Solution to Furloughs

As I was reading THIS article about furloughs and how parents are rallying to get school days back, I can't help but think that instead of fighting for all these furlough days to be put back into school, we (educators and parents) should focus our fight somewhere else.

We should be supporting and encouraging our students to work and study harder. Since there are less days of school, they should be getting MORE support from their families to learn harder. Instead of focusing on what isn't happening in education because of furloughs, how about we focus on what IS going on and spend our energies on making sure that the students are learning.

If the student's don't do their part to learn, to get their work done, there's nothing that the teachers can do at that point. We're doing our best to stuff our our content into the student's brains with 5 days of work into 4 days. The least the students' can do is work just as hard to get the education.

If not, the only other solutions I can see are pay cuts and/or layoffs. Neither is a good idea.

Pay cuts on an already low teacher salary? Do they want teachers to look for second jobs and focus less on students? We already take work home, hours we don't get paid for. We go above and beyond, stay for hours after our workday is done with no overtime pay. How do they expect us to feed, clothe and house our family with less income AND focus on our students?

Layoffs would be the worst solution ever. Laying off teachers mean that classroom sizes will get larger and the quality of education will lower. The teachers will have too many students to focus on and if class sizes increase, they can probably only catch a handful of the students that need help and miss an armful of kids that are borderline just making it but would have made it further if they had just gotten the help they needed. That my friends will be when the quality of education ends. We will be too busy trying to grade and assess what the students are learning but there will be too many kids just making it and because they are barely there, teachers won't focus on that. Instead of going more into depth and more explanations, teachers will just be trying to get the content finished in time.

I once read Pat Hamamoto say about putting furloughs back in and layoffs around the corner (paraphrased of course) " It's not about the quantity of education but about the QUALITY of education."


Instead of focusing on getting school days back from furloughs, how about we encourage and support the kids to work harder and study harder (since there is less school days). We can have all the furlough day taken away and students put back into school. BUT if the students don't do their part to learn, there's nothing more school days will do to help them.