I hope teachers are enjoying their moment as heroes. It won't last long beyond COVID.

When the pandemic is over and schools open, the age-old debate over just how much a teacher is worth will get even nastier.

Happy 2021, Code 47 readers. It's been bonkers so far. It'll get more bonkers. Prepare yourselves.

I had prepared a column about the political violence in America that I wanted to include at the top of this week's recap. I can't send it out today, though, for two boring reasons that my fellow journalists will recognize as occupational hazards. The first is that a news development this weekend has materially changed what I was going to say, and I now need to rethink a part of my thesis. I think it mostly holds up! But adapting what I'd written to the current situation is going to be more involved than just deleting or rewriting a few sentences. The other reason is that someone else has published something very close to what I was planning to say, and frankly, they have more authority on the issue than I do. So I'm going to put that column into the reserve folder and hope that I'm able to use it here or elsewhere shortly. 

So we'll talk about "teacher's privilege" instead.

I am married to a teacher. My wife teaches French to elementary age students. I also have two children, both are in elementary school. (But not my wife's school — she teaches at a private school, my kids go to the local French Immersion public school.) Via my wife, I know many teachers. This is all to say that I know how hard many teachers work, and I also know how essential they are to a child's life. With Toronto under a form of lockdown due to the pandemic and elementary schools closed, I've had to turn myself into a full-time teaching assistant as my kids learn remotely via Zoom. Luckily, my schedule permits this, but for many parents, balancing work and newfound teaching duties is going to be a nightmare, if not outright impossible.

Unsurprisingly, I saw my social media feeds fill up this week with odes to teachers. Parents are getting a taste for the first time since their own long-ago days as students just how hard it is to be a teacher, and how important it is that we have them. A commonly shared sentiment was, "Wow, these teachers are worth every penny!" 

That's nice! I hoped it warmed the hearts of educators everywhere. But this outpouring of support and affection made me wonder how long it'll be, once this pandemic finally blows over, before we find ourselves, yet again, having a debate over how much a teacher is "worth."

This has always been one of my favourite public-policy debates because it's fascinating, and complicated in a way that basically leaves everyone pissed off but also partially in the right. Teachers in Ontario are well paid. The salary grid for elementary teachers, in 2020, for example, would start from a low of $47,040 (minimal required qualifications, zero experience) to a high of $101,989 (fully qualified, ten years of experience or more). However! Since the Ontario College of Teachers requires at least a three-year degree from a post-secondary institution to qualify for a teaching certificate, most teachers will likely start in the A2 class for the purposes of determining their place on the collective bargaining agreement's salary grid. (It's probably more complicated than this in real life, and I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but permit me a bit of rounding off for simplicity.) And that means a teacher starting in 2020, with zero experience, starts at a salary of $52,595.

Not bad in a province with an average income (for individuals between 25-54, which best approximates a teacher's working years) of $56,800. Starting just shy of the provincial average for your whole age group on your first day on the job ain't bad. A day-one teacher looks even better if you look at the median income for that age group — $45,600. (Both those figures are current to 2018, so are likely slightly higher now, but close enough.) A teacher with A2 qualifications will surpass the average salary of the 25-54 age group by their third year on the job. 

I can sense teacher hackles rising already. Don’t shoot! I come in peace! I'm not about to make any sweeping argument that teachers are overpaid or demand crushing provincial austerity be inflicted on you all. My point above was simply to set out the key, objective facts: a teacher will not get rich in Ontario on their salary alone, but they are objectively well compensated, relative to the rest of the population. 

And wooo boy, does this ever set off some fights!

Public-sector compensation is a constant source of populist anger and conflict. Teachers are not quite in the public sector, in the sense that they don't work for the provincial public service, but that's a distinction without much difference here. In my years working in radio, and many more years listening to radio, I've found that fights over teacher compensation are particularly animated. Teachers get their backs up really quickly if anyone suggests they're overpaid, and many members of the public passionately insist that's exactly what they are.

And that's why I find this issue so fascinating. I actually don't have strong feelings on this, because ... I have no idea how to calculate someone's worth. I guess I default to pretty ruthless market capitalism for determining their wage: everything is worth what someone will pay for it. But that's too simple, of course. There are terrible people making great money and wonderful people out of work, particularly during the pandemic. Humans derive a ton of their sense of self-esteem and self-worth from their jobs and their economic status, so I get why people get fired up about how much money a person is paid. Truly.

But it still amuses me to see people get genuinely agitated because they think a teacher makes too much money (I assume because they make less), or a teacher who cannot understand why anyone would think they might make too much money. It's a completely pointless argument that we'll never stop having, and no one will ever learn anything from it or budge an inch. We're all trapped far too firmly in the confines of our own perspective.

And this might be where I do annoy teachers a little bit. As a group, I have typically found them to be wonderful, affable and, pardon me, somewhat clueless about how they can come across to non-teachers. I think every profession tends to get too involved in its own bullshit, lost in its particular inside baseball. But teachers might be unusually vulnerable to this because so much of their daily interaction is with children, so their adult interactions (many with fellow teachers!) are emotionally and intellectually weighted more highly than is optimal. The difference between teachers and other workers, in terms of the workplace echo chamber, is only a matter of degree, but in my experience, that degree is considerable.

