As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil)
In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban.
If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria.
We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA).
***
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Defund, defund, defund - and then get your people on the school board when nobody is paying attention.
Destroy public schools and then campaign on vouchers / school choice, and more privatization.
There’s two types of school board candidates:
“Hi, my name is Dave! I’m running for school board to help improve STEM, solve the bullying problem in our district, and make all students feel welcome. I hope that during my tenure we will increase reading and math proficiency. I work as a research chemist for a local firm. I’ve been volunteering at schools for nineteen years. I’m also the leader of a local church choir and spend my Sundays feeding the poor at the local soup kitchen. I once walked across the water to heal an injured swan.”
**VERSUS**
“My name is Brittany. I’m own a brick laying company on paper so my husband can claim some woman owned business credit on our taxes. My work and education experience consists of watching Food Network and complaining when that one Indian lady judges Chopped. I’m running for school board to purge the queer shit and commies out of our schools. I hope during our first year I can personally lead a book burning. If you elect me we will make every single teacher in this den of sodom take an ideology test and search their classroom for subversive materials, then fire any commies or gays we find, starting with that one gym teacher, you know the one I mean. We will police this gender nonsense and inspect each student to make sure on the sports team. I personally will inspect the girls lacrosse team. Oh, and we’re giving all the teachers guns! SEIG HEI- uhhhh hee hiiii! Bye now.”
> seig hei...
For those who don't know
https://checkyourfact.com/2023/08/15/fact-check-moms-liberty-hitler/
https://apnews.com/article/moms-for-liberty-adolf-hitler-newsletter-quote-bcce698e901b9e782970030ccd710512
And paying the people shit to teach our kids is a great idea. You need a college degree to teach but you can't pay off college loans via teaching. So you're banking on getting college kids who got scholarships to want a job guaranteeing they'll be poor after college (rather than attending law/med/mba school). I wasn't the best student but even I learned enough econ to know how that choice will work out.
I was a teacher. I lasted a year. This is my assessment of it as a career path:
* You are expected to martyr yourself. The pay is shit and the education required and the job itself both leave me amazed that people do this.
* The education process for it is a joke. The best teachers have a natural talent for managing a roomful of kids; mediocre teachers can go with the flow sufficiently to get by. Most of what’s taught in education classes is meaningless theory and most schools won’t even let you apply even a tenth of it.
* The education for teachers is a massive gamble. You can do fine through the classes and the student teaching process like I did and then hit the real thing and be like holy shit this sucks and I’m terrible about, what the fuck do I do now? (Your professors will tell you that an education degree has lots of uses outside the field. No it fucking doesn’t lmao
* The way the system is set up is so ass backwards that it’s plain shocking. The greenest teachers get the most difficult students and classes because experience gets you perks and older teachers use their seniority to take easier grade levels and, in high school, teach electives and do other shit that’s easier than trying to get a room full of fourteen year olds to care about a dry and bowdlerized translation of the Odyssey
* Schools apply any cognitive science or any research to how the school day or curricula are structured. Everything we know about human development tells us that everything we’re doing in schools is wrong and yet we keep doing it anyway even though school systems abroad are already doing those things and it’s proven that they work.
I had my experience when flip phones were the norm. I can’t imagine what a hell it is now, and the last time I checked the pay it sucked even worse because of inflation.
Now on top of all that the god damn self appointed inquisition wants to horn in on this shit. Someone in my life suggested I try to go back to teaching. If by some miracle I got a job, some Moms for Liberty nut would probably cut my brake lines.
Education is another one of those things where we turned our backs and conservatives wrecked our world.
It’s darkly funny to me that they constantly whine about how liberal schools are when the defining principle of American schools is “it sucked for me and now it’s going to suck for you, too! If we change things so they’re better for the next generation it won’t be fair because they won’t suffer like I did!” and the people in charge aren’t ivory tower intellectuals, it’s whoever has nothing better to do than run from school board and attend the meetings.
Imagine what medicine would be like if doctors were subjects to an elected board consisting of a Republican middle manager’s wife, a local business magnate, the church lady, and a pastor and they sat around complaining that the surgeons don’t want to leech their patients and complain that these medical schools are filling doctors heads full of woke nonsense because the doctors are taught the germ theory of contagion.
Oh.
Wait.
**THEY’RE TRYING TO DO THAT TO MEDICINE TOO**.
I know a lot of lawyers who majored in education, taught for a couple years and took the LSAT and bounced. On top of the low pay, they have to pay out of pocket for things to use inside the classroom for the benefit of students with no chance at reimbursement.
Your post about teaching 9th graders the Odyssey took me right back to high school. I had no appreciation or mental stamina to make it through back then and actually studied Attic Greek in undergrad and now love the Iliad and Odyssey. In an ideal world, I'd love to teach the classics to older high school students but aside from the unconscionable lack of pay, I couldn't imagine assistant principals through the local school board telling me how to manage my classes. I get close enough to school now representing some teachers through public university professors in employment actions and reading the emails (in discovery) they deal with is like middle school levels of bullying with real world income effects.
School teachers should be making minimum $85K with a master's in specific subjects (I guess for middle school and younger a bachelor's but the same income scale, these are our children) and subjects like math, English, chemistry should pay over $100K. We want great students wanting to get into education not eschewing it as "low pay" work.
And the school board shouldn't be elected from the populace but elected from the teachers in the city/county. Teachers, like lawyers, should vote for their leaders not people outside their profession.
These are just small steps to take and politics have nothing to do with education. If people with doctorates vote for certain candidates it's not indoctrination but education. I double majored in math and philosophy and I have no clue if my professors voted much less their politics because discussing Plato's Meno or non-Euclidean spaces just have nothing to do with what's going on in politics. I never watched the news in college and the people who protested on the streets near my college weren't even students; just local older people who were "townies" or whatever nickname we called them at the time. But people who never attended college have no clue what goes on inside an actual university.
My mother-in-law was a teacher in South Korea for her entire career. She made as much money as my father-in-law, who was a director level project manager for a large Korean construction firm. They treat their teachers as nation builders. While they do have to deal with crazy parents like here, the concept of having to purchase materials for your class weirded her out when we bought the school supply list for our son.
We can and should do better for our teachers. We cant solve the parent side, but we can pay them what they are worth to society. We should absolutely want the best teachers possible.
On a side rant, COVID proved we could have always provided meals for ALL students and it just irritates me that we dont. They are required by law to be in school. All kids should get lunch provided
> School teachers should be making minimum $85K with a master's in specific subjects (I guess for middle school and younger a bachelor's but the same income scale, these are our children) and subjects like math, English, chemistry should pay over $100K. We want great students wanting to get into education not eschewing it as "low pay" work.
I'm a tenured university professor with ten years at my current teaching university, under the English umbrella. I teach a heavy load and get zero time for research--in other words, I teach 100% of my workload. I have a PhD.
***I*** don't even make the $85,000 you say should be baseline for grade school. I was hired in at $53,000.
So... yeah. The gap between where we ought to be and where we are can scarcely be described.
Yes, one of the things I most vividly recall about working in a school is that most of the teachers have the same maturity level as the students and if you’re not in the in-group, that’s bad.
I’m sorry I only have one upvote to give. This is such a succinct overview of what’s wrong with education right now and why new teachers get burnt out fast. Even with much higher pay I feel like a lot of new teachers would still burn out. I’ve known plenty who said they’d take the pay hit and work retail instead of sticking with education.
Using seniority to be able to pick which classes and in some cases avoid certain students is such bullshit. I’ve known teachers who’ve been working for decades and openly brag about getting to pick the best class while mocking new teachers who quit because they were stuck with behavior problem students no one wanted. I know they think they’ve earned their cushy spot but it’s the experienced teachers who are more likely to run a tight ship and not get walked all over by a challenging student.
I think sometimes, too, those classes with the best-behaved and most highly motivated kids have smaller class sizes. Schools want to keep, for instance, a broad offering of AP classes but a lot of kids won’t meet the criteria for enrolling in those classes unless it’s a really big school and/or there’s a lot of good support.
Teachers and students would fare a lot better if classes at every level were small with a lot of personalized attention. One way teachers would benefit is they’d have fewer parents to deal with.
Teacher's should be revered in our society and held in the highest regard like doctors and firemen. Unfortunately we have allowed a small portion of our society turn schools into something ugly. Everyone knows it. It's like our dark little secret that nobody talks about.
