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The job of a teacher is ideal for a parent as it has someone working during normal school day hours. This allows teachers to pick their children up from school (or soon after) and still maintain a career with school-age children. However, it is always hard to juggle a career and be a parent, no matter the occupations. These helpful tips will keep your time organized and your mind free to be productive and happy with your family.

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Short Term and Long-Term Planning

As a teacher, you have a lot of responsibilities in terms of planning. That same responsibility resides at home, too. Use a large planner that allows you to organize your career and your family’s chores in the same place. Read more…

The Denver Post recently analyzed the cost of taxpayer subsidies to teacher unions in the 20 largest districts in Colorado and found they added up to more than $1M per year. In many places across the country, school districts pay some or all of the salary and benefits of union presidents and other functionaries who dont teach for a single hour. The fact that the practice is common doesnt make it impossible to change, however:

Douglas County Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, who started in June 2010, said she cut the districts payments to union members nearly in half last spring and will end the extra spending altogether in January.

Id rather not make comments on the past, Celania-Fagen said. Going forward, my responsibility is to do whats right for our students in these economic circumstances and to be accountable for taxpayer dollars.

Its difficult to make an argument that taxpayers should be directly subsidizing union leaders. Organized labor already extracts indirect subsidies by skimming dues from teachers paychecks, sometimes against the desires of teachers.

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At the beginning of the current school year I had a chance to talk with Peter Robinson, the Director of Information Technology for the Auburn school department in Maine. With the support and help of his district and some federal money, Robinson’s staff is pioneering the use of iPads in the classroom–in kindergarten to be precise. The pilot program began last spring. A literacy specialist in the district was having trouble getting through to some children. They weren’t responding to conventional or even unconventional methods, so she thought outside the box and brought her iPad in to school. Loaded with a select a few educational apps, it allowed her opportunities to reach children who had been untouched by other efforts. It allowed them learning opportunities that they just weren’t open to by other means. It also sparked many conversations in the right places, and at the right time.

With MBA admissions offices releasing second-round interview invitations in a few weeks, we thought we should explore an issue that brings endless paranoia to MBA candidates: scheduling interviews. Many schools will give applicants a significant window in which to schedule their interview. So, does scheduling an interview early convey that the candidate is being too aggressive and does not have any other irons in the fire or instead that he/she is eager to act and impress the admissions committee? Does scheduling an interview later give the impression that the candidate is less interested in the program or instead that he/she is highly sought after and is interviewing at multiple schools?

The reality is that there is really no difference between scheduling your interview early on during the time window offered and scheduling it near the end of this time frame. The MBA admissions committees recognize that candidates are busy and that their schedules are in flux as a result of work, community and personal commitments. The committees are focused on the interviews themselves, not on when they are scheduled.

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State Rep. Matt Huffman is trying to build support for a promising effort to expand private school vouchers to more working-class families in Ohio. In order to appease recalcitrant school districts, whose executives vocally oppose the measure, he may remove any benefit youngsters in wealthier districts could hope to get out of the program, however.

Originally, the bill would have granted vouchers of up to $4,626 based on a familys economic circumstances. But managers in more than 300 school districts have complained about the possible loss of state and local funding, apparently afraid of competition for students dollars from the parochial school down the block. Huffman now wants to limit the amount of each voucher to the total per-pupil aid the childs school district receives from the state. This means that children in property-rich suburbs, where a growing number of poor families are concentrated, could get just a few hundred bucks a year when they leave for a private school, while many thousands of dollars stay with the school district.

Its hard to imagine a worse trade-off: Districts get to keep the cash without providing services, while poor and working-class parents in the burbs are forced to scrimp and save even more than their urban counterparts to have some measure of control over their childrens education.

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