Remember the D.C. Whistleblower? Adell Cothorne was the new principal at a highly-touted elementary school where test scores had gone up and off, off the charts. She said she walked in on a grade-erasure session, where staff members were changing student answers from wrong to right. When she blew the whistle on what she learned, she became a pariah and nearly lost her career. For a time, she ran a cupcake bakery. She appeared on John Merrow’s PBS program about the legacy of Michelle Rhee, telling her story.
Now she is back as an educator.
In this post, Cothorne tells us about her early years as a worker for McDonald’s. she reminds us why thousands of fast-food workers are demanding a living wage of $15 an hour. Employers say the rise in costs would be prohibitive for consumers. But would it? She says no.
Another side to this story, which Cothorne does not explore, is the millions of dollars that the heads of these corporations are paid. When you read about the corporate head of a fast-food chain who is paid $10 million a year while paying workers $7-9 an hour, you have to wonder if they have a conscience.
I don’t have a problem with fast food employees earning $15 an hour. What I would have a problem with is my high school students earning more than teachers in our district with 10 years or less experience. This is my 16th year in teaching and $15 an hour for 40 hours a week for 50 weeks in a year comes very close to what I make. Keep in mind I work 65-70 hours a week for 39 weeks and 35-40 hours a week for 13 weeks. I teach high school math so I will leave the figuring as an exercise for you.
“. . . you have to wonder if they have a conscience.”
Nah! That particular brand model of human has never come with a conscience.
Can you disaggregate that assertion with some data please?
(Hee hee). I will just bet it ends up a bell curve.
Which would you rather deal with, Duane? A bell curve or hand bells? Because if I were not teaching public school music I would probably work in a church. And that means hand bells. Ah, the hand bells.
Bell curves or hand bells, that’s what it comes down to for me.
Generally the the best kind of curves are those formed by the female of the species which can cause my bells to go off!
Dirty old Spanish teacher.
Ring aling.
More on the topic of this post: I recall a parent saying to one of my students when I was a gifted teacher that she had had a lot of French fries in her life and did not want that for her children. In fact, I recall the younger of her two children telling me her parents had met because her dad managed a Sonic and her mom ran the deep fat frier.
If not but for the bell curve, her children might not have gotten the extra challenges and attention they needed per their IEP (in Kansas gifted is under the EC umbrella). So I am OK with the bell curve. I think it helps bring attention to outliers on both ends of the curve who need more individual attention. Just sayin.
Duane, I don’t even think “they” are human.
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Something just occurred to me. Cothorne has an administrative credential, right? And experience as a teacher and administrator. And she’s demonstrated integrity under pressure.
Would those attributes actually disqualify somebody from being considered as Chancellor of New York City’s public schools? What do you think, New York?
chemtchr: quite so.
However, keeping in mind the likes of Superintendents/CEOs like Michelle “Bloody Lips” Rhee, Paul “Move On” Vallas and John “Fire Patrena Shankling” Deasy, she is unqualified to wreck any public school system.
To build and sustain a “better education for all”—now THAT she could do.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.” [Charles Dickens]
Let’s hope the present Age of the Severely Undeserving gives way at some point to the Age of the Most Assuredly Deserving.
😎
While NYC, or even NYS could definitely use a person with Cothorne’s skills, I think she should take Duncan’s place. Obama doesn’t have nearly enough women in his cabinet, and he could use a qualified person to run the Education Department.
Corporate drug pushers profit off of boredom in the classroom: The following just came up on the NY Times site and those of us who have been involved in education for any length of time remember when the diagnosis discussed in this article began to be made for every kid who wasn’t “doing well” in the classroom, no matter how little the classroom was doing for him. I have no doubt that most have experienced boredom in the classroom and the disorder was not with you but with the material and the methods to which you were being subjected. Ways have been devised to remove the disease of boring from the classroom but it keeps coming back with teachers who give in to corporate curricula created by textbook companies and the lesson pushers who give workshops for great amounts of money to teachers who have to get their fix of what is currently being sold on the intervention market. Perhaps the inservice sellers and the textbook companies get a kickback from the doctors and drug companies that deal with the the illness they create. I remember reading a quote a long time ago by someone whose name I cannot remember at this moment who said that motivation is a term we have created to describe a symptom of a malady we have created (referring, of course, to lack of motivation). I never thought at the time I read the quote (paraphrased, at best, above) that the symptom would come to be understood and accepted to be an illness to be treated with drugs! But then, the corporate world we have come to accept as our reality, the reality taught to be a proper reality in the schools, allows for scams to be an aspect of doing business and that business, the economy it produces, accepted as being good and wholesome and righteous. Bullshit.