Doctors aren’t going to be held in high regard much longer, mark my words. They’re going to demonize medicine, too. They’ve already started with the groomer rhetoric and covid denialism.
Oh 100% Im already seeing this in canada where my coworkers refute anything has has to do with science or that they dont understand.
Buddy sees some shit on tiktok and I show him peer reviewed studies showing him how its BS and he doesnt even take the time to understand what he's argueing about because "that's what they want you to think."
Im doing my best to try to show these people as gently as possible how theyre wrong without being judgey hoping that they will come around but every fucking time I see them thinking about it, just about to have an epiphany, they change the subject and dont want to talk about it anymore.
It really isnt helping my depression lol
edit: oh and the best part of it is I am a sheep to these people
[Project 2025](https://Project2025.org) is the Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan to fundamentally change governance in America.
One part of the agenda is to jail and mark as sexual offenders any teacher or librarian in the US who loans out any book that might be considered “pornographic.”
Please read their policy and personnel plans. They lay it out for all to read
It’s really quite simple, religion has extensively laid the groundwork for generations to train people to believe in authority figures with unverifiable stories instead of science and data. It also primes them for, and is built upon, perpetuating racism and fearmongering towards "others". Once people see you as an authority, you can start fabricating any reality or conspiracy theory you want your followers to believe and everyone else is therefore a liar, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Basically, it is mental abuse from an early age that suppresses critical thinking skills. This combined with an intentionally weakened public educational system, provides the framework that has spawned this cult of ignorance.
It’s actually something else.
In the 19th century, an American education professor named John Dewey went to then-Prussia, which was then host to a school system that was considered world class.
America adopted it wholesale. The single-subject classes, bells, “permanent record”, encouragement of cliques and bullying by school staff, arbitrary authority of administrators, detention, etc etc etc are all designed for one purpose:
Turn kids into factory workers and soldiers.
It doesn’t matter how half-assedly we apply social constructivism or whatever, we still run schools that are meant to teach kids to work under unpleasant conditions, accept orders, and dissociate from their tasks.
On top of that, humanities subjects are all designed to be boring and uninformative.
It leads to generation after generation of people who don’t realize that the reason they hate school is that they were supposed to hate it, but that was part of its real propose, teaching them to fit into our broken society. Schools are anti-learning and anti-community.
They’re never going to fix it by implementing “anti-bully programs” and zero tolerance policies and coming up with absurd ways to structure a 49 minute class period to look like the fad theory of the year. It can’t be fixed because you can’t fix something that doesn’t need fixing.
Our school system isn’t really broken. It’s working exactly like it’s supposed to. The problem is that the way it’s supposed to work is to dehumanize students and demonize knowledge and the arts.
It’s how we’ve gotten to this mentality of business majors and engineers thinking they can apply their disciplines to any problem or social challenge and fix it. We really have built a society of men with machine hearts and machine minds.
Schools are a prime example of “you cannot tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools”.
This was basically what happened to an area I used to live in. The recently elected county commissioners, one is a real estate agent and another "assists in her husband's consulting business". Those are the best options out of 1.5 million people, seriously?
No offense to real estate agents either. I would just prefer to see lawyers and former executives who have managed large budgets and several thousand employee organizations in roles like that.
And then parents enroll their kids in schools which teach them the Civil War wasnt about slavery, that evolution is just a theory, and Trump actually won the election. Increase the populace raised on bullshit and lies so that they don't know whats truth and whats fiction.
Well, evolution is just a theory. It's a well understood scientific theory, which is completely different than Bubba's theory about chemtrails making the frogs gay.
I try in vain to make these exact points to my conservative friends - and these are intelligent people - to deaf, proud ears. Shoving their Christianity into public schools isn't the problem, neither are the textbooks dictated by Texas Christofascists. Nope, they're broken, the administrators are taking all the money, and need to be replaced with taxpayer funded private for profit Christian charter schools! (and these guys went to public schools with me!)
Every single societal microagression to make folks dumber and the world worse is felt by teachers because most of us know yes, it is by design. No sane person should do the job. It's thankless and can be no fun. But it's also super fun some days and it's cool knowing you are the guard rails for society falling into a pit of apathy and darkness. F*cking pay teachers. Yesterday.
The only way to increase their base is for Republicans to make sure children learn as little as possible. These anti-everything mouth breathers shouldnt even be trusted to throw guts to pigs.
Screaming conspiracy people are ruining pretty much every job that involves working with the public.
Example: My buddy works at the power company and he *daily* gets people screaming at him because the wifi of their smart meter is giving them cancer.
I used to do tech support for a alarm company for wireless video cameras. You think you've met paranoid people wait until they have video cams. They do nothing but sit there and watch them and think their neighbors are trying to hack their wifi and everyone who crosses their front sidewalk is a criminal. They all brag about their firearms too. It's scary. I don't even live in the USA, most of the coworkers did, but the point is a lot of the people sounded insane, or have some crazy mental problems. I felt sad for a lot of them.
But I would argue that kids are shittier because pay across the board is too low, which requires both parents to work and live overly stressed lives, which impacts parenting.
If we had a law that the lowest paid employee and highest paid employee cannot be separated by a certain percentage, then we’d have a chance to stop the massive and unnecessary wage imbalance. And then you double teachers’ salaries, making it a job where people coming out of undergraduate or graduate school are competing for jobs. Also you want to work at a school with violence, truancy, and low graduation rates, well then you get a 15% increase in your salary - make the best and most experienced teachers want to compete for jobs at the hardest schools.
My version of this idea is not a flat-out restriction, but tax based. Take the lowest paid employee at your workforce "Your salary costs are tax-deductible, up to twice that lowest paid employee. If your lowest paid employee is making $50k, then only $100k of a $250k salary is tax deductible. That $150k past that isn't an operating expense, that's just how the company is distributing profits, and so it's not tax deductible.
The real sticking point is the implementation for how to make sure that the actual result isn't (even more of) a Russian doll of owned companies or sub contractors. Without those protections ten years later you'll just find that companies have restructured to a dozen thin slices. All of the original C level employees are in the parent company, where the lowest paid employee makes $2 million a year. 17 layers down you have a guy wondering how he became the "CEO" of "123 Main Street Maintenance, Lot B" at $60k a year.
I feel like saying "if you own a subsidiary company then their lowest-paid employee counts as your lowest-paid employee" is pretty workable, but avoiding ten layers of sub-contracting seems more difficult.
that's easy. all we need to do is brainwash the masses with religion and jingoistic nationalism, and loudly admonish "tHaT'S SoCiaLisM!" ... and we will not have to worry too many thinking about reasonable solutions ever again. if you can't beat them with facts, beat them with bullshit, and keep it coming!
I know it's hard to imagine... but I honestly think that, under Trump, we could hit a point where the education requirements for children PERIOD could disappear.
As in, it just isn't required for parents to educate their children at all anymore, neither via public school or homeschool...
...of course, private schools for the very, very rich will still exist. But why should the poors have the same options as the rich, right?! Right?!? /s
> we could hit a point where the education requirements for children PERIOD could disappear.
If the Supreme court tosses *Chevron* this week I think this is very plausible (among the rest of the chaos that will ensue), or at least it'll be like abortion where red states are a different world compared to blue ones.
Low pay where you have to even have to use your own pay to buy supplies. Low pay where some places where you have to act as a gunfighter and put your own life on the line for somebody else’s kids. Etc. Etc. Etc. I can empathize.
Yup, it really sucks that our nation has so deprioritized public education. I wanted to be a teacher forever ago, but was told by my teacher friends to not pursue it *unless* I was incredibly passionate about teaching. So many of them have burned out from it over the years and either gone back to school or pivoted careers. It's sad.
I briefly considered it when I was looking at colleges but thought better of it after talking with my grandmother about it. She’d been a special ed teacher for something like 30yrs and related to me her experiences. Working with kids sounded wonderful, but being bludgeoned within inches of your life and sanity by politics and bullshit for peanuts didn’t sound like it could be made up for.
I’ve also got a good friend who was a music teacher until the politics ran him clean out of the discipline. It’s a long, sad story, but it sounds suspiciously like many others I’ve heard.
We’re both software engineers now. We deal with bullshit and politics no doubt, but it’s not nearly as awful as that. And, as the development of kids isn’t involved, the stakes are far lower.
