more specific, if I were a few months into the school year and my employer (like six school districts in Arkansas have already done) suddenly got waivers from the law requiring them to pay me for weekend/summer teaching duties, this would add 175 days of potential work to my contract, without increasing my pay. If they also got a waiver from the law limiting “additional duties” to 60 minutes per week (which my school did,) the school could also increase my work hours from “half-days” to unlimited hours each day — still entirely legally. Neither the state nor federal government would interfere, nor would my contract protect me.
Instead of earning $111.51 per day for 190 days, I’d be making $58.05 per day for 365 days. Instead of working half-days, I’d be working full days. The school would suddenly get four times as much work from me without ever having to negotiate a new contract — and there would be no way for me to quit and get a teaching job somewhere else.
In fact, there would also be absolutely nothing stopping the school from making me work 24 hours per day. This might seem inhumane and absurd, but it would be totally legal. And they’d only have to pay $2.42 per hour, by the way. Either be grateful, or quit teaching and go work at McDonalds. Your choice.
I quit my teaching job after three months, so I’m not still at the mercy of the school’s abusive employment practices. In fact, I will not teach in a public school again — not under these negligent laws, and not until my “forced labor” lawsuit is resolved. It’s legal for schools here (yes, all schools) to require human beings to work 24 hours a day/365 days a year, with the right to unilaterally change the terms of their employment at any moment, no minimum wage, and no feasible way to seek employment elsewhere in their field.
You know what would fix this? It’s probably not the teachers’ union, which is ranked 48th in the country. We need to quit exempting schools from having to follow the wage/hour laws established by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The more that we encourage districts to run their schools like businesses, the more we should include teachers in the same category of labor laws that govern everybody else: Minimum wage or more. The right to negotiate contracts on an individual basis. Overtime for hourly or low-salaried employees working more than 40 hours per week. The possibility of high-achieving employees getting a better offer at any time.
Then, maybe, we’ll see teachers start competing to be the best at their jobs — instead of quitting the profession (40% within five years) or becoming stagnant as they wait for retirement. That’s the whole idea, right?