the Education Gig
May 24, 2017 4:42 AM   Subscribe

"The idea that incorporating a gig economy structure to education would result in freedom and active employment of previously untapped talents is laughable. The charter school’s yearly contracts did nothing but create a toxic, anxious environment. As the end of every school year loomed, we would whisper in passing around the copy machines, counting off on our fingers all of those we knew were most disliked by the administration. Even if we hadn’t squared off with an administrator, there were always those who walked out of the office having been told their jobs were reduced to part time the following year. No one was ever safe, secure. Long-term plans were always at risk.

Substitute teaching with a third party contractor has turned me into a ghost."

--The Teaching Gig Economy. by @rebeccaheckyea
posted by Potomac Avenue (30 comments total) 40 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gee, maybe tenure exists for a reason?
posted by leotrotsky at 5:14 AM on May 24, 2017 [13 favorites]


Wait so after sinking thousands of dollars and years of your life into becoming qualified to teach, the end game has been changed to adjuncting?

Boy, we really hate teachers.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:35 AM on May 24, 2017 [32 favorites]


Robot economy folks, just wait for the full implementation of charter robotic schooling.
posted by sammyo at 5:53 AM on May 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


Whatever you're thinking? It's worse.

My dad retired last year. He had taught 8th grade science for ~10 years, and previous to that, had had a career that sounds remarkably like the OP. But even the last 10 years, where he was theoretically tenured, he never got any respect from the students, parents, or administrators.

I used to want to teach. Still do, actually. I sit in my sensory deprivation chamber and work on things without any real belief that what I do has any effect on the world, and I go home every day feeling like a ghost in the world. But holy shit, there's no way in hell I'd sign up for this life. Even on the rare occasion I see a posting for a teaching job relevant to my interests (engineering/AP physics/etc.) the salary is a non-starter, even assuming it's a permanent job (unlikely) and carries decent medical insurance that doesn't take a quarter of the paycheck (lol) and not a 60 hour week on the regular (LOL).
posted by disconnect at 5:55 AM on May 24, 2017 [15 favorites]


Wow. Never loved the gig economy, especially as a one size fits all proposition. Saying this as a guy who alternately cycled through success and struggle as a contractor of my own free will.

The only way this trend can continue, in the US anyway, is with single payer healthcare and universal basic income, but then we are in danger of being beholden to our state not the other way round as it should be...

I got to choose to play in the gig or contract economy due to privileges of birth, including coming from a lowish income household that had rock solid job security: If security of income is high, then even when the yield was just enough to support a stable home, you have options.

Stories like this make me panicky for my kids. There is handwringing about science outstripping the pace of ethics in society. The economy always outruns ethics.

How can we preserve some dignity and equity for the next gen? Can we adjust enough to put the brakes on for people caught in the gears now?
posted by drowsy at 5:55 AM on May 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


If your entire business model is "working people need to get paid less, have fewer rights, and have less control over their lives", your family is wrong for loving you.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:57 AM on May 24, 2017 [64 favorites]


Growing up, my dad was a substitute teacher for years while he finished up his teaching degree and certification. Looking back on it: yup, absolutely a gig economy, and absolutely designed to wring the worst out of both sides of the equation. $80-ish/day with no benefits, and he basically had to sit and wait for the phone to ring from one of the four or five (widely geographically dispersed) districts where he was "on-call," every day. I'd honestly never thought about what an utterly shit proposition this was for everyone involved, and how it presaged the gig economy of Uber/Fivr/whatever else by twenty years, until reading this article.

The notion of actual teaching being remade in this mould is horrifying.
posted by Mayor West at 6:05 AM on May 24, 2017 [8 favorites]


Disconnect, your story reminds me of one of my friends. After graduate school, he wanted to do something positive and went through a teacher certification program to become a high school math teacher.

He was a really good teacher, and a really good guy - the kind of person that I would want in a classroom. He had an intuitive sense of how to explain things and he was obviously excited about the job. Exactly the type of person you'd want in a classroom.

It was as if the system was designed to strip him of his soul. He was underpaid, overworked, and routinely disrespected. He had no power to fix the things that were wrong with his class, while at the same time being held accountable for them. He became one of those many, many teachers who leave before five years.

