This is a letter I have sent to Gov. Chris Christie in reply to Paula Desch’s letter as published in the Tri-Town News of Nov. 25, 2010. Gov. Christie, I have been reading week in and week out the lamentations of the New Jersey public school teaching community.
Ms. Desch, in her letter to you (the governor), compares herself to “any other executive.”
However, there is really no comparison, as most private sector executives contribute a much larger percentage of their paycheck for heath care coverage than does Ms. Desch; they do not get their summers off, they do not get time off to attend a convention, they do not get a Christmas break, nor do they get an Easter break, they do not get all the holidays a New Jersey public school teacher receives and they certainly do not get anything called tenure.
As an employee in the private sector, the private sector employee does not get a “45-minute prep period” each day as does Ms. Desch, as it is expected that by virtue of your having been hired in the first place, you will be prepared when you walk into your place of employment.
Oftentimes in the private sector, not only do you not get a contractually guaranteed 30 minutes for lunch, you don’t get your lunch break at all, and if and when you do miss a lunch, you don’t have a union business agent to complain to.
Yes, Ms. Desch is able to work a second career or operate a secondary business during her summer vacation to supplement her income. How many private sector employees do you know that get a full summer vacation every year?
Ms. Desch refers to the 180 to 186 school days per year that she is required to work. There are 260 working days in a year and at most the private sector employee gets 10 holidays and two to three weeks vacation per year. Very few get more, and this includes Christmas and Easter.
I know of very few private sector jobs that allow one to bargain away a Veterans Day or Election Day in order to substitute some other advantage, because they never got those days as holidays in the first place.
I know of many teachers that do not, nor did they ever attend any of the teachers’ conventions, as they simply considered those days as days off. As a matter of fact, this was true of most of the teachers I knew.
I would not want to visit Ms. Desch’s classroom as she suggests you do. I did not choose to be a teacher. I can’t do her job; I don’t want to do her job. But I don’t think she would have enjoyed my job either, because I had to work more than 180 to 186 days a year and I did not get my summers off and I did not get every conceivable holiday off, and I wasn’t guaranteed a 30-minute lunch period, and I could not bank my sick days, and lastly, I did not have anything like tenure.
Yes, we need a good education system with good teachers who care about educating our children, but the system we are burdened with now does not provide incentives for teachers to be good. It only promotes a seniority system; merit is not a consideration.
We need to have the ability and the right to reward the good teachers and to be able to get rid of the incompetent, noncaring ones. If we could do this, we would all benefit.
Joel Drobes Freehold Township