Let me tell a story to illustrate the point. Many, many years ago, I was at an end-of-school-year party with my wife, hosted by one of her colleagues. Spirits were high! And the common theme among the teachers was, woo hoo! Fuck yeah! Another year done, another summer is here! One of them in particular had had perhaps a bit too much to drink and was more vocal than the others in expressing her excitement at two months without work, without having to wake up early, without a boss, without bullshit, and so on and so on. She was hurling herself into two months to herself. And thank God, because she’d sure earned it!

I'm a people watcher. I find humans fascinating. And I tuned out what the tipsy teacher was saying and just watched everyone else. And you could spot anyone who was not a teacher by how carefully neutral their facial expressions became. I suspect mine was the same! No one was going to ruin the party by noting that that kind of time off is not normal. But a bunch of us were thinking it. The boasting that was so obviously odd to us non-teachers just washed over the teachers themselves, though. They weren't as exuberant (drunk), but they shared the sentiment. 

Yes, yes, it's just one party, one tipsy educator. And teachers will rush in to tell me, hey, Matt, we plan during our summers. We take courses. And we also work after hours during the school year with marking. So it all balances out, dammit. I've heard it all before, and my response has always been, sure, that’s all true, but ... you don't think I work after hours? You don't think I'm planning stuff on my holidays? Teacher exceptionalism is a blind spot many of them — their jobs probably are harder than many, but they’re already, as noted above, objectively well compensated for their labour.

I don't begrudge teachers their good deal. But gosh, many of them run a danger to their own public standing by not realizing that they indeed have a good deal.

Not all! Many are clued in and very grateful for all they have. I remember one teacher in particular, a friend of a friend, saying something very smart that I've often reflected back on. This woman taught in a rural area of the province, and one that has in recent years suffered from a lot of economic problems — high unemployment, failing businesses, collapsing incomes. Ahead of one of the labour disputes between the province's teachers and government, she told me that she was mortified.

Obviously, she wanted the best deal possible. She was frank about that, and, I mean, hey. Of course she wanted the best possible deal. But she told me point blank that she was already making a lot more money than the parents of every student she was teaching that year, with one possible exception — she wasn't sure about one kid's dad. For every other student in that class, though, she was pulling in more money than their parents, and probably their households. Not to mention the benefits, the time off and, again, the pension.

"If we go on strike and these kids can't come to class," she told me, "those parents, who are making minimum wage, are going to have to scramble to find childcare so I can picket for a slightly higher raise than what I'm being offered on top of my already six-figure salary."

She was willing to fight for that slightly higher raise, but she knew how bad it could look. I'm not sure all her colleagues do.

Location plays a part. Earning $100,000 doesn't get you far in Toronto; in other places, it's a king's ransom. So yes, context matters. But so does humility, or at least a well-honed instinct for (political) self-preservation. 

So here we are, in a very strange moment in history, when a lot of parents would probably be happy to pay teachers double if that's what it took to get schools open. But this moment isn't going to last, and when COVID-19 is finally under control and the schools can open again, the economic damage of the pandemic, plus the enormous debts added by provinces, are going to make a teacher's salary, benefits, secure pension and summers off even more offside with the norm for much of the public. 

I like teachers. I value them. I married one! I already knew how hard they work, but I also know how well they're paid, and I know many people who work as hard for less. This moment of harmony and appreciation for our educators is wonderful and I hope it lasts. But I don't think it will.

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Anyway! Hope you enjoyed that. That was long enough already, so let's make the weekly recap snappy, eh?

In a column that already seems like it was written a million years ago, I wrote in the National Post about the outrage many Canadians felt after some of our politicians ignored advice to stay at home and jetted off for sun-filled holidays. "There’s no arguing with the public once they’ve made up their mind that someone, or a group of someones, have gone further than they’ll dare permit and must be punished," I said, "and no hope for any politician who dares try stand in the path of such waves of anger."

And then, also in the Post, there was my best effort at making some sense out of the absolutely insane attack upon the U.S. Capitol last week."Terror groups and foreign adversaries the world over must be astonished," I wrote. "That … that’s it? We could just march in and seize the capitol? As difficult as it is to accept that the U.S. lost control of the capitol, it’s harder still to believe that the local security forces just let it happen."

And there was my weekly video for the Post, on the slow pace of vaccinations in Ontario. Right now, that's a provincial problem. But it's about to become a federal one.

Speaking of unfolding disasters, both of my columns at TVO.org this week focused on a rapidly deteriorating COVID-19 situation in Ontario, which the government seems to have no plan for. The first was on Monday, the second on Friday, and, honestly? Not much changed in-between. I've often reflected on a snappy saying I heard once from a survivalist: "When seconds count, help is only minutes away." I hadn't realized that was actually our guiding principle of emergency planning in Ontario, though. 

Yikes. What can I say? Lots happening out there, folks, and little of it good.

But we’ll keep on keepin’ on here at Code 47, and I wish you all all the best. Until next time.

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Twitter.com/MattGurney