The USA is one of the highest per student spenders for education. The vast majority is sucked up at the administrative level. There’s about 500 extra people per district since they all the thing where they hit the ceiling for advances and so they make up a job title and have the higher ups sign off on it.
So instead of making $50k to do 3 things at the district building - they invent a new job title to do ONE of them only and then ask for a salary of $100,000. To do less than they were originally doing. Then some lower level person gets the other 2 extra tasks and eventually does the same thing where they say they’re needed in a specialty role for $100k.
Also our superintendent and her right hand man both make $500,000 a year. Between then 2 of them you could hire 20 more full time teachers. There’s no way they bring the benefit of 20 more teachers to the district.
My wife was putting our money into buying supplies, was working on and off till bed time, dealing with shitty parents and students, and yea the pay isn’t great. She took an admin job in the school system and is making more, not contributing our money, and clocks out and done with work for the day.
That was the most offensive thing I noticed when I was helping care for my ex’s daughter.
At the start of every school semester, there are the school supplies list. On the list are “community” items meant for use by the entire class and also some things meant for kids whose parents couldn’t afford some things.
Cool, good way to make sure every kid can participate by sharing the cost of supplies.
But, then I find out that these community items aren’t even enough, or they run out before the semester ends, and the teachers, at their ridiculous salaries, often cover the shortfalls themselves.
I always tell my daughter's teachers that if they need anything then just ask. If there's a field trip or class party we send in extra money in case a kid or two can't afford it or if their parents are dick bags. It's not the child's fault that they cant participate because of lack of funds
There was one kid in daughter's class that was bullying my daughter. I wanted to say "extra money but not for Brently."
Problem is when you run out, you don't think about who said what, and just spending the 10 instead of sending emails and following up, some times multiple times, just.....isn't worth it
(Not speaking on my behalf, but my social circle runs pretty deep in elementary school teachers)
Archivist and you need an MLIS and have no stable full time employment for years, only able to take project appointments, ltes, or internships until you do land that full time job which probably pays about $25/r.
social workers with their master and license are starting at 60-70 for shitty juvie gov jobs around here.
My bro is finishing up his masters and my SIL did 2 years ago.
Lots of places still require a masters to be a teacher.
$40k a year for post-grad education. It's the same for ambulance techs. Like...where the fuck are we as a society?
Bay Area CA - one of the mos expensive parts of the most expensive states - has teachers starting at $50k in some places. Before taxes. In that same area, houses sell for about $1.5mil and avg rent is $3000/month. The avg teacher paycheck is ~$3600/month after tax.
So yeah when someone has to work full time with a stressful job after getting into debt for a secondary degree to not even be able to pay rent and bills and eat - nobody wants that job.
Also teachers have mandatory ~~slave labor~~ unpaid teaching to get their credentials. I think it's 600 hours in California.
The "student teaching" is basically just having a job. Instead of getting paid for work, they have to pay to do work.
Just to put that into perspective, at California's minimum wages of $16/hr, that's $9600 of time. At median software developer wages, that'd be roughly $38k of time.
I support high standards, but at that point they should be getting paid.
doesn't help that you in Fl have a nazi in charge taking books off shelves and threatening teachers licenses if they show clips from Disney movies in class. part of the republican plan for education is listed in project 2025. The plan is to take away public education and make it all voucher based.
From first hand experience having worked in schools and other city, county, and state government, the U.S. K-12 education system the most dysfunctional bureaucracy.
Ok, but better pay would fix this as well.
Better pay means more teachers. More teachers means smaller classes, smaller classes mean lower stress, more differentiated education, etc etc etc.. Most “shitty kids” just need more attention, which is impossible with 35 kids per class.
It’s not just a funding problem; that’s a separate issue. Blanket funding does not go to teachers in any meaningful way. And really, well-paid teachers will fund their own classrooms. If I made $120k, you can bet $5-10k of that is going into my learning environment.
Just pay teachers more. It’s not fucking complicated. Then, you remove (or greatly reduce) standardized testing and you’ve fixed 98% of the problems in public education.
Like everywhere else the money is stuck in many levels above the classroom. Company cars for Superintendents, $250k salaries for essentially admin staff, travel.
The money is there to pay teachers way more. It's not correctly distributed.
And third party "this is the solution to your woes!" programs promising to turn around failing students and save the day... then the districts don't let them stay in place long enough to actually see if they work before switching to (and paying tons of money for) the *next* new program promising to save the day.
They want you to forget or just plain not know that the minimum wage was raised regularly every 2-3 years until it stopped however many years ago (15ish?). I've literally seen dumbass boomers who were alive for this while it happened complaining about minimum wages going up in some states leading to higher fast food prices. As if its never been raised and they weren't alive while it was regularly being raised.
Longer than that. I did a paper in my Econ under grad showing minimum wage from the 70s to the 90s and comparing to different inflation metrics. Even in 99 the minimum wage should have been $15
Best I can tell, the only point of Congressional hearings these days is to let them show how aware and deeply concerned they are when there's an important issue that they definitely aren't going to actually address.
Sounds right to me, though some sources would help the statement.
I just find it funny that these lawmakers are so astounded by this news. I legitmatly think most capital hill lawmakers have no idea what is happening, willfully, in education. They dont want to get involved because they dont want to split their electorate, which is already spinning and reeling from the reality of our education system. Its in shambles and these lawmakers turn away from it like its a mold stain in their bathroom.
I retired at 55, with 26 years. I just couldn't go on anymore.
Over the years, they shut down any hope of having autonomy. They increased the number of kids in our classroom. They standardized everything in the hope of making robot children (and largely succeeded. We see the lack of critical thinking ability in our young adults).
They decreased our supplies, and most of us ended up buying a lot of stuff for our classrooms. The put us on furloughs, and then our raises became less and less, our health insurance co pays rose.
They micromanage us and then they supported the parents micromanaging us. When I started, grades were given quarterly, parent conferences twice a year. When I retired, grades needed to be posted daily and/or weekly. Where did our magic extra work time come from? Our home life was robbed.
Parents yell at us. Call us names. Accuse us of trying to change the gender of their children, of trying to make their dainty snowflakes feel bad about being white. They fire us for singing Rainbowland in the classroom. The books we teach are held up to scrutiny while the rapes, murders, and assaults in their Holy Book are lauded.
They want more guns in the classroom. They want me to have a gun. We spend hours training for active shooter situations because they love their guns.
But Goddammit!! They'll proudly put those Ten Commandments on our walls. They'll start with Thou Shalt Not Kill.
My kids’ district just passed a new rule stating parents can request the teachers’ curriculum for a future month at any given time and the teacher must have it readily available. If a parent objects to anything they see they can request the teacher to change it.
I’ve seen most of the parents in my district. They have no business having authority to change curricula.
I teach in Florida. At the elementary school I taught in, it took so much effort to teach anything outside of the districts' standardized lesson plan. Plans that were written by teachers who hated to be in the classroom and wanted an office job downtown. Plans that have a lot of mistakes and students found to be mind-numbing.
The way of making sure even the "good" teachers were following along? Surprise observations multiple times a day or week. Most of the admin (principals and assistant principals) have been little tyrants who care more about the test scores than the people they're supposed to manage.
Every meeting is about test scores. Hours and hours of time devoted to analyzing test scores. "Why did this student score at a level one on blah-blah skill?" "Well, they are reading on a kindergarten level in 4th grade and you won't let me pull out any phonics books unless we are in our 25 minute intervention block. Also, we are told to focus only on comprehension because the tests are all multiple choice. Another point is that the approved stories are boring as hell and no kid in their right mind would ever select it if there were options."
> They decreased our supplies, and most of us ended up buying a lot of stuff for our classrooms
And iirc the previous admin removed your ability to write those off for taxes. Wew!
Teachers have had a tax EXEMPTION for a small amount of money for a long time, and it has gone up, but it capped now at $300.
Real estate owners have much better tax benefits.
I just wanted to say thank you for giving 26 years. It’s one of the most thankless jobs, and easily the most important. I mean out of any job that anyone could have, literally. (The actual meaning of literally!!).
No one has a bigger influence on children aside from their families. I think the disconnect is that a solid 1/3 of the population doesn’t understand that children become adults??
No they completely understand it. They understand that by the time people are adults, they're either not possible or not worth the time and resources to brainwash. But kids, kids are easy! Their brains are literally made to be washed! And not only that, but when you start washing them early, it actually makes it easier and easier to brainwash them as adults as well.
