Help wanted:  Professional position, requires bachelor’s degree, Masters preferred.  Starting salary is $33,000 – $36,300 depending on academic qualifications.  Raises are dependent on multiple complex criteria that have little to do with how hard or well you work and are subject to change without notice.   Employees are expected to bring their own supplies.  Position title:  Public School Teacher in North Carolina.

The issues are not unique to North Carolina.  The typical American teacher spends about $500 of personal funds paying for classroom supplies – about 1.5 percent of the starting salary.  Effective teachers spend many hours before and after school on parent-teacher conferences, lesson planning, grading papers and their own professional development.  Duties performed outside the classroom are part of doing the job well.

We’re probably all familiar with annual pleas from teachers for contributions to purchase supplies and equipment for classrooms.  I have asked members of school boards and school superintendents in three states why an adequate amount is not budgeted for supplies.  Invariably I have been told that the contributions are needed because the school district doesn’t have adequate funds for supplies.

An insight came from a teacher who was elected president of his local union.  One of the school buildings had no copy paper and teachers needed it immediately.  The administrative offices had plenty but wouldn’t deliver it so a teacher used time allocated for non-class work to go get it.  Because a teacher fixed the problem, no one needed to prevent recurrences.

School boards, administrators, and elected officials that fund schools, are behaving like alcoholics who can get drunk, make a mess of everything around them and then rely on teachers and their assistants clean up the messes.    Alcoholics generally deny responsibility and refuse to admit that their drinking is the source of their problems.  A family member or friend will call the boss with an excuse for missing work or clean the alcoholic up rather than letting them wake up in their own vomit.   That behavior is called “enabling”.  It allows the alcoholic to continue behaving in the same way rather than making him accountable for what he has done.  In a similar way, teachers are enabling those in government and executive positions to avoid their responsibilities.

Tough love is the opposite of enabling.  It requires those who created or allowed the problems to clean up after themselves.  Whether it is an alcoholic spouse or a board of education, the message of tough love is “I’m not giving up on you.  I want to make this relationship work but I’m not bailing you out again.  If you change your ways we can succeed together.  If you don’t, then  it is you who will bear the consequences.”

Tough love translates into reality with some sad new ways of doing things.  An example might be, “If there are not enough supplies, we will teach as best we can without supplies and refer complaining parents to the superintendent or the board of education.”  Once teachers start to think in terms of “tough love” they will find other ways of applying it.

Teachers will be better able to practice their professions when state and federal legislators have met tough love.  They write laws requiring schools to serve as nutrition centers rather than funding nutrition through social safety net programs.  They make schools into corrections facilities by requiring them to mainstream children who can’t or won’t behave.  They provide funding to supply extremely active children with dangerous mind-altering drugs such as ritalin to slow them down but won’t  fund teacher’s aides who could give individual attention to the unique learning characteristics of individual children.  They find funding for varsity coaches but can’t afford physical education for the rest of the kids.

Teachers have been adapting, filling the gaps and cleaning up the messes  made by overlapping and sometimes conflicting federal, state and local policies.  Tough love will focus teachers’ energy on kids in the classroom rather than tests, standardized curriculum and cleaning up messes made by government and school boards.  Teachers and parents will know that tough love is working when their boards and administrators stand up for them in front of elected officials; when they can focus on teaching rather than testing; when supply budgets are reasonable and when salaries are competitive with careers that require similar skills.

Teachers, please don’t give up.  Just give continuous tough love to your profession for your own sake and for the students entrusted to your care.