And he made the right choice. He was miserable.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:10 AM on May 24, 2017 [10 favorites]


I was a substitute teacher for a time in a county with mainly poor, urban schools (I subbed in the burbs and small towns around the cities too, but most of the gigs were in the city).

The old system of "the secretary has a list of substitutes that each regular teacher likes and calls them when one is needed" is over. Instead, teachers call into an automated system when they take a sick day, and the job gets posted to a website that you need to sit an manually refresh when looking for jobs often at 6am fully dressed in a suit and tie (because the sub dress code is much more strict than the regular teacher dress code, owing to the precarity of their situation), though you probably already spent several hours refreshing the page the night before.

Why do you need to constantly refresh the page? Well, because everyone else is, and any jobs that show up, barring the worst, most soul-crushing ones that nobody wants to take, are snatched up within seconds. All of the jobs are paid the same daily rate, besides the cheapskate rural schools that give you 7/8ths pay because they don't pay you for your prep hour if there is one, even though they know that 90% of their subs are driving 45 minutes from the city and don't get mileage. All told, I would get $75 a day (no sick days, no 401(k), no union) for 7-8 hours of actual teaching, plus a 1-4 hours of sitting and refreshing a web page followed by 30 seconds of existential terror while I weighed the terribleness of the job I was about to take against the possibility of waiting several more hours at the computer or going a day without pay.

Meanwhile, it's simple for schools to put you on a "blacklist" so that you can't even see their listings, meaning that every day in the classroom is a constant calculus of "hmmm, I could actually discipline this student or strategically let the class get a little unruly while I concentrate on helping this pocket of students over here, but if there's even a whiff that I lack good classroom management that gets back to the office, I'm donezo."

The flip side was that you could blacklist certain classrooms or schools as well, so that they didn't show up for you -- but I never did that because if you want to work every day, you need to be willing to take the shit jobs at least once or twice a week, and that's if you're a well-seasoned experienced teacher who really has their shit together and can handle a room of crazed middle schoolers with aplomb. If you're like I was, a fresh-faced recent college grad with zero experience in urban schools (I technically went to city schools, but at a mostly lily-white magnet school where all the kids were bussed in from the suburbs), then you took what you could get.

The predictable result? Constant churn for sub teachers, sub positions left unfilled at the reliably "bad" buildings (my Mom was a secretary at the all-city mega middle school, and they had entire weeks where nobody would pick up their sub jobs, so that they had to do things like have the gym teach take 2-3 classes worth of kids each period.) and the rural schools mainly turning to a corps of grandmothers and retired teachers from their own community. Urban teachers also take many more sick days, for obvious reasons.

It's just subs, but it's a microcosm of a lot of what's bad with the gig economy and the educational system in this country -- nobody is invested in the success of the system as a whole, and the poorer you are, the worse and more precarious your situation (subs and students included).
posted by LiteOpera at 6:11 AM on May 24, 2017 [30 favorites]


There are some real benefits to giving teachers downtime in their schedule. In my school in China, the teachers only have about 3 hours of classes a day. When someone takes a day off, another teacher (in the same subject) takes over the class.

But apparently having things like reasonably happy teachers, lower turnover, and stable employment is only possible for communists?
posted by Trifling at 6:27 AM on May 24, 2017 [14 favorites]


No one was ever safe, secure.

The entire point of the 'gig economy' in one sentence.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 6:53 AM on May 24, 2017 [22 favorites]


If your goal is to destroy labor, the entire idea of a gig economy is basically best thing since outsourcing.
posted by rokusan at 6:55 AM on May 24, 2017 [23 favorites]


Mayor West: see my post above, because it's gotten worse since your Dad did it. Waiting by the phone would be a vast improvement on what they've cooked up these days -- constantly refreshing a very-mobile-unfriendly webpage. At least Uber can get your attention with push notifications on your phone instead of requiring hours of active effort on your part just get a one-day gig for $75.
posted by LiteOpera at 7:13 AM on May 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


rokusan: If your goal is to destroy labor, the entire idea of a gig economy is basically best thing since outsourcing.

A "gig economy" is either Marx's ideal:
...to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
...or it's Zola's nightmare. It all depends on whether you have enough money to have a real choice.
posted by clawsoon at 7:18 AM on May 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


Education itself is a near obsolete concept among conservatives, where teaching equates to training for job-ready skills, as if employers aren't supposed to train them anymore. It's surreal when your average Republican thinks they solved a problem by dumbing-down an institution by giving it a perfunctory existence (sort of like fundamentalism).
posted by Brian B. at 7:32 AM on May 24, 2017 [9 favorites]


Boy, we really hate teachers.

