Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Academic Freedom

Are college teachers paid well? It depends.

What about K-12 teachers? Are they paid well? I would say yes.

What is tenure? Tenure means essentially lifetime guaranteed employment. It's a distinguishing characteristic of the teaching field.

The article Hello, Adjunct, Meet Prof. Cozy divides university teachers into the three categories of tenured professors, non-tenured adjunct professors and graduate assistants. We'll limit our comparison to tenured and adjunct professors herein. The article points out that adjunct professors are paid much, much less than tenured professors.

Adjunct professors also on average earn as little as one half of what K-12 teachers are paid. And unlike adjunct professors, K-12 teachers after three years of teaching almost automatically are granted tenure.

So the obvious question is how is K-12 compensation determined? Well, it's not based on student or teacher performance.

Years of service or seniority is one criterion for K-12 pay. The more years worked, the greater the pay. Then if the K-12 teacher acquires a graduate degree, that teacher is paid even more. Thus, K-12 teacher pay is based on years worked and degrees earned. And most all are granted a lifetime employment guarantee after only a few years teaching.

Yet the K-12 compensation scale seems to be totally separate and apart from what college teachers earn. I have no idea why that should be the case. In fact, although K-12 teachers on average have much less education than adjunct college professors, they earn twice as much and have lifetime employment guarantees, too. This makes no sense to me.

And when I think about the appropriateness of tenure in K-12, I really question why it exists. Evidently, tenure began a couple of centuries ago to make teaching more attractive, since the pay was low compared to other jobs. Later it became a symbol of academic freedom. How and when it came into being in elementary and high schools is something to which I have no clue. Union power perhaps?

As mentioned hereinabove, at the K-12 level teacher pay goes up as more degrees are granted to the individual teacher. As a result, teachers take lots of graduate courses at universities, because that's in large part how they make more money. In fact, more than 25% of degrees at the university graduate level are granted in the field of education.

What seems all too apparent is this: Pay and pay raises don't depend upon teaching performance in the classroom. Not for K-12 teachers and not for college instruction either.

As far as faculty compensation and tenure are concerned, the student "customer" doesn't seem to count at all.

That system seems very wrong to me.

Thanks. Bob.

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