I taught for 3 years before entering private sector and this largely jives with my experience. So many teachers had only ever been teachers and had only ever de

I taught for 3 years before entering private sector and this largely jives with my experience. So many teachers had only ever been teachers and had only ever developed their classroom and subject matter skills. spending hours a week being unproductive or marginally productive on grading, grade entry because they were scared to or refused to learn more productive ways of accomplishing the same tasks. I would watch teachers spend hours a week grading, calculating and manually inputting informal daily comprehension checkouts-- a mini pop quiz to get a check on daily comprehension of the learning objectives for that day. These made up 10% or LESS of the students grade, and while they were very important information for the teacher to know where there were deficiencies ahead of formal assessment, the act of manually grading and inputting the information represented 90% of their work in this area. it was a complete inverse of effort on the teachers part vs impact on the students grade. I used technology to make these nearly completely automated. My first year all we had were smart clickers so I was limited to multiple choice but by my last year students had chromebooks and if I took the 3 minutes to put together an online assessment ahead of time, I could make it anything i wanted and have it auto score. I then made a choice to not even count the daily assessments in the student grades because apart from a classroom discipline perspective, they did not serve the student learning nearly so much as they gave me immediate data to judge how well I had presented the material. I spent maybe a half hour a week on this and it freed me up to use my planning time to assess critical thinking assignments, adjust to near real time assessment data, and plan more interesting and dynamic lessons. I did leave education because while i was not laid off, my fourth year fell in 2009 and there was a chance of being laid off (my tenure would have begun the first work day of my fourth year) and the projected retirement pool was smaller (retirement accounts took a big hit that spring) than the number of cuts needed to achieve full staffing. I do not know If I would have had a job come august but its irrelevant. I went from teaching science, engineering and technology to working in science, engineering and technology, and while not adjusting for 190 work days vs 240 work days a year, I make about double what I would make on negotiated pay scale, but this is the exception that proves the rule-- my pay was bound to a rate lower than private sector because demand and compensation in my field was so much higher than other fields. I do miss teaching, but I don't miss how tunnel visioned and inflexible it could be. I do not think that dramatically increasing compensation will achieve any gains in student learning but I do think that dramatically increasing student to teacher ratios, introducing the modern knowledge worker workflow to the profession, differential compensation and programs to better engage parents and communities (look at how horribly the transition to common core math has gone-- a much better way to teach numeracy that was atrociously communicated and taught to communities, parents and even many teachers to the point of becoming a political issue) will all improve outcomes, and really the only metric that really matters at the end of the day is increasing student learning, everything else is ancillary to that.