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Each day teachers cope with working environments that would never be tolerated by lawyers, doctors and other professionals. Copiers, ditto machines, lab glassware and even books, the basic tools of the trade, are battered or nonexistent in many school systems. Teachers are frequently left to fill the gap from their own pockets. Some pay for photocopies; others pick up the tab for educational extras. Every month, for example, Patrice Bertha, a sixth-grade teacher on Chicago's seedy West Side, piles her charges onto a city bus, often paying the fare and admission fee so they can visit a museum or see a play. Many of the children, who are black, would never visit downtown Chicago otherwise. "Their whole world is where they live," she says.
The lack of essentials is symptomatic of a larger problem: inequities in school financing. In most states, schools are supported by a combination of property taxes and state and federal grants. The formula ensures gleaming beakers and well-stocked libraries for schools in wealthier states and neighborhoods but leaves many rural and inner-city schools with peeling paint and leaky pipes. Connecticut, for example, with its tony suburbs, spent an average of $5,900 on each public school student in the state last year; Alabama spent just $2,600.
The physical signs of underfunding are not limited to the inner cities. The roof of one building on the grounds of Tunica Junior High School in Tunica, Miss., collapsed years ago, but the school district -- abandoned by whites in the wake of integration -- does not have money for repairs. Inside, the wooden desks and textbooks remain, split and rotting. Outside, there is no playground equipment. "The world sends messages to our kids about the importance it places on education," says Robin Gostin, a tenth-grade math teacher in Los Angeles. "Go to shopping malls and see how nice they are. Then look at the desks in our classrooms, and you see nails coming through the bottom of the seats."
Most weekdays, Juan Rodriguez, 46, roars up to Hartford's Thomas J. Quirk Middle School in his red pickup truck at 7 a.m. and leaves by 3 p.m. In between, he teaches five science classes, grades papers, prepares lesson plans, has two rounds of hall duty, grabs a sandwich at his desk and calls parents to discuss discipline problems or schoolwork. The daytime schedule -- which is often followed by two hours of work at home -- sounds hectic, and it is. When the last-period bell rang on a recent afternoon, Rodriguez had not yet had an opportunity to go to the bathroom.
Coffee breaks. A lunch hour. A moment to chat with colleagues. Most workers take these things for granted. But teachers cannot operate that way. Their workweek easily stretches up to 60 hours, including back-to-back classes, lunchroom duty, daily lesson planning, coaching, club sponsorship and conferences.
The frantic pace can take a toll. For 17 years Sue Capie and her husband Ken, of Cupertino, Calif., had a two-teacher marriage. Then in 1981 she fled to a job as a recruiter for Hewlett-Packard. "I had been onstage a long time," she says. "Now I can sit at my desk sometimes and say to myself, 'O.K., you don't have to think about anything for a few minutes.' I have a lot more freedom."