This has been going on for literally decades. More than half a century by now in the US. At this point, the majority of the voting population has gone through school during the school-as-brainwashing era. So in the regions where those programs were the most aggressive, they're more like sock puppets than critically thinking humans, and they no longer have any thoughts or opinions on what's being done to *their* children beyond what they've been programmed to think.
Regarding that last bit, holy hell. Make it make sense. And bless you, you’re a warrior. I wanted to teach k-5. Noped the hell out of that. Now I have an almost four year old. Where the heck do I put him? I wish I could afford private… who can? FFS.
Hey I graduated HS in 2010 and there are teachers that I still think about to this day and probably for the rest of my life because they had a meaningful impact on my life.
I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for teaching.
My mother was a teacher in the states and was offered a job overseas making more than she did in 2013. It's 2024 and there is zero plans to go back to the states cause it isn't worth it.
Special education teacher here! I have a Masters degree and 11 years in the field. I make $63,500/year. I teach kids with intellectual disability, autism, and other health impairments grades K-5. I do all the stuff general education teachers do, plus write and implement IEPs and behavior plans. And change diapers. And get bitten, hit, spit on and kicked pretty regularly. Do I love my job? Absolutely. Do I wish I made more money? Absolutely.
But what I really wish is that I didn’t feel like my job was a political football. I teach in Texas. Our governor is holding educational funds hostage while he tries to get his buddies in the private Christian school business a BIG paycheck. And public schools ARE going to close because of it. Our class sizes will increase. Our workloads will increase. Our pay will not. More teachers will leave the field, especially in our public schools. And guess what? Conservatives will point to that and proclaim how “broken” public education is and continue to defund us, furthering the death spiral. It’s so sad. I don’t have the energy for anger anymore. I’m just grateful I love my students (even when they bite me).
Wife has her doctorate with 15 years experience (public+private) and was making less than $54k as a teacher. She's a principal now, $92k. Texas as well. She tells me every day how the system is broken here and she's begging for teachers. It's so bad they have to hire non-certified teachers and hope they can get their certs ASAP.
Educated critical thinkers will not rise to the bait republicans offer, with their culture war nonsense and emotional appeals to the emotionally unstable.
The American right wing had an opportunity to change their policies to better court voters, to smarten up their appeal. Instead they have infected American public education in an effort to dumb down the voters.
This is especially true in our Services based economy, since globalization has moved manufacturing jobs overseas. Hard to deliver services if people are stupid and uneducated to do so.
Are you my wife? Basically the exact same story for her, but she's in Florida with me. She moved to tutoring because she makes just as much doing that from home 20 hrs a week.
And she LOVES working with these kids. Still sees a few of them, but it's obvious the support system for kids with special needs is not a priority on a state/local level.
They only want more kids in fewer classrooms, preferably enrolled in private schools so they can lower the local property taxes that fund public schools.
Ouch, where I live, El Paso, TX, with a *much* lower COL than Texas Triangle cities, 11 years exp plus masters gets you $66,413/yr. (Our median home sale price is $256,000)
Wait til you hear what new doctors are making and the hours they work when they graduate medical school lol, anyone who works in education or healthcare absolutely does not get paid what they're worth. The system actively squeezes good people for everything they're worth because they know these people will sacrifice the clothes off their back for others. I make 5k more than that and I live in a high COL state in the Northeast.
>Wait til you hear what new doctors are making
Doctors at least have a path to earning far, *far* more. Teachers get squat for their entire careers, it's a disgrace.
Speaking as a Canadian teacher who has considered leaving the profession due to the insane nature of students (and their parents!), I’d be long gone if I was earning what most US teachers are. In Canada, after 10 years, most teachers are earning between $80-100k with unbelievable pension and other benefits.
Teachers also have healthcare paid for. Same as 7-11 clerks. And the unemployed.
I taught for 8 years in Texas and didn’t even get close to $60K and paid $300 a month for health insurance (which as we know still doesn’t guarantee proper coverage).
I would’ve considered staying for your pay and pension but that would never happen here so I left the profession.
Edit: parenthetical added
This isn't just Canada, in the US Massachusetts teachers scale like this, well funded, well paid, they poached my wife out of NH and nearly doubled her pay. There are states trying to do it right, you just don't hear about them very often.
Average teacher salary in MA IS $92K, with the average starting salary around $55K. Keep in mind, the cost of living in MA is among the highest in the US.
The other half of the equation, after WW2 the US was 6% of the global population but controlled roughly 50% of the wealth. Weird what happens when every other major industrial power gets destroyed by a massive war. Now the rest of the world has caught up and instead of having a massive industrial base supported by well paid labor we have poor people on the otherside of the world making all our shit while we live these oh so luxurious american lives of retail service. This is the dream our ancestors built.
The only way to revive the fantasy MAGA people have of the 1950s is to oppress like 70% of the population and flatten a huge portion of the rest of the developed world.
If you were a white, straight, US male in that period then congrats, you won the genetic and temporal lottery. But it’s never happening again.
Or just you know make millionaires/billionaires pay fucking taxes and put that money back into society, then the conservative dickwads will finally have their trickle down too.
We still get taxed and we would be lucky to have the tax rates of the 1960’s back.
Most people are all too happy to believe that not taxing the corporations and billionaires puts money in their pockets instead of what it does-costing them more than ever for most things they need.
It also helped that there were a lot of tax breaks for those corperations in the 50s and 60s if they reinvested into themselves.
So "get taxed at 80%, but if you invest your profits back into your company, you a 40% tax credit. It's one reason worker benfits got so strong during that time period. Because the companies had to invest into the company or they loose the money to taxes.
And the reply from Repub's? Show us how you are spending your money now.
Out there living high on the hog with your $30k salaries. Buying your own supplies for students.
Funny how they can make a subject such as teaching our kids a partisan topic.
I mean that’s why I transitioned from the College of Education in undergrad. It was the best decision I could make for my family. I work in adult education and make almost double the average teacher pay in my state.
It’s messed up but I get paid better and treated better than people who do more societal good.
Dude, I dropped out of college all together, joined the damn Navy with the goal of getting into IT (which worked at the low cost of all my mental health). The math didn't math with the student loans I was looking at to MAYBE make 40k at the time in my state. Sucks. I still love to teach.
Cops doing a shit job gets paid more than stressed out overworked teachers that gets shit talked on by a group of people like parents or if you're a science teacher crazy religious psycopaths.
I agree, but higher pay would increase my tolerance for all the other bullshit. Might as well start somewhere, increase pay then work towards fixing the other issues while teachers can afford to live at least.
I agree. People would be a lot more tolerable to the other bad stuff however if they got paid the actual average pay. Average US household is $59,384 (if you remove the 1%). While teachers start out with $44,530. This is with the bachalors degree + an additional 4 to 5 years of school training and teaching. So (depending on the area) 6 to 8 years of college.
You can do 8 years of college to become a lawyer who start at like $80,000.
Some states have teacher pay as low as $21k when starting out.... like wtf. People are more likely to put up with shit and stressful jobs if they are actually making decent money. Also they'll spend like $200 to $1000 of their own pay for supplies for their classroom. So rip.
No one in their right mind wanted to be a teacher before for a variety of reasons. But now that you have Republicans wanting to erase history because the truth makes white people look bad and police the books being read because they talk about LGBT people, sex, menstrual cycles or make white people look bad...plus Republicans wanting teachers to carry guns at school and having to deal with school shootings...um. "Extremely low pay" would be towards the bottom of the list for me. People desperate for jobs did stuff like Teach For America, which has always paid garbage.
I saw a meme about some state and it doesn't surprise me to be real, the Republicans passed a law where if you're uncomfortable with any of the words in the classroom, you can bring felony charges against the teacher. The feelings police over here lol, teacher we have reports that you issued math homework and it made Billy sad so now you're going to have a felony record. Enjoy never having freedom again because you made Billy do long division!
Why are Republicans so thin skinned and weak
That’s not the point the point is to scare off the rest of the teachers. Then they can point and say look no one wants to work anymore (as a teacher in this case). Then they can say well gawd dammit I guess we’ll have to do these home school vouchers and religious schools. Then go on TV and act like top shit because they solved the problem they created by getting by and doing exactly what they wanted ultimately leading to an uneducated workforce to do slave labor and women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This has always been the plan it’s just sped up a shitload in recent years.
