You’d need to be independently wealthy to the point where you could afford to lose a ton of money operating at a loss for as long as the company exists. It would be impossible to pay a decent wage and still win any contracts. They generally go to the lowest bidders which is why you see wages creeping lower and lower.
Money.
Regional school districts are poorly funded and just have dispatch companies bid for contracts.
Dispatch companies want money for themselves and keep lowering teacher salaries.
Someone who was willing to operate it as a not-for-profit company. The owner would still collect a reasonable salary commensurate with their position as president, but if the company wasn’t trying to maximize profits, you could pay your frontline ALTs fairly decent wages (at least by current standards), attracting and retaining the best candidates and developing a reputation for high quality and reliability.
In a sense, it would be much closer to direct hire, with the company acting as an outsourced contractor responsible for hiring and overseeing the ALTs, as opposed to a middleman trying to maximize their profits.
A void: dispatch companies do nothing except syphon money from instructor salaries. They’re be better as cooperatives run by teachers or schools.
Only hire people from developing / middle income countries.
Everyone here is saying you’d need to operate the dispatch company as a non-profit (or at a loss) because schools are low on money so they go for the lowest bidding company. What about the opposite approach? Instead of catering to the lowest common denominator, what if you had strict hiring criteria, targeted higher tier schools with more money, and branded yourself as having the best (and most reliable) teachers available? Create a reputation for excellence, and as your reputation builds, try to target mid-tier and eventually lower tier schools. Also, think of ways to add value to your contract besides (random foreigner comes in x days per month). In other words, you will charge more to school, but also provide much more value in return.
Honestly, drop the dispatch-part and offer to train Boe direct hires. They have budget for alt salary and alt training. Dispatch just takes both and takes tax money as profit from both. As a training company less money ends up as corporate profit and more in the hands of the ALTs.
As a teacher I would want…
A liveable salary, regularly paid salary (no arbitrary partial salary), A published payscale with raises that rewards qualifications and experience, stability, observations with actionable feedback, useful training, and sick leave.
The problem with dispatch companies is baked into their business model – they take a chunk out of every dispatch worker’s paycheck, but after initially connecting them with a job, they don’t really provide any meaningful service for the teachers whose money they are skimming from. They are supposed to manage their employees, but they know so little about the day-to-day operations of the places they contract to that they can’t do that effectively and end up just creating more work for all parties involved.
In my experience, they tend to be a bunch of mid-level office workers who take their salaries from the people who actually create value for the institutions they work at, and in return just give the employers the ability to easily hire and fire despite Japanese laws meant to make that a serious decision.
What would I need as a teacher? Not that. I’m not sure what it would look like, but it definitely does not look like someone with lower academic credentials than I have in a better suit than I can afford telling me how I should teach because they half-understood something that happened in my school.
I’ll give the unpopular opinion:
I think ALT dispatch should be abolished altogether. I think the money used for ALT salaries would be better spend in other ways, such as upgrading the school buildings, equipment, teaching supplies, the teacher’s salaries, and so on.
I also think that if the English department needs assistant teachers, those teachers should be hired outright, from a pool of qualified candidates, and those assistants needn’t be native speakers from a foreign country.
The ALT programs as they are now are a HUGE mess, don’t bring any great benefits to the education of the students and are therefore not worth what it costs to run them.
Need – money, time, enthusiasm and patience Want- national holidays off, paid time off , decent resources , English support 🙂
Here’s what I would want from a new Dispatch Company:
* Require one level of JLPT certification (up to level 3) per year of employment. You can come to Japan with no Japanese, but by the end of your first year with the company you need to be N5 *at minimum*. Second year? N4. Third year? N3. N3 is more than enough to communicate with your teachers and do the job of an ALT. The dispatch company should offer study materials, lessons, pay for test registration fees, etc. and / or subsidize those things. Increase salaries for each level passed and further for ALT’s that achieve N2 and N1. * Require ESL certification at point of hire OR require certification by the end of the first year. The dispatch company should subsidize online certification courses. * If the company offered appropriate support along the way to help make those two things happen, that would be all I’d want. I wouldn’t even increase base salaries from what they are now.
This allows everyone to have their cake and eat it too.
* ALT’s that stick around are rewarded by being on the path to earn better pay OR, more importantly, to ***move on*** to another job in Japan they might not have been able to get when they first came here. Also, if people come here for a “One and Done” working vacation year, they don’t have to worry about any of that and the company gets a cheap warm body in a room. * Dispatch companies either get trained, competent, ALT’s that can speak the language and know how to teach (to a point) OR they get to churn through new blood every year / few years like they always have which is how they survive. Not to mention all the bloviating they get to do to BOE’s when talking about how “high quality” their ALT’s are.
But honestly, the real issues aren’t with specific dispatch companies being shitty, the problems are endemic to the Japanese education system. **Until Japan takes English education seriously nothing will change, and no one has any incentive to make things change.** You can have an elite work force of the top educated, certified, multilingual teachers and it doesn’t matter when Boards of Education only care about securing the cheapest contract.
