South Carolina teacher "contracts" are not actually contracts
"Other Duties as Assigned" (Part One Million)
A contract is an agreement between parties, creating mutual obligations that are enforceable by law. The basic elements required for the agreement to be a legally enforceable contract are: mutual assent, expressed by a valid offer and acceptance; adequate consideration; capacity; and legality.
-Definition from Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute (emphasis mine)
Some of the earliest pieces from this newsletter focused on how utterly one-sided South Carolina’s teacher “contracts” are.
In fact, several pieces in the conglomeration of final straws that pushed me out of the teaching profession for good last year were related to these “agreements” and the way the state— frequently with the cooperation of elected school boards and district HR departments— uses them to exploit teachers.
South Carolina essentially does not allow public employees the ability to collectively bargain, and the state does not create any real incentive for districts to compromise with employees, or to make concessions on their behalf. Even in the face of a historic shortage of willing educators that has continued to break records year after year, districts don’t seem to generally recognize that it is in their own interest to create working conditions and labor agreements that make school employees want to stay. In the midst of this growing crisis, many districts continue to challenge teacher certificates for non-offenses like violating these “contracts,” which in essence amounts to a school system desperate for teachers voluntarily removing many willing teachers from the labor market for an entire calendar year.
Of course, it’s complicated: the state legislature, which in South Carolina and other states has the ultimate constitutional mandate to ensure that schools are properly funded and resourced, underfunds state schools nearly every year (even according to its own funding formula), and most districts do not have the property tax base or county funding to make up the difference. (In South Carolina, even local funding is further complicated by huge property tax breaks like Act 388 which eliminate much of the revenue districts historically used to make up for the lack of state funding.)
These underfunded districts, in turn, are tasked with impossibility upon impossibility relating to teaching all students, no matter their circumstances, to meet artificial “standards” created largely in cooperation, whether tacit or explicit, with standardized testing companies, and despite resources that, despite some nominal spending increases, cannot keep pace with either inflation, the changing labor market, or the ever-increasing demands of federal, state, and local governments.
So I have a little bit of sympathy for districts. And I have a little bit (although even less) for HR middle management types who rarely seem to understand much about education or the larger political infrastructure, and who are essentially always caught between a rock and a hard place. (It would be easier to feel bad for HR middle managers and district officials if they didn’t all seem to make 2-5 times my highest teaching salary.)
But this is all part of a systemic devaluation of teaching. The state, in most cases, could better fund education. Policymakers could treat schools as allies in the effort to teach and care for children, rather than playacting as if educators are somehow inherently opposed to the interests of the children they spend all day serving. Districts could hire HR professionals with educational training or experience. They could make the decision to prioritize the funding they do have in ways that actually support learning and teacher retention.
And the public could, for its part, stop voting straight ticket in ways that put incompetent, think-tank-trained, private school voucher cheerleaders in many of the offices that are intended constitutionally to oversee and support public schools.
In the end, the system we accept is the system we have. And while I’m glad that good people continue to teach, and hope that good people will continue to teach, I felt as a teacher that despite whatever good I might be doing for my students, I was just playing right into these bigger systemic problems. By showing up each day, part of me believed I was just allowing the crumbling infrastructure of education to be held together by the abuse of educators and students and the frothing rhetoric of public officials, who created the whole mess in the first place, and then profited off of it by pointing fingers at the few people and organizations trying to save it.
I know this is very pessimistic, so I will try to point at what I see as the silver lining.
If we, collectively, have created and fed this system in its current unwholesome form, we can also make decisions to heal some of the injuries and help it grow into something better. Although I am certainly not an expert on “educational reform” (a phrase which, in practice, usually means someone is selling you something, or about to tell you to do something you know in your heart is wrong and counter to logic and humane behavior), here are some general observations I have to offer about what we need to do:
If you are a parent of children in public schools, don’t let “reformers” use your children as a mascot for their own fake attacks on the problems they engineered for their own benefit. Tell elected officials what is good about schools, or what they can do to fix what is bad about schools. Support your local schools by going to board meetings and offering an alternative to the corrosive narratives of groups like Moms for Liberty.
If you work for a public school districts, stop making it easier for the state and districts to exploit you. Don’t sign a contract months early when there is nothing in it for you. Ask, politely but explicitly, what is in it for you. It’s obvious why districts would like to know approximately how many staff members they have locked into a one-sided labor agreement as early as possible, so that they can prepare for the following year. But that also creates a small amount of leverage. And leverage refers to the fulcrum upon which actual negotiations and compromises— the things that constitute healthy human relationships— can turn. Without leverage, it’s just one party coercing the other.
Show other people your contract. This is something Berkeley County teacher and advocate Kat Low has been pushing hard for this year. If you’re in a state like South Carolina that has a piddling 1-3 page joke of an End User License Agreement that almost no serious person would consider a “contract,” it might really help for the public to know what we expect educators to sign every year. (In short, it’s a list of demands from the district which promises nothing in return; signing it triggers an exploitative clause in state law that allows districts to take away your professional certificate for a calendar year— starting once the State Board finally gets around to considering your case— if you decide to leave the district for any reason during the 190-day duration of the contract.)
When districts make demands on your time and labor, including signing your contract early, start asking, What do we get? It’s not wrong to ask for compensation. South Carolina and other anti-labor states (as well as, perhaps, American work culture in general) have fostered expectations that a good teacher must be a martyr for her students. Sacrifice can be noble, but in my experience acting like a martyr mostly makes you a bad teacher. It sets an example for students that they should follow authority without question, that they should violate their consciences, that they should offer themselves up for exploitation. If you wouldn’t do it to your students, don’t do it to yourself.
Join with other people. Join a parent group like Families Against Book Bans (FABB), or start on in your area. Join the PTA. Volunteer for a district book review committee. Join and support labor organizations that actually believe in negotiation. Join and support organizations that defend civil liberties and public schools. It can be lonely to feel under attack by the powerful; it feels much better to have friends who can support you. An organization can start as just you and one other person. Suddenly, neither of you is alone.
For everyone who has signed a teacher contract this year, or who plans to sign one soon, or who is faced with hard decisions about whether to sign one, I’m thinking about you!