Just to muddy the waters a little: On more than one occasion, I have dealt with teenagers who suffered from boredom, and used that excuse as a reason to put very little effort into their classes. A little soul searching plus a dose of maturity changed their attitudes toward the amount of effort they dedicated to coursework. Lo and behold, they discovered that more often than not their classes magically became interesting. Granted, I am not talking about off the shelf, scripted lessons, but I shudder lest we think that if only we eliminate the corporate bugaboo our teachers will be able to wow all our students with wonderfulness.
No doubt there are a variety of experiences. The most important thing that lead to my son’s dedication to mathematics was his exposure to instructors who understood mathematics deeply. In his junior year of high school these were senior meth Ph.D. Students, in his senior year these were full professors of mathmatics.
Too many threads going. I thought this comment was in a thread on the GT posting. Apologies.
And how was that soul searching activated and how was the “dose” of maturity administered?
Forgot the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-attention-deficit-disorder.html?src=me
superb. thank you
They do not have a conscience. We have too many folks who make $9 while the top makes millions. But isn’t that true for teachers. Teachers have at least a MS degree and how much do they make a year. Its outrageous.
Not all teachers have a Masters. The percents are around 52% for public school teachers and 38% for private school teachers.
You’re actually right about that, FUSCO.
I’m so glad, to be honest, that you had the guts to come right out and say this! More power to you.
I’m a public school teacher with an MS.
Can we discuss this issue of outrageous teacher pay together? Let’s celebrate your new found discovery, and I’ll bring a magnum of vintage Dom Perignon.
Please let’s get get together for dinner in your home town.
Just make sure to give me your address and please, please let me know where there is a private airport so that I can land my private jet and catch a limousine to your place.
As a public school teacher, I have to put up with all these accoutrements that my middle class counterparts don’t have to deal with . . . .
So true. I’ll have my private chauffeur drop me off and join you. I’m living on the largess of the public trough.
FUSCO,
You’ve hit the nail on the head.
Down with those horrid filthy rich public school teachers. THEY caused the crash in the economy, not Wall Street.
FUSCO, let’s you and I go after them! Whaddya say?
We need to regulate teachers, not billionaires like Bruce Covner, who actually bought a prized show donkey from a friend of mine who raises them in France in the Midi-Pyrenees . . . . .
FUSCO, what would this fine country do without great thinkers like you!?
It is outrageous. Teachers in the United States do one of the most difficult jobs, and they do those jobs extraordinarily well, and in many, many parts of the United States, if a single teacher has a couple of kids, her kids will qualify under the federal guidelines for for eligibility for the free and reduced lunch program for those living in poverty.
How did you interpret FUSCO’s comment, Mr. Shepherd?
Am truly shocked to hear the many teachers here who earn ca. $15 an hour. In my area – small inner city – a teacher with 10 years experience will make $60,000-$70,000. Many experienced teachers approach six figures. I think it is a tough job that deserves that sort of pay if done well. However, I also caution teachers in using a “we are low paid” argument in these discussions because that is certainly not universal.
It takes 30 years in Buffalo and a Masters degree to get $75,000. In some of the suburbs it takes between ten to fifteen years to make over $80,000. Some teachers even make over $100,000.
Uh-oh.
Have I misinterpreted FUSCO?
“We have too many folks who make $9 while the top makes millions. But isn’t that true for teachers. Teachers have at least a MS degree and how much do they make a year. Its outrageous.”
Outrageous because teachers make too much like the executives at McDonald’s or outrageous because teachers are still ill paid?
I need to do a close reading according to the CCSS or FUSCO needs to disambuguate his language. . . . I’m not sure.
CCSS, please help us.
I am thrilled to hear that Cothorne is back as an educator. It is comforting to know that someone who is courageous and honorable got back “on the horse”! I look forward to hearing more about her advocacy. And her points are certainly well stated.
If McDonald’s workers make $15 an hour we will have even more trouble keeping kids in high school. Also, if they worked a 40 hour week they would make more money than teachers at my school with 10 years experience. And some if them have master’s degrees.