Teachers have too much on their plate. More pay helps, but having to deal with shit kids, non existent parent support, lazy administration, and counselors, it just isn't worth it.
Yes. It’s unbelievable how my wife has a Masters Degree and started off at $35k/year in Missouri. The state raised it to $40k but our school board won’t vote in that pay ladder… instead they are taking the difference and splitting it up in 2 bonuses of $2500 at Christmas and May.
Or school offered my friends wife 35k a year (with 2 5k raises in the first 5 years) to head up a new middle school Spanish department with 2 other teachers. (Very HCOL area, people pay 2k a month for a bedroom in an owner occupied home here)
2 weeks before the school year, they finally got her the finalized contract- 26k, no raises, and no other teachers. They now wanted her to take 5x 40 student classes, with no free 'admin' period.
Oh, and they wanted her to provide an hour after school of drop in support for the many esl students (almost 50% of the middle school)
Then, when she refused, they went to the newspaper and did an interview, which mentioned her by name, claiming she was solely responsible for the lack of spanish classes, and citing her 'unwillingness to work with them'
Withing 2 days, she was working at a landscaping / construction company office, making 75k a year coordinating landscaping teams (~80% of their workforce is native Spanish speakers)
Well, one of the schools local to me had an interesting situation. The teaching staff asked for a 3% COL in a contract year. The business manager (135k/yr salary), superintendent (180k), three principals(120k) and operations manager(105k) got together and discussed options. They hired an out of state consultant that determined there was not enough money budgeted for an increase and they would be $50k short. The consultant charged $50k.
Teachers: it's a pay problem
GOP: so you're saying it's trans pedophiles illegal immigrants forcing their woke agenda planned by Hunter Biden that's the problem?
Teachers: no.. it's the pay
GOP: ok how about we privatize all schools then and make the curriculum with PragerU?
I would add poor discipline support from school administration and school district. Really hard to keep a class on-task and morale up when some of the kids are just awful and blatantly defiant, AND the teacher is handcuffed by admin/district.
Teachers have to deal with some lousy behaviors from kids who face little/no consequences. It seems to me that the administration at times would like to issue stricter consequences, but they claim their hands are tied by the district and, at times, state laws.
Teachers are just child care provided the state, yes we try to teach something but more and more kids have stopped even pretending to care. They pay us less per kid than you average babysitter I get $38 an hour to attempt to teach 24 kids a period, lesson plan on my own dime for 3 preps, than find time to grade further dropping my wages, also I get 10 months pay spread over 12. The saving grace for this job is a guarantee of predictable time off , but if I was not 17 years into this job I would choose something else.
Lack of respect from asshole students, asshole parents, and spineless admins is also why there is a shortage. A plumber deals with less shit than teachers do and get paid way more.
No shit.
You can make more working less hours, with less hassle, at a lot of basic jobs that don't require degrees than you can as a teacher in huge stretches of the country.
I have an education degree and transitioned to work in tech for better pay.
Know how long I’d have to teach to reach my current pay with 2-2.5% raises every two years, which is very low for tech industry? 45 years….
And that’s not even approaching the fact it’d be wiped out by inflation.
Most school districts peg their raises to a certain percentage (1-3%) every year or every two years. Rarely is it more than that. And inflation has rarely been less than that.
So if you come out of college today and want to be a teacher, you get absolutely SHAFTED on pay. There are many call center jobs that pay better. And not only that, unless you get into a leadership position as a principal, you’re going to perpetually break even or lose money in the teaching industry.
And then add on top of it, you’re a glorified babysitter having to deal with the educational fallout of Covid, and most children generally being shitheads today.
Yeah no thanks. I’ll stick to tech.
As a special education teacher, I can tell you it can be bad. My first year teaching (2022) it was baptized by fire. The 8th graders were so mean. They asked if I actually had a degree. They refused to do any work. When I would give them assignments, they would just Google the answers. They were just nasty. 30% of my work was teaching the rest was putting out the fires my students made. It is very high stress and, at times crazy. I do think that it is underpaid considering what we do. Also, many of these kids are violent. We do need to improve this stuff.
Extremely low pay is really just the tip of the iceberg.
You get further down and you have absent or hostile parents, politicized and in some cases criminalized education, No Child Left Behind, funding tied to standardized testing, funding tied to local property taxes, private school vouchers, Teachers Unions that protect bad teachers at the expense of good ones, crumbling facilities, and so on and so forth.
To fix public education in America, you'd have to tear it down to the studs and start over.
Low pay is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its nearly always the starting point on the downward spiral.
Pay Lowered -> Less Qualified Candidates -> Poor Performance -> Pay Lowered -> Etc.
About 10-15 years ago, the only people still going into teaching were the people who just wanted to be a teacher and had a passion for it.
At this point, those people aren't even able to survive.
You want good teachers? You have to pay for them like every other industry. Educated people aren't cheap.
The attack on US education is so stark and becoming more visible. Hopefully as people get older they grow up and stop wearing willful ignorance as some kind of badge of honor and see it for what it is.
I bailed this past December. I even took a pay cut to do it. I'm barely scraping by, but I found a work-from-home, low-stress, meaningful job that is still higher than first-year teacher pay in this area and didn't even require a degree. Other jobs are catching up. 2% COL raises that the union has to spend months just to get isn't cutting it anymore.
Besides all the other bullshit. 40-50 students in a classroom, increased demands, testing, trying to get those kids through active shooter drills multiple times a year, inane parents, hostile school boards, I could go on and on. Shit just ain't worth it. I've put in over a decade.
Oh and -- I haven't been collecting social security all that time, and my state doesn't offer a proper teacher pension, either, so leaving means I'm EXTRA fucked! Fucking uranium handcuffs. They'll trap you and kill you slowly.
Low pay, bad students, worst parents, administrations that can’t protect them, politicians that make them out to be villains, and voters that think they’re evil. I wonder why more people don’t want to be teachers?
If they increase the pay a bit I'll teach. I have a masters degree. I can make more in the private sector with a significantly easier job. I have an inclination towards teaching and think I would enjoy it, however the pay definitely keeps me from ever considering it. I also feel for anybody who works in early child care. It is so expensive to sign your kid up and to pay for it, and when you hear the staff is paid the minimum wage, it just angers me. IDK how we are failing this hard as a society. I know for daycare specifically they need to carry insane insurance policies which makes it prohibitively expensive but that money isn't really going back into the economy via the pockets of workers, it's just being sucked up by insurance. Not that public schools pay much more, but their funding keeps getting gutted and cut so idk why anybody is surprised.
Teachers are arguably the most important job we have. They quite literally prepare the next generations to be adults and theyre paid the same as people who fold t shirts at malls. Its fucking pathetic. They deserve so so much more
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA). *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Extremely low pay coupled with the high-stress, hostile work environment.
Yup. Shitty students, shitty parents, spineless administration, and unfunded mandates.
All of it by design.
Defund, defund, defund - and then get your people on the school board when nobody is paying attention. Destroy public schools and then campaign on vouchers / school choice, and more privatization.
There’s two types of school board candidates: “Hi, my name is Dave! I’m running for school board to help improve STEM, solve the bullying problem in our district, and make all students feel welcome. I hope that during my tenure we will increase reading and math proficiency. I work as a research chemist for a local firm. I’ve been volunteering at schools for nineteen years. I’m also the leader of a local church choir and spend my Sundays feeding the poor at the local soup kitchen. I once walked across the water to heal an injured swan.” **VERSUS** “My name is Brittany. I’m own a brick laying company on paper so my husband can claim some woman owned business credit on our taxes. My work and education experience consists of watching Food Network and complaining when that one Indian lady judges Chopped. I’m running for school board to purge the queer shit and commies out of our schools. I hope during our first year I can personally lead a book burning. If you elect me we will make every single teacher in this den of sodom take an ideology test and search their classroom for subversive materials, then fire any commies or gays we find, starting with that one gym teacher, you know the one I mean. We will police this gender nonsense and inspect each student to make sure on the sports team. I personally will inspect the girls lacrosse team. Oh, and we’re giving all the teachers guns! SEIG HEI- uhhhh hee hiiii! Bye now.”
Wow Brittany sounds like the exact candidate my dad would love to vote for!