And it's no coincidence that three-quarters of public school teachers are women.
posted by Etrigan at 7:53 AM on May 24, 2017 [32 favorites]


It's not hard to sell middle-class white people on the idea that there should be well-paid teachers with secure jobs and great benefits, from what I've seen. This is the part that scares me. They just want those to be a small minority of the total number of teachers--safe, happy, well-trained professional educators in the middle-class suburbs and then exhausted minimum-wage babysitters in the cities, because apparently education is not a public good, it's a zero-sum game where a more educated kid from a low-income area is going to take your kid's job. That's not speculation, that's a thing a coworker told me recently. His wife is a school teacher! But she's a teacher in an affluent suburban district.
posted by Sequence at 8:10 AM on May 24, 2017 [27 favorites]


It's not hard to sell middle-class white people on the idea that there should be well-paid teachers with secure jobs and great benefits, from what I've seen. This is the part that scares me. They just want those to be a small minority of the total number of teachers--safe, happy, well-trained professional educators in the middle-class suburbs

I don't think middle-class white people do want well-paid teachers with secure jobs and great benefits. I live in a middle-class suburb that is a poster child for white flight and "good schools" as a code word. And even in this suburb, I hear far more approving discussion of how low taxes are here than how great schools are here. "Taxation is theft" has been baked into political discussion from the fringes for so long that there's traces of it everywhere.
posted by Etrigan at 8:23 AM on May 24, 2017 [15 favorites]


My oldest child graduates high school next month. She heads off to a good college in the fall, and dreams -- DREAMS! -- of teaching little kids.

I have asked her many times if she's sure that she really wants this, and she always says that she does. She is her class salutatorian, an athlete, the prom queen, a serial volunteer -- she can literally do anything, and she wants to teach young kids. I believe in the value of professional teachers and so this makes me burst with pride, but I also worry that some tax-crazed Betsy DeVos disciple will deliberately break the school systems and she'll never get the chance to reach her potential.

*sigh*
posted by wenestvedt at 9:15 AM on May 24, 2017 [7 favorites]


And it's no coincidence that three-quarters of public school teachers are women.

I'm really curious what the implication is here, because I've not seen it echoed in anything I've read on the subject. Is your belief that male teachers get treated better? Or that society as a whole undervalues teachers as a surrogate for undervaluing women?
posted by mikoroshi at 9:31 AM on May 24, 2017


The county I live in pays its substitutes $.50 above the state minimum wage. Full-time teachers don't get a whole lot more than that. But retirees don't think they should have to "pay twice" since they "already paid" for their kids' schools in New York or whatever. Nevermind that all the people who keep them alive & comfortable around here might have families too.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 9:31 AM on May 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


And it's no coincidence that three-quarters of public school teachers are women.

I'm really curious what the implication is here, because I've not seen it echoed in anything I've read on the subject. Is your belief that male teachers get treated better? Or that society as a whole undervalues teachers as a surrogate for undervaluing women?


The latter. Jobs that are seen as "Women's work" are consistently undervalued, even when such work was previously valued at a higher level when men did it.
A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.

The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
posted by Etrigan at 9:55 AM on May 24, 2017 [32 favorites]


That horrible political apocalypse you're up in arms about is just a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse, which is a distraction from this other horrible political apocalypse,
posted by univac at 10:01 AM on May 24, 2017 [9 favorites]


Yup. 40 years ago, all the MBTA bus drivers were white men. Then then went to white women (oh cool, feminism! we thought). Then they were black men. Now they're black women. Hmmm.
posted by Melismata at 10:02 AM on May 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


Sequence: apparently education is not a public good, it's a zero-sum game where a more educated kid from a low-income area is going to take your kid's job. That's not speculation, that's a thing a coworker told me recently.

This is so so so much the underlying cause of so much that's bad about American culture and politics. There's an intense fear of a level playing field that goes all the way back to - I dunno, probably all the way back to slavery? - this fear that there aren't enough good things to go around and you have to be willing to keep stomping on faces underneath you (but don't look down!) if you want to have anything good at all.
posted by clawsoon at 11:24 AM on May 24, 2017 [7 favorites]


it's a zero-sum game where a more educated kid from a low-income area is going to take your kid's job.