Maybe we can have a government agency set wage
Excels for various industries/fields such that we ensure that McDonalds workers make more than they do now, but note nought such that it surpasses teachers. This way we can all advocate for higher wages without feeling threatened that someone with less schooling than we have will make more than we do (and, thus, by extension, more than they deserve).
Ummm…”wage Excels” should just be “wages”. Darn autocorrect.
And “note nought” = “not enough”. So much for making a point. Oy vey!
If teachers with masters degrees that have been working for ten years are making less than $35,000 a year, then you are working in the wrong state. They will earn much more in the public sector. Leave the jobs to the TFAs, you deserve more. The school districts deserve whatever they can get. Unfortunately, it’s the kids who will suffer.
Since the corporate profiteers make millions upon millions, I think they should just pay the cashiers and grill workers $50 an hour. For a 35-hour work week (40 hours less lunch), that would be $87,500 per year for a 50-week year (two weeks vacation; hourly workers generally don’t get paid leave, though some do). That’s quite a good salary and enough to push them out of poverty or near-poverty.
For that much I’d start flipping burgers.
I think higher wages and less hand outs is the way to a more healthy society. If minimum compensation is 30 K for a 2000 hour year, what should be the compensation for a skilled job like a teacher? Hopefully pay plus benefits would add up to 50 K, minimum starting salary, for putting in 2000 hours in some way, shape, or form over the course of a year.
What would we do wot all of the high school grads and those without high school degrees who fond themselves unemployed because their skills do not measure up to a $30K job? Should we also force companies to hire people at $30K? And we would need to have another federal agency to establish proper wages for the different fields.
Should we force companies to hire people at minimum wage? No. But, hopefully there is a financial incentive to make more by working than being unemployed. Hopefully there is a huge financial incentive to be a professional teacher versus a unskilled laborer. How to design a rational economic system I suppose is a little more tricky.
I am glad to see that I am not the only one making points like this on the blog.
There is, of course, a financial incentive to be a teacher rather than an unskilled laborer. I imagine you will find very few unskilled laborer a capable of being teachers, though, hard though they may work. (And as for designing a rational economic system…it cannot be done.)
Kudos to Adell Cothorne for risking her career to save her integrity. We need more leadership willing to do the same. I’m glad she was victorious in the end.
Her article is spot on. I went to see Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed (a must read), when she spoke at UB. When she advocated for a higher minimum wage she was heckled with “the economy won’t support it!” Her reply, “I’m a biologist, not an economist, and I can tell you that biologically, the human body cannot survive on minimum wage!” From that day forward, I have been an advocate for a living wage.
I’ve known too many elderly widows who had to go back to work in order to survive. Also moms and dads trying to support their families. I don’t even begrudge the high school or college student trying to pay for a car or their college tuition. The money they earn goes right back into the economy. No one would do that dirty job to sock away in a savings account. They work because they have to.
And SC Math Teacher is right. Why go off welfare if it pays better than a real job. You have to make it worth their while. And let’s face it, we are going to pay their living expenses, one way or another. (I know I’m going to have to fill my daughter’s gas tank, so if I get her to run an errand for me, at least I’m getting some bang for my buck.)
The teacher’s pay is another issue. My union continues to fight that battle. I realize the parents expect us to be Mother Theresa – we do it for the children. I say, what about our children? We need to keep “educating” the public about what our job means and why we should be valued. Sounds simple, but it will be easier to get McDonalds employees that $15 an hour pay, than to expect sympathy from the people in our neighborhoods.
As my former principal used to say with some derision and some wisdom, “One day we will ALL have our PhDs, making $20,000 a year . . . . . “
Ha, ha! It’s funny because it’s so close to the truth.
Love Barbara Ehrenreich–a person WAY ahead of her time, and our nation’s leaders should have read that back & listened to her way back when.
Oh, wait–I forgot–I’m always the person here pointing out the fact that ALEC just celebrated its 40th birthday.
Barbara Ehrenreich had problems with southerners because she smoked pot. Was that a reason not to take her seriously?
lafared, thanks for the comments about attention deficit disorder & the NYT link.