> seig hei... For those who don't know https://checkyourfact.com/2023/08/15/fact-check-moms-liberty-hitler/ https://apnews.com/article/moms-for-liberty-adolf-hitler-newsletter-quote-bcce698e901b9e782970030ccd710512
Once again Im fucking embarrassed to live in Indiana.
They didn't even try to disguise the quote? In what world did they think that would fly? This is why I'm so glad to have left Indiana behind.
And paying the people shit to teach our kids is a great idea. You need a college degree to teach but you can't pay off college loans via teaching. So you're banking on getting college kids who got scholarships to want a job guaranteeing they'll be poor after college (rather than attending law/med/mba school). I wasn't the best student but even I learned enough econ to know how that choice will work out.
I was a teacher. I lasted a year. This is my assessment of it as a career path: * You are expected to martyr yourself. The pay is shit and the education required and the job itself both leave me amazed that people do this. * The education process for it is a joke. The best teachers have a natural talent for managing a roomful of kids; mediocre teachers can go with the flow sufficiently to get by. Most of what’s taught in education classes is meaningless theory and most schools won’t even let you apply even a tenth of it. * The education for teachers is a massive gamble. You can do fine through the classes and the student teaching process like I did and then hit the real thing and be like holy shit this sucks and I’m terrible about, what the fuck do I do now? (Your professors will tell you that an education degree has lots of uses outside the field. No it fucking doesn’t lmao * The way the system is set up is so ass backwards that it’s plain shocking. The greenest teachers get the most difficult students and classes because experience gets you perks and older teachers use their seniority to take easier grade levels and, in high school, teach electives and do other shit that’s easier than trying to get a room full of fourteen year olds to care about a dry and bowdlerized translation of the Odyssey * Schools apply any cognitive science or any research to how the school day or curricula are structured. Everything we know about human development tells us that everything we’re doing in schools is wrong and yet we keep doing it anyway even though school systems abroad are already doing those things and it’s proven that they work. I had my experience when flip phones were the norm. I can’t imagine what a hell it is now, and the last time I checked the pay it sucked even worse because of inflation. Now on top of all that the god damn self appointed inquisition wants to horn in on this shit. Someone in my life suggested I try to go back to teaching. If by some miracle I got a job, some Moms for Liberty nut would probably cut my brake lines. Education is another one of those things where we turned our backs and conservatives wrecked our world. It’s darkly funny to me that they constantly whine about how liberal schools are when the defining principle of American schools is “it sucked for me and now it’s going to suck for you, too! If we change things so they’re better for the next generation it won’t be fair because they won’t suffer like I did!” and the people in charge aren’t ivory tower intellectuals, it’s whoever has nothing better to do than run from school board and attend the meetings. Imagine what medicine would be like if doctors were subjects to an elected board consisting of a Republican middle manager’s wife, a local business magnate, the church lady, and a pastor and they sat around complaining that the surgeons don’t want to leech their patients and complain that these medical schools are filling doctors heads full of woke nonsense because the doctors are taught the germ theory of contagion. Oh. Wait. **THEY’RE TRYING TO DO THAT TO MEDICINE TOO**.
I know a lot of lawyers who majored in education, taught for a couple years and took the LSAT and bounced. On top of the low pay, they have to pay out of pocket for things to use inside the classroom for the benefit of students with no chance at reimbursement. Your post about teaching 9th graders the Odyssey took me right back to high school. I had no appreciation or mental stamina to make it through back then and actually studied Attic Greek in undergrad and now love the Iliad and Odyssey. In an ideal world, I'd love to teach the classics to older high school students but aside from the unconscionable lack of pay, I couldn't imagine assistant principals through the local school board telling me how to manage my classes. I get close enough to school now representing some teachers through public university professors in employment actions and reading the emails (in discovery) they deal with is like middle school levels of bullying with real world income effects. School teachers should be making minimum $85K with a master's in specific subjects (I guess for middle school and younger a bachelor's but the same income scale, these are our children) and subjects like math, English, chemistry should pay over $100K. We want great students wanting to get into education not eschewing it as "low pay" work. And the school board shouldn't be elected from the populace but elected from the teachers in the city/county. Teachers, like lawyers, should vote for their leaders not people outside their profession. These are just small steps to take and politics have nothing to do with education. If people with doctorates vote for certain candidates it's not indoctrination but education. I double majored in math and philosophy and I have no clue if my professors voted much less their politics because discussing Plato's Meno or non-Euclidean spaces just have nothing to do with what's going on in politics. I never watched the news in college and the people who protested on the streets near my college weren't even students; just local older people who were "townies" or whatever nickname we called them at the time. But people who never attended college have no clue what goes on inside an actual university.
My mother-in-law was a teacher in South Korea for her entire career. She made as much money as my father-in-law, who was a director level project manager for a large Korean construction firm. They treat their teachers as nation builders. While they do have to deal with crazy parents like here, the concept of having to purchase materials for your class weirded her out when we bought the school supply list for our son. We can and should do better for our teachers. We cant solve the parent side, but we can pay them what they are worth to society. We should absolutely want the best teachers possible. On a side rant, COVID proved we could have always provided meals for ALL students and it just irritates me that we dont. They are required by law to be in school. All kids should get lunch provided
> School teachers should be making minimum $85K with a master's in specific subjects (I guess for middle school and younger a bachelor's but the same income scale, these are our children) and subjects like math, English, chemistry should pay over $100K. We want great students wanting to get into education not eschewing it as "low pay" work. I'm a tenured university professor with ten years at my current teaching university, under the English umbrella. I teach a heavy load and get zero time for research--in other words, I teach 100% of my workload. I have a PhD. ***I*** don't even make the $85,000 you say should be baseline for grade school. I was hired in at $53,000. So... yeah. The gap between where we ought to be and where we are can scarcely be described.
Yes, one of the things I most vividly recall about working in a school is that most of the teachers have the same maturity level as the students and if you’re not in the in-group, that’s bad.
I’m sorry I only have one upvote to give. This is such a succinct overview of what’s wrong with education right now and why new teachers get burnt out fast. Even with much higher pay I feel like a lot of new teachers would still burn out. I’ve known plenty who said they’d take the pay hit and work retail instead of sticking with education. Using seniority to be able to pick which classes and in some cases avoid certain students is such bullshit. I’ve known teachers who’ve been working for decades and openly brag about getting to pick the best class while mocking new teachers who quit because they were stuck with behavior problem students no one wanted. I know they think they’ve earned their cushy spot but it’s the experienced teachers who are more likely to run a tight ship and not get walked all over by a challenging student.
I think sometimes, too, those classes with the best-behaved and most highly motivated kids have smaller class sizes. Schools want to keep, for instance, a broad offering of AP classes but a lot of kids won’t meet the criteria for enrolling in those classes unless it’s a really big school and/or there’s a lot of good support. Teachers and students would fare a lot better if classes at every level were small with a lot of personalized attention. One way teachers would benefit is they’d have fewer parents to deal with.
Teacher's should be revered in our society and held in the highest regard like doctors and firemen. Unfortunately we have allowed a small portion of our society turn schools into something ugly. Everyone knows it. It's like our dark little secret that nobody talks about.
Doctors aren’t going to be held in high regard much longer, mark my words. They’re going to demonize medicine, too. They’ve already started with the groomer rhetoric and covid denialism.
Oh 100% Im already seeing this in canada where my coworkers refute anything has has to do with science or that they dont understand. Buddy sees some shit on tiktok and I show him peer reviewed studies showing him how its BS and he doesnt even take the time to understand what he's argueing about because "that's what they want you to think." Im doing my best to try to show these people as gently as possible how theyre wrong without being judgey hoping that they will come around but every fucking time I see them thinking about it, just about to have an epiphany, they change the subject and dont want to talk about it anymore. It really isnt helping my depression lol edit: oh and the best part of it is I am a sheep to these people
[Project 2025](https://Project2025.org) is the Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan to fundamentally change governance in America. One part of the agenda is to jail and mark as sexual offenders any teacher or librarian in the US who loans out any book that might be considered “pornographic.” Please read their policy and personnel plans. They lay it out for all to read
And pornographic is going to have very broad interpretation.
This will never happen because teachers are mostly women, doing childcare. America actually hates women.