This is more-or-less the actual ground truth to education and many other related things in the United States right now. The boomers and GenX alike have both teamed up to make a university degree the great filter; the golden ticket to a comfortable upper middle class desk job. There's a reason we don't fund public education, and it's the same reason university tuition now costs >10x what it did a scant few decades ago. Class warfare, y'all.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 11:33 AM on May 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


Except that university degree doesn't even get you anywhere anymore. (Except deeper in debt.)
posted by Kitty Stardust at 2:31 PM on May 24, 2017


If you are reading this thread and send your kids to private school, you are participating in the problem. If you refuse to push back on democrats who promote "school choice" and Teach For America, you are participating in the disintegration of public education. We (especially middle class parents like me) all know this happening and we blame it on outside forces or Betsy Devos as if this wasn't all being done in the name of our coded fear of poor and non-white students corrupting our children. But it's hard s to blame the middle class for being anxious--the system seems rigged for those few that get the right education early on, and the jailhouse is ready to swallow anyone who slips. It's a vicious cycle. The more charter schools are successful at rescuing a small group of inner city kids from struggling public schools the fewer resources are devoted to saving the public schools. As the companies that run the charter schools make more profit by cutting costs and avoiding unions, they influence policy more and the more capitalist infection of the education system spreads.

We have to take action to stop it, in our own neighborhoods and school boards. Even, especially, if you are childless, we need your help.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:47 PM on May 24, 2017 [12 favorites]


School choice comes up over and over at our school board meetings. Often enough that I've started going to most of them, so I can stand up and discuss why charter schools are a blight upon one of the great shining stars of our nation. And people bitch about our taxes, because our taxes are absurd, I pay almost $7000 in tax just to the school district. It's painful, and I get that people hate that. I hate that too.

But, I keep pointing out at board meetings; our town has gone from 5000 people to 50,000 people in under a decade. We are building new schools as fast as we can. We are adding to the existing schools as fast as we can. Infrastructure is expensive. (That said, I went on a longass diatribe about the football stadium bond, and eventually led the resistance to it. We won. In Texas, y'all.)

My point is, nobody likes taxes, but everyone likes having literate humans, and for some things, we have to hang together, or we shall surely hang separately. (To borrow a phrase.)

Re teaching: I was a sub while in college. *Shudder* I worked as a teacher at the juvenile detention center for a summer, and I had pretty good experiences with the kids, but had zero interest in being part of the corrections system.

Our last day of school for the year was today, and I went around and gave all Mowgli's teachers gift cards for office supply stores, because I know they're all spending a fortune buying supplies the school doesn't supply.

In a nation as rich as ours, to allow our education system to crumble and become privatized for the benefit of the wealthy is a travesty.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:40 PM on May 25, 2017 [5 favorites]


Except that university degree doesn't even get you anywhere anymore. (Except deeper in debt.)

I maintain that this is the system working exactly as intended. (eg: "Class warfare, y'all")

Look at the recent historical trend.

In 1950, anyone with a high school education could support a family and have a house and a car and a TV and a vacation once in a while and could retire. That's more or less "The American Dream" that everyone's been sold.

In 1970, though, a high school diploma isn't enough. You need a college degree if you really want to make it into the comfortable life. The Boomer's parents made sure it was affordable for their own kids, but no one else.

In 1990, well, son, a college degree isn't quite enough. I hope you got one in a high-demand field. Were you lucky enough to guess right 5 years into the future? Well good for you! You can now have a house and a car and a family.... Except that your spouse also probably has to work full time too, but that's okay. You made it through the filter. GenX's parents made sure their kids could get through, but no one else. You think they're just giving away good jobs!?

By 2010, oops, guess what? That specialized degree doesn't guarantee shit anymore. Maybe you should get a Masters degree to go with it? Take a few unpaid internships to gain valuable on-the-job training! What, you don't want $80,000 in debt? You say you can't afford to buy a house, or retire, or send your kids to college, because you're paying off your student loans for 20 or 30 years? Well, the _successful_ parents made sure you could afford to pass through the filter. Others that seeped through, well, debt'll take care of 'em.

2030 should be interesting, no?

(Some days I wish I wasn't so jaded.)
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 9:28 AM on May 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


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