Now, let’s get to the real problems that exist within our system: tenure, tracking, credential requirements, accountability, school start time, electives, observations, salary, course offerings, testing, communication, etc. That’s where we need to spend our time.

And Dan, your earlier comment is fairly right on. I try really hard to fit into that 50% you describe. It doesn’t take 60 hours every week to make that happen, but there are quite a few weeks where that’s the case.

I don’t think I made either-or declarations.

I don’t think working efficently is dumb.

I don’t think I stood on a soapbox.

My overall point is that teaching, especially teaching in those much-vaunted “high-need, at-risk” communities, is a job that is damn near impossible to do well if you put in 40 hours a week. After your time in front of kids, you’ve spent about 32 hours a week on the job, give or take. To work a 40-hour week, we’re talking about 8 hours or so of lesson planning, assessing, tracking achievement, communicating with families, offering additional assistance or heaven forbid enrichment, and/ or participating in any school-based events. My point was, rather than alter expectations such that folks can keep Starbucks hours and still feel good, we should alter the way our profession is structured, communicated, marketed, qualified for, and compensated, such that the (basically) required 60 hours seems about right on to the folks who are seeking the job.

As for TMAO’s comment: “Why dumb it down (for lack of a better term)?” um, excuse me but when did working efficently become dumb? Time management, classroom management, and lesson planning are all skills. They can be learned and improved.
Standing on a soapbox and declaring “my way or the highway” doesn’t create a valuable discussion nor does it help your collegues or the profession in general.

And to suss out your sub-rosa point here, Chris, it seems like you’re saying that, well, TMAO and Dan are both fans of the standardized model. Both of them feel comfortable putting in a bunch of off-contract hours, which is fine, but what about the teachers who don’t feel like jacking their hourly rate so close to minimum wage.

Which is a fine point, really, and it’d be pretty lame and smug of me to trumpet the standardized model if I thought it meant every teacher in America had to up their hourly contribution to 60+ per week (barring any enticements you or TMAO can concoct).

But I don’t.

I think to make the standardized model work, teachers need to work smarter more than harder. Teachers need to change how they work inside their classrooms more than they need to increase their contribution outside.

If I could be confident that 50% of America’s teachers …

1. … didn’t waste hours on the week and days on the year with lousy class- and time-management …
2. … gave more than an afterthought to what their state board asked them to teach … (i.e. if they checked out their state’s framework, standards, or released questions at the start of the year rather than five days before testing) …

… and the nation’s students didn’t show gains across the board, I’d vote to toss testing.

But there are a lot of teachers who waste a lot of time. Students know it and feel it and it annoys them. The California math standards assume you are teaching 180 days out of the year but, once time-sucks are considered, we’re somewhere south of 150. If we’re after a model that lets us dawdle and pick and choose the times we want to respect our students’ compulsory time commitment, then yeah, let’s scrap standardized testing. I just maintain a lot of hope that we can get this thing right.

All I really want to know is what was the Guinness World Record?