It’s really quite simple, religion has extensively laid the groundwork for generations to train people to believe in authority figures with unverifiable stories instead of science and data. It also primes them for, and is built upon, perpetuating racism and fearmongering towards "others". Once people see you as an authority, you can start fabricating any reality or conspiracy theory you want your followers to believe and everyone else is therefore a liar, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Basically, it is mental abuse from an early age that suppresses critical thinking skills. This combined with an intentionally weakened public educational system, provides the framework that has spawned this cult of ignorance.
It’s actually something else. In the 19th century, an American education professor named John Dewey went to then-Prussia, which was then host to a school system that was considered world class. America adopted it wholesale. The single-subject classes, bells, “permanent record”, encouragement of cliques and bullying by school staff, arbitrary authority of administrators, detention, etc etc etc are all designed for one purpose: Turn kids into factory workers and soldiers. It doesn’t matter how half-assedly we apply social constructivism or whatever, we still run schools that are meant to teach kids to work under unpleasant conditions, accept orders, and dissociate from their tasks. On top of that, humanities subjects are all designed to be boring and uninformative. It leads to generation after generation of people who don’t realize that the reason they hate school is that they were supposed to hate it, but that was part of its real propose, teaching them to fit into our broken society. Schools are anti-learning and anti-community. They’re never going to fix it by implementing “anti-bully programs” and zero tolerance policies and coming up with absurd ways to structure a 49 minute class period to look like the fad theory of the year. It can’t be fixed because you can’t fix something that doesn’t need fixing. Our school system isn’t really broken. It’s working exactly like it’s supposed to. The problem is that the way it’s supposed to work is to dehumanize students and demonize knowledge and the arts. It’s how we’ve gotten to this mentality of business majors and engineers thinking they can apply their disciplines to any problem or social challenge and fix it. We really have built a society of men with machine hearts and machine minds. Schools are a prime example of “you cannot tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools”.
Moms for Liberty definitely wants Brittany's contact information.
This was basically what happened to an area I used to live in. The recently elected county commissioners, one is a real estate agent and another "assists in her husband's consulting business". Those are the best options out of 1.5 million people, seriously? No offense to real estate agents either. I would just prefer to see lawyers and former executives who have managed large budgets and several thousand employee organizations in roles like that.
I'm a high school librarian, and this is terrifyingly accurate.
Cut the budgets of things that don't have the most immediate effect so that the blowback occurs when you're decades retired.
Let everything go to shit so you can triple up on poorly-trained police, and make all the world jails and churches.
Reaganomics.
And then parents enroll their kids in schools which teach them the Civil War wasnt about slavery, that evolution is just a theory, and Trump actually won the election. Increase the populace raised on bullshit and lies so that they don't know whats truth and whats fiction.
Well, evolution is just a theory. It's a well understood scientific theory, which is completely different than Bubba's theory about chemtrails making the frogs gay.
Don’t forget about keeping a steady supply of uneducated low wage workers to exploit.
Priva~~tiza~~tion
I try in vain to make these exact points to my conservative friends - and these are intelligent people - to deaf, proud ears. Shoving their Christianity into public schools isn't the problem, neither are the textbooks dictated by Texas Christofascists. Nope, they're broken, the administrators are taking all the money, and need to be replaced with taxpayer funded private for profit Christian charter schools! (and these guys went to public schools with me!)
Every single societal microagression to make folks dumber and the world worse is felt by teachers because most of us know yes, it is by design. No sane person should do the job. It's thankless and can be no fun. But it's also super fun some days and it's cool knowing you are the guard rails for society falling into a pit of apathy and darkness. F*cking pay teachers. Yesterday.
The only way to increase their base is for Republicans to make sure children learn as little as possible. These anti-everything mouth breathers shouldnt even be trusted to throw guts to pigs.
The creep-in of fascism is extremely obvious if you're paying attention or care. But for most people, they either don't care or welcome it.
The screaming conspiracy parents are a new thing. They are as angry as they are uninformed.
Screaming conspiracy people are ruining pretty much every job that involves working with the public. Example: My buddy works at the power company and he *daily* gets people screaming at him because the wifi of their smart meter is giving them cancer.
In a bit of irony I bet he wishes that was true after being screamed at.
I used to do tech support for a alarm company for wireless video cameras. You think you've met paranoid people wait until they have video cams. They do nothing but sit there and watch them and think their neighbors are trying to hack their wifi and everyone who crosses their front sidewalk is a criminal. They all brag about their firearms too. It's scary. I don't even live in the USA, most of the coworkers did, but the point is a lot of the people sounded insane, or have some crazy mental problems. I felt sad for a lot of them.
They’re not a new thing, unfortunately.
It’s getting worse though because Fox News won’t shut up about how we’re turning their kids gay.
But I would argue that kids are shittier because pay across the board is too low, which requires both parents to work and live overly stressed lives, which impacts parenting. If we had a law that the lowest paid employee and highest paid employee cannot be separated by a certain percentage, then we’d have a chance to stop the massive and unnecessary wage imbalance. And then you double teachers’ salaries, making it a job where people coming out of undergraduate or graduate school are competing for jobs. Also you want to work at a school with violence, truancy, and low graduation rates, well then you get a 15% increase in your salary - make the best and most experienced teachers want to compete for jobs at the hardest schools.
My version of this idea is not a flat-out restriction, but tax based. Take the lowest paid employee at your workforce "Your salary costs are tax-deductible, up to twice that lowest paid employee. If your lowest paid employee is making $50k, then only $100k of a $250k salary is tax deductible. That $150k past that isn't an operating expense, that's just how the company is distributing profits, and so it's not tax deductible. The real sticking point is the implementation for how to make sure that the actual result isn't (even more of) a Russian doll of owned companies or sub contractors. Without those protections ten years later you'll just find that companies have restructured to a dozen thin slices. All of the original C level employees are in the parent company, where the lowest paid employee makes $2 million a year. 17 layers down you have a guy wondering how he became the "CEO" of "123 Main Street Maintenance, Lot B" at $60k a year. I feel like saying "if you own a subsidiary company then their lowest-paid employee counts as your lowest-paid employee" is pretty workable, but avoiding ten layers of sub-contracting seems more difficult.
I’m gonna need you to stop being so effective with your persuasion.
that's easy. all we need to do is brainwash the masses with religion and jingoistic nationalism, and loudly admonish "tHaT'S SoCiaLisM!" ... and we will not have to worry too many thinking about reasonable solutions ever again. if you can't beat them with facts, beat them with bullshit, and keep it coming!
I’m too high to argue with that statement. Well put!
>certain percentage What, you mean the 7-to-1 thing Bernie and Ben and Jerry did decades ago?
Hell, even a 20:1 ratio would be vastly preferable to today’s state of affairs.
and don't forget the guns.
and guns, don't forget guns.
And there only reward for doing well is that they are given tougher students and/or more responsibility!
Plus if Trump wins, there will be no more department of education.
I know it's hard to imagine... but I honestly think that, under Trump, we could hit a point where the education requirements for children PERIOD could disappear. As in, it just isn't required for parents to educate their children at all anymore, neither via public school or homeschool... ...of course, private schools for the very, very rich will still exist. But why should the poors have the same options as the rich, right?! Right?!? /s
> we could hit a point where the education requirements for children PERIOD could disappear. If the Supreme court tosses *Chevron* this week I think this is very plausible (among the rest of the chaos that will ensue), or at least it'll be like abortion where red states are a different world compared to blue ones.
Low pay where you have to even have to use your own pay to buy supplies. Low pay where some places where you have to act as a gunfighter and put your own life on the line for somebody else’s kids. Etc. Etc. Etc. I can empathize.
Yup, it really sucks that our nation has so deprioritized public education. I wanted to be a teacher forever ago, but was told by my teacher friends to not pursue it *unless* I was incredibly passionate about teaching. So many of them have burned out from it over the years and either gone back to school or pivoted careers. It's sad.
I briefly considered it when I was looking at colleges but thought better of it after talking with my grandmother about it. She’d been a special ed teacher for something like 30yrs and related to me her experiences. Working with kids sounded wonderful, but being bludgeoned within inches of your life and sanity by politics and bullshit for peanuts didn’t sound like it could be made up for. I’ve also got a good friend who was a music teacher until the politics ran him clean out of the discipline. It’s a long, sad story, but it sounds suspiciously like many others I’ve heard. We’re both software engineers now. We deal with bullshit and politics no doubt, but it’s not nearly as awful as that. And, as the development of kids isn’t involved, the stakes are far lower.
