Chile – Page 3 – Globally Elite

Chile

From a cafeteria to “The Hill”

Marco Zamarron / Globally Elite / Chile, Code Switching, Croft School, KIPP, No Excuses, Who am I? /

October 3, 2016

My educational experience started the day that I signed a contract, known as the Commitment to Excelence, at the age of 10, in order to enroll into a school called KIPP: Austin College Prep. This contract was written by the school and it had to be signed by my parents, my advisor, and myself before I could even step foot on the campus. The contract basically says that I will be an examplary student at all times and that my parents agreed to push me and support me no matter what. (If you follow the link on the words “commitment to excelence” and you scroll down you can download the contract so you can see it. It hasn’t changed since I was in 5th grade.) I say that my educational experience started this late in my life because before I was just passed through the system waiting to land on someone’s desk that was willing to help. When my parents made the decision to move me to KIPP I

did try to resist the change that they wanted to instill on me. As a kid I was stuck in a system where I wasn’t expected to make anything of myself so I carried myself in that way. It wasn’t until I got to KIPP that I understood that it was me against the world and that there were “no excuses” for not thriving in this world. I couldn’t sit down with my arms crossed and blame the system for where I was in life.

Every Wednesday morning we would have a meeting in our cafeteria and we would highlight the values of our school, “No Excuses”, “All of us WILL learn”, “Team always beats individual”, etc. These ideas were repeated so often that I bought into them eventually. I went from reading at a 2nd grade level, when I was in 5th grade, to reading at a high school level by the time I was in 8th grade. When I went on to high school I went to another KIPP school called KIPP: Austin Collegiate. This is where I saw the difference between charter schools and private elite schools.

In my time at KIPP: Austin Collegiate I was also playing football for ST. Stephen’s Episcopal school. Her

e is where I had my first interactions that would help me succeed in a place like Colby. While I was here I saw how we were “othered” because I came from a different school. On Fridays we would have team dinner before games and I saw how their cafeteria looked more like a restaurant. They had tables made of pure wood and wooden chairs while we had lunch tables that folded up after every lunch. They had ice cream machines, juice and milk dispensers while we had coolers with ice where we got our milk carton from. The guys that came from my school sat with the kids who were on scholarship at St. Stephen’s and the rich would sit apart. On Thursday nights after practice we would go to a teammate house to eat a team dinner before Friday night and this is where I felt the most out of place. We would walk into these houses that were two stories high, had 5 rooms and 3 bathrooms, a pool that overflowed into the lake that had people water skiing and riding around in small boats. We would have to be escorted in and out of the neighborhoods by security just so the rest of the neighbors felt safe but we didn’t dare say anything to the coaches because we felt like that wasn’t our place.

When we were in the locker room things weren’t that different. At first we had our own little section where all the guys from KIPP would be. I noticed that even though there were more people of color on that team they were different because they had money. It wasn’t until later on in the three years that we played football for them that we started to be more and more accepted into the community. Things started to flow better but I still won’t forget how things started.

This all helped me when I got to Colby because what happened at St. Stephen’s is happening here. I still sit with the people that look like me. I still have one little section for me and that is where I am expected to feel “safe”. I learned how to code switch between the people who looked like me and those that didn’t. At the end of the day I learned to play the game. KIPP showed me the tenacity and tools that I needed to succeed while St. Stephen’s showed me how to try to blend in and when to stand out in a different environment.

Teacher Salaries at the Croft School

Thomas Barry / Globally Elite / Chile, Education, Teacher Pay, Teachers, United States /

September 29, 2016

Recently, my Education Senior seminar has been discussing teacher salaries in the United States. My classmates and I are keenly aware that primary and secondary school teachers don’t get paid very much for all the work they do.

Modern School Teacher - Tom Barry — Yup, that pretty much sums it up!

Unfortunately, these low salaries are discouraging many highly-educated students from becoming teachers. While Teach for America has had success recruiting highly-educated college and universtiy graduates to teach for two years, low salaries are making it difficult for schools to attract and retain them for longer than that.

SEE YA! JPG — The motto for too many TFA corps members.

Other educational systems around the world are also experiencing difficulty recruiting quality students to become teachers, as well as retaining them for extended periods of time. While a number of unique factors hinder each education system’s ability to recruit and train highly qualified students to become teachers, the two most common factors appear to be low teacher salaries relative to other occupations in the country, as well as the teaching profession’s low standing among other occupations within the professional hierarchy.

For example, while India has a well-established system for training teachers, it has trouble recruiting promising students to the profession. This is because of the profession’s ‘meager’ salary. Careers in medicine, law, and engineering carry more prestige, respect and higher salaries relative to teaching. As a result, few promising students in India pursue teaching careers. More information on the Indian education system, as well as on other education systems around the world, can be found here.

"Um, I'll pass... I want to earn more money than a teacher!" — “Um, I’ll pass… I want to earn more money than a teacher!”

Since teacher pay was at the forefront of my mind when I began perusing the Croft School’s website, I immediately latched on to a section which discussed teachers at the elite institution. I am fascinated by the payment scheme the school uses to attract and hire teachers. The school recruits and hires both Chilean and international teachers, and uses a scale to pay salaries that include accommodation, pension, taxation, health insurance, and more. The school claims to pay teachers much more favorably than other schools in the immediate area, as well as the city it is located in. This school also says its international teachers enjoy a much higher standard of living than when they taught in their home country.

That line hit me like a ton of bricks. Did they REALLY just say that?

The description of their pay scale is fascinating to me for two reasons:

By comparing their teacher salaries to those in other countries, the school acknowledges that teachers in other parts of the world are not being paid a lot for their work.
This school is clearly proud of its long-standing ability to provide a well-rounded education. I believe the extent to which the school values high-quality teachers is seen in its favorable pay structure. The school pays its teachers high salaries because it knows it needs high quality teachers to effectively teach and carry out their curricular objectives.

Since the Croft School has a strong reputation for preparing students to achieve social and monetary success, their pay scale leads me to ask: What if schools in the US paid teachers these types of salaries? Would this change the teaching profession for the better (i.e. attract more highly-educated candidates who have potential to be great teachers ), or worse (i.e. recruit candidates who are more interested in the profession’s money than actually helping children learn and grow)? Would teacher quality improve as a whole, and would student performance improve, if US schools had the resources to pay teachers higher salaries?

It seems to be working at the Croft School, and I believe if the resources were there, paying teachers higher salaries would improve teacher quality, and thus the academic performance of schools, in the US as well.