I wish to take exception with the views of letter writer Jennifer Biel-Franco, as expressed in her Oct. 4 letter, “The extras teachers give.” She was responding to Steve Lardner’s letter to the editor, “Public school system gets failing marks.”
She speaks about all the “extra” time she put in as a teacher doing things like grading papers and class preparation.
I travel on the Metra daily and I see person after person with a laptop open working on some sort of document or spreadsheet. I also see people reading various work-related items in preparation for their next day’s work. Biel-Franco is sorely mistaken if she believes that teachers are the only ones who do uncompensated work at home.
She also speaks about how teachers often give up summers to take additional classes.
What Biel-Franco fails to mention is that many public school teachers receive an automatic increase in salary for additional semester hours or advanced degrees they earn.
Often no distinction is made between how well a person performs in a particular class or degree program. It’s just “punch your ticket” and get more money.
I have an advanced degree in business and will complete one in library science in December and I am guaranteed no such automatic increase.
As a former substitute teacher in a suburban high school, I saw firsthand what goes on.
In the district I was in, a full load for a teacher consisted of 200 minutes of classroom time plus a 40-minute supervision (such as study hall duty), for a total of 240 minutes. I challenge Biel-Franco to tell me of one organization other than school that gives a full day’s pay for four hours of work.
I find Biel-Franco’s letter infuriating and condescending as a taxpayer. She claims that we who are paying her salary “have very little clue.”
I think that what is upsetting to Biel-Franco is that many of us in the community are getting a clue and upsetting the status quo of public education in this nation and she does not like it.
It is the attitude of entitlement by people like Ms. Biel-Franco that hampers true school reform.
