A reader recently wrote what it is like to work for a for-profit tutoring company:
I am a teacher in a Catholic school and I work for one of these for profit tutoring companies in Chicago. I provide small group instruction to children in math and reading.
Although I feel that I am conscientious and try my best to provide the best services I can for my students, the company I work for pays teachers very low salaries and forces them to teach extremely unreasonable number of hours per day with almost no preparation time. I, for example, teach nine, 40 minute classes per day with a 20 minute lunch.
The company is squeezing teachers more and more so that the company makes lots of money for their shareholders (because they are paid by the head).
The company cares only about paperwork, and does not care one iota about whether the children learn anything at all. I love the school I work at and the children I teach, but the many, many layers of management add no value whatsover to the end product and provide zero professional development to their teachers.
If more people understood what these companies are doing, they would be outraged!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Am I understanding correctly that the Catholic school is paying an outside company to provide it’s remedial reading and math classes?
Sadly, these companies can get away with this because there are enough certified elementary teachers who can’t get public school jobs who will take these ridiculous jobs. If folks didn’t take the jobs, they’d have to change the salary and working conditions. The existence of these jobs also applies downward pressure on the wages of public school teachers who can be bullied in negotiations with threats that their jobs can be replaced by these temp workers.
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Exactly right. Most things are run by market conditions. I retired in 2006. The family medical plan in 2006 was $360 a year or so extra, no matter if I had 15 children. I recently spoke to a grammar school teacher who said he had to have his wife work to be insured under her job. The main reason was because if he had the family plan for her and the 2 children, it would cost him about 1/2 his check. That is on top of larger classes, longer school day and longer school year. The pay has remained constant, but the burn out rate is much higher.
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This perfectly mirrors what is happening in privately run care homes in the UK – the workers pay decreases as the hours increase and the quality of care becomes inversely proportionate to the profits made.
Yet the Government here is hell-bent on privatising everything – destroying vocation-reliant domains simply because they recompensed with money from, and subsequent jobs in industry.
A continuing crime against democracy.
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I love when right-to-work (for less) advocates talk about how companies “won’t take advantage of individuals,” so “why should they need to belong to collective bargaining units?”
Here is a perfect example of why people need to band together and press for reasonable working conditions. It improves not just the quality-of-life for the employees, but it allows them to do their best work which, when children are involved, is of the utmost importance.
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Things are going full circle to the workhouses situation that blighted Britain 100 years or so ago. The momentum towards a position of oppressive worker dominance is huge, so the task for a united people to slow it down will be immense. Already, a sizeable majority of ‘have-nots’ across the world are treated effectively as slaves by the ‘haves’.
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Exactly! Do a search for ALEC and you’ll see it’s across the board in every facet of life.
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Thanks, I did (American Legislative Exchange Council – ‘Limited Government · Free Markets · Federalism’).
I have an interesting personal perspective on this matter by virtue of some successful business friends. Whatever social-minded and commonsensical angle I propose to them, they remain staunchly pro business. It seems that a life saturated with exposure to business and less to people will always veer that way – we humans want to promote for others what works for us.
But these lucky, wealthy friends are blinded to the reality of life at or below the breadline for a large percentage of humans.
The pro-business mindset is, alas, what is cultivated in the elite that make it into top level political positions. They too see no problem in what their pro-business stance as insufficient numbers of them have been exposed to a harsh life.
To my eyes, promoting politicians into roles such as national education decision making is fundamentally flawed. Politicians should manage the country, but delegate detailed decision making to experts – experts for education in my example.
This is precisely what happens in Finland, where a cross-party agreement enables education experts to develop a long term, cohesive, pro-people plans for education.
Sorry if I have rambled i this comment – my mind does have a tendency to jump.
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