12 comments
You’d need to be independently wealthy to the point where you could afford to lose a ton of money operating at a loss for as long as the company exists. It would be impossible to pay a decent wage and still win any contracts. They generally go to the lowest bidders which is why you see wages creeping lower and lower.
Money.
Regional school districts are poorly funded and just have dispatch companies bid for contracts.
Dispatch companies want money for themselves and keep lowering teacher salaries.
Someone who was willing to operate it as a not-for-profit company. The owner would still collect a reasonable salary commensurate with their position as president, but if the company wasn’t trying to maximize profits, you could pay your frontline ALTs fairly decent wages (at least by current standards), attracting and retaining the best candidates and developing a reputation for high quality and reliability.
In a sense, it would be much closer to direct hire, with the company acting as an outsourced contractor responsible for hiring and overseeing the ALTs, as opposed to a middleman trying to maximize their profits.
A void: dispatch companies do nothing except syphon money from instructor salaries. They’re be better as cooperatives run by teachers or schools.
Only hire people from developing / middle income countries.
Everyone here is saying you’d need to operate the dispatch company as a non-profit (or at a loss) because schools are low on money so they go for the lowest bidding company. What about the opposite approach? Instead of catering to the lowest common denominator, what if you had strict hiring criteria, targeted higher tier schools with more money, and branded yourself as having the best (and most reliable) teachers available? Create a reputation for excellence, and as your reputation builds, try to target mid-tier and eventually lower tier schools. Also, think of ways to add value to your contract besides (random foreigner comes in x days per month). In other words, you will charge more to school, but also provide much more value in return.
Honestly, drop the dispatch-part and offer to train Boe direct hires. They have budget for alt salary and alt training. Dispatch just takes both and takes tax money as profit from both. As a training company less money ends up as corporate profit and more in the hands of the ALTs.
As a teacher I would want…
A liveable salary, regularly paid salary (no arbitrary partial salary), A published payscale with raises that rewards qualifications and experience, stability, observations with actionable feedback, useful training, and sick leave.
http://alt.generalunion.org/
The problem with dispatch companies is baked into their business model – they take a chunk out of every dispatch worker’s paycheck, but after initially connecting them with a job, they don’t really provide any meaningful service for the teachers whose money they are skimming from. They are supposed to manage their employees, but they know so little about the day-to-day operations of the places they contract to that they can’t do that effectively and end up just creating more work for all parties involved.
In my experience, they tend to be a bunch of mid-level office workers who take their salaries from the people who actually create value for the institutions they work at, and in return just give the employers the ability to easily hire and fire despite Japanese laws meant to make that a serious decision.
What would I need as a teacher? Not that. I’m not sure what it would look like, but it definitely does not look like someone with lower academic credentials than I have in a better suit than I can afford telling me how I should teach because they half-understood something that happened in my school.
I’ll give the unpopular opinion:
I think ALT dispatch should be abolished altogether. I think the money used for ALT salaries would be better spend in other ways, such as upgrading the school buildings, equipment, teaching supplies, the teacher’s salaries, and so on.
I also think that if the English department needs assistant teachers, those teachers should be hired outright, from a pool of qualified candidates, and those assistants needn’t be native speakers from a foreign country.
The ALT programs as they are now are a HUGE mess, don’t bring any great benefits to the education of the students and are therefore not worth what it costs to run them.
Need – money, time, enthusiasm and patience Want- national holidays off, paid time off , decent resources , English support 🙂
Here’s what I would want from a new Dispatch Company:
* Require one level of JLPT certification (up to level 3) per year of employment. You can come to Japan with no Japanese, but by the end of your first year with the company you need to be N5 *at minimum*. Second year? N4. Third year? N3. N3 is more than enough to communicate with your teachers and do the job of an ALT. The dispatch company should offer study materials, lessons, pay for test registration fees, etc. and / or subsidize those things. Increase salaries for each level passed and further for ALT’s that achieve N2 and N1.
* Require ESL certification at point of hire OR require certification by the end of the first year. The dispatch company should subsidize online certification courses.
* If the company offered appropriate support along the way to help make those two things happen, that would be all I’d want. I wouldn’t even increase base salaries from what they are now.
This allows everyone to have their cake and eat it too.
* ALT’s that stick around are rewarded by being on the path to earn better pay OR, more importantly, to ***move on*** to another job in Japan they might not have been able to get when they first came here. Also, if people come here for a “One and Done” working vacation year, they don’t have to worry about any of that and the company gets a cheap warm body in a room.
* Dispatch companies either get trained, competent, ALT’s that can speak the language and know how to teach (to a point) OR they get to churn through new blood every year / few years like they always have which is how they survive. Not to mention all the bloviating they get to do to BOE’s when talking about how “high quality” their ALT’s are.
But honestly, the real issues aren’t with specific dispatch companies being shitty, the problems are endemic to the Japanese education system. **Until Japan takes English education seriously nothing will change, and no one has any incentive to make things change.** You can have an elite work force of the top educated, certified, multilingual teachers and it doesn’t matter when Boards of Education only care about securing the cheapest contract.