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National Teacher Day

photo credit: oddsock

Tomorrow is National Teacher Day .  The tagline for the day is “Great teachers make great public schools”.  The first event of this kind was in 1953, when Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded the 81st Congress to proclaim a National Teacher Day.  There has been an annual celebration since 1985.So, how far have we come with public education since 1953?  We’ve already commented here on the declining literacy levels among US high school students.  Consider as well this excerpt from The Teaching Penalty, a publication of the Economic Policy Institute:

Recent trends represent only a small part of a long-run decline in the relative pay of teachers. Using U.S. Census data we show that the pay gap between female public school teachers and comparably educated women—for whom the labor market dramatically changed over the 1960-2000 period—grew by nearly 28 percentage points, from a relative wage advantage of 14.7% in 1960, to a pay disadvantage of 13.2% in 2000. Among all public school teachers the relative wage disadvantage grew almost 20 percentage points over the 1960-2000 period.

In this era of No Child Left Behind, you’d think that teachers and schools would get additional resources to carry out their mission.  Instead, school systems are often pressed to meet federal and state mandates with funding that is highly dependent on the local tax base.   As a member of the Finance Committee for a small town in Massachusetts, I’ve had a front row seat at the difficult financial tradeoffs that need to be made to balance flat budgets against the needs of the K-12 students in our town - especially those with special needs that require expensive outside services.  Teachers battle through tough collective bargaining to earn modest wage increases. 

Most adults have fond memories of the teachers who made an impact in their lives - by exposing them to new ideas, by challenging them to perform at a higher level than they thought possible, or just by being there for counsel.  Those of you who are parents of school age children know who are the teachers who’ve made an impact on them.If you want to say thank you tomorrow, by all means send a card or some flowers.  If you want to make a real impact, however, vote locally and nationally for measures that provide these teachers with the resources needed to get the job done.   We’ll get the workforce we invest in, not the one we wish for.

Happy Teacher Day, Mr. Ramsden, Mr. Perry, Mr. Brady, Mrs. Hennessey, Mrs. Silva, Mr. Reed, Mr. Schwartz and the rest of you unsung public school heroes who’ve made an impact in my life and those of my children.

May 5, 2008 | This post has one comment | Read this post »   

Five Ways to Leave Your Job (Well)

 photo credit: nielsvk

I’m on my way out to a goodbye party for a very good employee.  She’s been with our company for many years, and after an ex-pat assignment in the US,  is returning home to Australia to a new job with a different employer.  We’ll miss her terribly.  She’s not only a great employee, she’s a dear friend to many Kronites.

In keeping with her excellence as an employee, she’s been a role model for how to leave a job with style.  Here are five lessons to carry with you the next time you need to jump:

• Provide your manager with as much advance notice as possible.   Giving him/her more time to adjust key stakeholder expectations and shift resources is invaluable.
• Keep excellent records of your key projects and commitments - and share them with those who need to know in order to preserve as much continuity as possible.
• Help identify candidates - internal or external - who can replace you (or at least assume your responsibilities if you’re irreplaceable).
• Keep your communications about your current employer positive.  The decision to leave an employer often includes the opportunity to leave behind some negatives.  Resist the temptation to enumerate these negatives for your soon-to-be former coworkers.
• Provide honest and direct feedback to your management about how to improve the position for the next incumbent. 

Thanks for everything, Natira - and good on ya!

May 1, 2008 | This post has 4 comments | Read this post »   

Do We Still Need Take Your Child to Work Day?

Full disclosure - I’m a mother of two kids. They’re 18 and 20, and both veterans of Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day programs. In fact, my daughter and I co-hosted the first Take Your Daughters to Work day program at Lotus Development in 1993 when she was 5 years old. The original goal, as established by the Ms. Foundation for Women, was to expose young girls to career opportunities beyond traditional women’s roles.

The current program has the following mission:

“Exposing girls and boys to what a parent or mentor in their lives do during the work day is important, but showing them the value of their education, helping them discover the power and possibilities associated with a balanced work and family life, providing them an opportunity to share how they envision the future and begin steps toward their end goals in a hands-on and interactive environment is key to their achieving success.

Kids like to visit their parents’ workplace, no doubt about it. Whether these visits inspire them to future career decisions is questionable, but allowing parents a day to share their workplace with their kids is one means of engaging the employer loyalty of working parents. While no substitute for fair pay, flexible work options, good health benefits, and other perks that help parents balance their fiscal and family obligations, these programs do acknowledge the balancing act that working parents have to manage.

On the flip side, Newsday columnist Helaine Olen wrote today about the need for a day for parents to stay home with their kids and do absolutely nothing. Her take is that we’re a nation of workaholics who are taking BlackBerries to ball games and thereby teaching our kids that the cost of flexibility is that the work switch is always set to on. I wonder, how many of the adults who brought their kids to work today for art projects, age appropriate speakers and pizza and ice cream lunches will pay for it with extra night or weekend catch up time in the next few days?

It’s not only the parents of participating children who are impacted by these programs. Take the survey on the right and let us know how this plays out in your workplace.

April 24, 2008 | This post has 19 comments | Read this post »