The Other Unfunded Mandates

Talk to teachers– or former teachers– across the country, and you hear similar complaints. An increase of job responsibilities, without the necessary time or resources to complete them. When we talk about unfunded mandates, we usually mean some program for which the government has told the district, “You must do this, but we will not give you any money to pay for it.” But it is another kind of unfunded mandate when a school says to a teacher, “You are being given new tasks to complete, but we expect you to donate the time to do them on your own.”

In addition to your regular teaching duties, and preparing to teach, and grading papers, and recording the grades, we would like you to also administer some pre-testing tests and then crunch the data. We’d like you to create your lesson plans in a new piece of software, and use that software to build scope and sequence for your courses. Create some emotional and social development programs for the students. Call every parent. Keep everything up to date and entered on your school website (using the new software that we expect you to teach yourself).

Before you squawk back, here are two things I know about this.

One is that teachers are not alone. I have nurses in my family, and I have watched how the health care providers solve budget issues by the not-very-clever method of simply reducing the number of staff, which can be done by declaring, “You still-employed people will now do your old job and also somebody else’s old job.” Many companies also use the technique of cutting employee hours, but not employee responsibilities. “Do what you’ve always done– just do it in half the time.” So, yeah– I now that teaching is not the only place suffering from these unfunded mandates.

Another thing I know is that teachers are professionals and not hourly wage workers. When I signed up for an English teacher job, I knew that those essays wouldn’t grade themselves, and I wouldn’t have six unassigned hours during the school day in which to grade them. Any teacher who thinks she can do the job within the hours of the school day and no more is kidding herself. The out-of-school hours are part of the gig.

But teachers are good team players, and therefor terrific institutional enablers. Administrators add hours to the teaching day like drunks add gin to their glass, and some teachers just keep saying, “Well, that’s okay. I’ll make sure the kids have a normal Christmas and take the phone calls from your mother.”

Teachers suck it up and squeeze in the new duties instead of telling their administrator, “I can do this, but I’ll need direction from you on which duties you wold like me to stop performing.” They donate the extra hours to the district, and then complain that administrators aren’t fixing the problem, but here’s the thing– from the administrator’s perspective, there is no problem. The fact that Mrs. Bagshot is sad about all the hours she spent at work is not an administrative problem. It’s not an administrative problem until the job doesn’t get done and Mrs. Bagshot is telling her boss, “No, I didn’t get it done. I ran out of time.”

Of course, if Mrs. Bagshot works in a charter school or a state that has “freed” its teachers from the “inflexible” union rules, Mrs. Bagshot will donate the extra hours or else suffer unemployment.

But for the rest of us can draw lines.

That raises the question of where, exactly, to draw those lines. Because in some cases, failure to donate free time to the district creates more problems for us or the students than we really want to see. It’s decision that everyone has to make on their own; you’re the one who has to live with your choice. For me, it boils down to this– my job, the job I signed up for, is to use my expertise and knowledge to help students learn how to be better at reading, writing, speaking and listening. On the bigger scale, my work is to help them discover and grow toward the best version of themselves, to help them better envision what it means to be fully human, how to be in the world. So anything that helps me do my job is worth my time. And anything that doesn’t, isn’t.

I can’t tell anyone else where to draw their lines. But if we want to be respected as professionals, we need to be careful about giving away our time for free. After all, how can we expect someone else to value our time if we don’t seem to?