Again, follow the money & we can all determine there’s more to come–Pear$on just purchase a company that publishes tests for ADD/ADHD and Dyslexia, so you can see what this leads to. In Illinois, there’s some talk of that widespread testing for dyslexia (&, perhaps, ADD/ADHD) will be written as legislation and, perhaps, passed in the General Assembly. Now…where did THAT come from?! This has given the IL
Dyslexia Assn. (which is now called “Everybody Reads”) cause to rejoice. However, they aren’t connecting the dots. What will happen if/when testing is widespread will be: #1–Pear$on makes a WHOLE lot of $$$, thus draining even more from state education coffers=MORE money taken away from the schools/children.
#2.–Students will be diagnosed w/dyslexia, but they will NOT get services they need in the schools, because there is a shortage of teachers trained in Orton-Gillingham, Wilson and other remedial programs highly specific to meet the needs of these students (even when I worked as a sped. resource teacher, few of us had the additional training necessary {I was one of three who had both} to appropriately address the IEP; now, when resource teachers retire, many districts aren’t even hiring replacements–with greater inclusion, more schools are using teacher aides from the self-contained classes to work with the L.D. children, as well as their own pull-outs.
#3–Due to #2, many children who actually ARE dyslexic will not be diagnosed as such, and will not receive services. (Don’t tell me this won’t happen–I worked with people {school psychologists} who tested students who were TOLD to NOT qualify students, so they did not. Please believe that I am not slamming S.P.s–I am talking about just a few people we had, but it DID happen then, & will most certainly happen now.) In any event, all that will be important is that the tests are purchased–KA-CHING!
#4–Insofar as ADD/ADHD–in previous posts, it has been mentioned that more and more students are being looked at as having attention deficits–merely because they “can’t sit still” for test preps and tests. Therefore, they are being “diagnosed,” & “treated” with an Rx. Big bucks for Big Pharma!!! And–with Pear$on tests to quickly diagnose them, double the money that’s flying out the windows! No matter if kids really need meds or not–now we’re not only destroying their minds, but also their bodies. As someone who’s seen firsthand–through 35 years–how difficult it is to get these meds right & for parents to get good doctors who are qualified to do the appropriate monitoring, it’s another shame for the children. But, for those who are over medicated and NOT monitored, the results are that you have a zombie child (who may grow into a zombie adult).
And, wouldn’t that make him/her the perfect Walmart or Mac employee?
No asking about raising the minimum wage from her/him!
I was trained in Orton Gillingham at the Gow School. My husband and I took the six week, all day, intensive class. It was an eye opening experience. Unfortunately, my son refused to do it with me. My son used Wilson and Earobics in Middle School. He could describe exactly what techniques he was learning. There were six boys in the reading class for three years together with the same teacher. He’s still close friends with two of them. They are all chefs. My son won’t be reading Shakespeare, but he can read enough to get through life without any problems. And if he has a question about a word – he calls me.
Great to hear about your son. And, yes–for those who don’t know, Orton-Gillingham training is intensive and time-consuming. In fact, after 20 years of receiving certification, I started the course again (for a refresher and update), but had to quit due to the distance I needed to travel. Wilson training is also time consuming but, perhaps, less so. Nonetheless, where school districts may have, in the past, paid for Wilson training, they are not now doing so.
And all that I mentioned early this morning–teacher aides in the classrooms (being used as LD resource teachers), TFAs (who have not had any intensive sped. training or experience) and newer teachers (who have not yet had the additional O-G or other training and, possibly, will not in their future, as it can be expensive)–means that students diagnosed with dyslexia (via the Pear$on tests) will NOT receive the tailored teaching that they will need to succeed.
That having been said, I repeat–it is wonderful to hear that your son is doing so well, as are many others–I am certain–who were truly afforded numerous educational opportunities in the “golden age” (actually, not so golden, but looks so in comparison with what we have now…) of public education.
And I shudder to think of the dreck that these kids will get in the charter schools (as they’re probably being accepted as the least sped–the “token” special ed. students).
There is a rigorous and high salary expectation the few at the top have for themselves, and for the top shareholders playing “Risk” with the livelihoods of those supporting their wealth with actual labor. When the thought of rewarding the efforts of workers is forced into their consideration, their warning (from atop their perch of money and privilege) is that the innocent customer will have to be bled…how else to come up with that money?
The entitled are OUT OF TOUCH with REALITY. They live in BUBBLES and behind HUGE GATES tso wall themselves off from what they consider riff-raff. I don’t want to live a society like this.
And Yvonne, we never will.