Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ), U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom — among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks.
The OECD average is 786 hours.And that’s just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays).
One of the things that can piss me off faster than just about anything else in the world is listening to people slam teachers. That absolutely makes my blood boil.
I have had the privilege of working with some of the finest educators in the country, and I can tell you from my own experiences with schools in the Anchorage area, that I have only rarely, and I mean RARELY, come across a teacher who I considered less than completely dedicated to the children they taught.
When I worked at the local elementary school for those four years, I would often receive calls from the teacher that I worked with, who was still at the school sometimes as late as seven o-clock in the evening inputting data on the computer or preparing her lessons.
Now this article goes on to say that despite these many hours of classroom instruction that America is still not doing as well as it could with educating our young people. But I would suggest that it has much more to do with the lack of parental involvement, the "dumbing" down of the textbooks around the country, and the focus on "teaching to the test" that has been the focus of education in our public schools since the introduction of NCLB.
Nor does it help to provide a multifaceted educational experience with the dramatic increase in the banning of books from our school libraries:
On Monday at the Republic, MO school board meeting, four Republic School Board members reviewed a year-old complaint that three books are inappropriate reading material for high school children. In a 4-0 vote, the members decided to ax two of the three books from the high school curriculum and the library shelves: Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson was spared. The resident who filed the original complaint targeted these three books because “they teach principles contrary to the Bible“
There have been 20 books banned in the last six months from school libraries. And instead of responding to complaints from a single parent, like in times past, these days the complaints are coming from organizations that seem determined to "clean up" the libraries in response to a religious or political agenda:
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says he believes the challenges are increasingly influenced by politics and the economy.
" Districts are dependent on budgets, and politically motivated school boards try to determine what we read, what we think and what we teach," he says.
Here is the list of banned books.
Cutting school funding at every opportunity, demanding high exam scores even in low income/high crime areas, and removing intellectually stimulating reading material that does not comport with a right wing political agenda, and we want to blame TEACHERS for the lack of success in our classrooms?
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