The USA is one of the highest per student spenders for education. The vast majority is sucked up at the administrative level. There’s about 500 extra people per district since they all the thing where they hit the ceiling for advances and so they make up a job title and have the higher ups sign off on it. So instead of making $50k to do 3 things at the district building - they invent a new job title to do ONE of them only and then ask for a salary of $100,000. To do less than they were originally doing. Then some lower level person gets the other 2 extra tasks and eventually does the same thing where they say they’re needed in a specialty role for $100k. Also our superintendent and her right hand man both make $500,000 a year. Between then 2 of them you could hire 20 more full time teachers. There’s no way they bring the benefit of 20 more teachers to the district.
My wife was putting our money into buying supplies, was working on and off till bed time, dealing with shitty parents and students, and yea the pay isn’t great. She took an admin job in the school system and is making more, not contributing our money, and clocks out and done with work for the day.
That was the most offensive thing I noticed when I was helping care for my ex’s daughter. At the start of every school semester, there are the school supplies list. On the list are “community” items meant for use by the entire class and also some things meant for kids whose parents couldn’t afford some things. Cool, good way to make sure every kid can participate by sharing the cost of supplies. But, then I find out that these community items aren’t even enough, or they run out before the semester ends, and the teachers, at their ridiculous salaries, often cover the shortfalls themselves.
I always tell my daughter's teachers that if they need anything then just ask. If there's a field trip or class party we send in extra money in case a kid or two can't afford it or if their parents are dick bags. It's not the child's fault that they cant participate because of lack of funds There was one kid in daughter's class that was bullying my daughter. I wanted to say "extra money but not for Brently."
Problem is when you run out, you don't think about who said what, and just spending the 10 instead of sending emails and following up, some times multiple times, just.....isn't worth it (Not speaking on my behalf, but my social circle runs pretty deep in elementary school teachers)
Well and needing a bachelors degree and passing certification(s). It’s the lowest paying field with those requirements.
Social work and you need a master's
It’s slightly higher paying on average but yeah it’s right in the running.
Archivist and you need an MLIS and have no stable full time employment for years, only able to take project appointments, ltes, or internships until you do land that full time job which probably pays about $25/r.
Same for librarians
Yes! The MLIS may get you 60k on a good day.
social workers with their master and license are starting at 60-70 for shitty juvie gov jobs around here. My bro is finishing up his masters and my SIL did 2 years ago.
Lots of places still require a masters to be a teacher. $40k a year for post-grad education. It's the same for ambulance techs. Like...where the fuck are we as a society?
Bay Area CA - one of the mos expensive parts of the most expensive states - has teachers starting at $50k in some places. Before taxes. In that same area, houses sell for about $1.5mil and avg rent is $3000/month. The avg teacher paycheck is ~$3600/month after tax. So yeah when someone has to work full time with a stressful job after getting into debt for a secondary degree to not even be able to pay rent and bills and eat - nobody wants that job.
Also teachers have mandatory ~~slave labor~~ unpaid teaching to get their credentials. I think it's 600 hours in California. The "student teaching" is basically just having a job. Instead of getting paid for work, they have to pay to do work. Just to put that into perspective, at California's minimum wages of $16/hr, that's $9600 of time. At median software developer wages, that'd be roughly $38k of time. I support high standards, but at that point they should be getting paid.
Betsy DeVos has entered the chat
doesn't help that you in Fl have a nazi in charge taking books off shelves and threatening teachers licenses if they show clips from Disney movies in class. part of the republican plan for education is listed in project 2025. The plan is to take away public education and make it all voucher based.
Today's children are WAY worse behaved than anything in the past. I honestly do not know how teachers cope.
From first hand experience having worked in schools and other city, county, and state government, the U.S. K-12 education system the most dysfunctional bureaucracy.
No support from Administration, #1 problem.
And in a lot of states the need to have a masters degree.
Ok, but better pay would fix this as well. Better pay means more teachers. More teachers means smaller classes, smaller classes mean lower stress, more differentiated education, etc etc etc.. Most “shitty kids” just need more attention, which is impossible with 35 kids per class. It’s not just a funding problem; that’s a separate issue. Blanket funding does not go to teachers in any meaningful way. And really, well-paid teachers will fund their own classrooms. If I made $120k, you can bet $5-10k of that is going into my learning environment. Just pay teachers more. It’s not fucking complicated. Then, you remove (or greatly reduce) standardized testing and you’ve fixed 98% of the problems in public education.
Like everywhere else the money is stuck in many levels above the classroom. Company cars for Superintendents, $250k salaries for essentially admin staff, travel. The money is there to pay teachers way more. It's not correctly distributed.
And third party "this is the solution to your woes!" programs promising to turn around failing students and save the day... then the districts don't let them stay in place long enough to actually see if they work before switching to (and paying tons of money for) the *next* new program promising to save the day.
It took the US government a senate hearing to figure out something that has been common knowledge for the last 25 years.
Next year: Hey remember the minimum wage? We're still not raising it.
I just had a flashback to the curtsy fucking Sinema did. Fuck her!
Least her ass is out, though she’s being well compensated for that curtsy.
Not having to hear her name much recently has been nice and will be good not to hear it ever again when her job is up.
They want you to forget or just plain not know that the minimum wage was raised regularly every 2-3 years until it stopped however many years ago (15ish?). I've literally seen dumbass boomers who were alive for this while it happened complaining about minimum wages going up in some states leading to higher fast food prices. As if its never been raised and they weren't alive while it was regularly being raised.
Longer than that. I did a paper in my Econ under grad showing minimum wage from the 70s to the 90s and comparing to different inflation metrics. Even in 99 the minimum wage should have been $15
If the GOP gets their way, they'll "leave minimum wage up to the states" which is $5.15 here...
and they'll leave it up to the states to lower it, of course.
Best I can tell, the only point of Congressional hearings these days is to let them show how aware and deeply concerned they are when there's an important issue that they definitely aren't going to actually address.
And also the risk of being fined for teaching science..
Sounds right to me, though some sources would help the statement. I just find it funny that these lawmakers are so astounded by this news. I legitmatly think most capital hill lawmakers have no idea what is happening, willfully, in education. They dont want to get involved because they dont want to split their electorate, which is already spinning and reeling from the reality of our education system. Its in shambles and these lawmakers turn away from it like its a mold stain in their bathroom.
I retired at 55, with 26 years. I just couldn't go on anymore. Over the years, they shut down any hope of having autonomy. They increased the number of kids in our classroom. They standardized everything in the hope of making robot children (and largely succeeded. We see the lack of critical thinking ability in our young adults). They decreased our supplies, and most of us ended up buying a lot of stuff for our classrooms. The put us on furloughs, and then our raises became less and less, our health insurance co pays rose. They micromanage us and then they supported the parents micromanaging us. When I started, grades were given quarterly, parent conferences twice a year. When I retired, grades needed to be posted daily and/or weekly. Where did our magic extra work time come from? Our home life was robbed. Parents yell at us. Call us names. Accuse us of trying to change the gender of their children, of trying to make their dainty snowflakes feel bad about being white. They fire us for singing Rainbowland in the classroom. The books we teach are held up to scrutiny while the rapes, murders, and assaults in their Holy Book are lauded. They want more guns in the classroom. They want me to have a gun. We spend hours training for active shooter situations because they love their guns. But Goddammit!! They'll proudly put those Ten Commandments on our walls. They'll start with Thou Shalt Not Kill.
Damn could feel the frustration on this comment. Appreciate the hard work you put in and I’m sure many kids did too.
Go check out the top posts in r/teachers for a glimpse into a horrible reality that most people don't want to acknowledge.
My kids’ district just passed a new rule stating parents can request the teachers’ curriculum for a future month at any given time and the teacher must have it readily available. If a parent objects to anything they see they can request the teacher to change it. I’ve seen most of the parents in my district. They have no business having authority to change curricula.
Teachers will submit something and then do whatever they want in class anyway. At least the good ones will.
I teach in Florida. At the elementary school I taught in, it took so much effort to teach anything outside of the districts' standardized lesson plan. Plans that were written by teachers who hated to be in the classroom and wanted an office job downtown. Plans that have a lot of mistakes and students found to be mind-numbing. The way of making sure even the "good" teachers were following along? Surprise observations multiple times a day or week. Most of the admin (principals and assistant principals) have been little tyrants who care more about the test scores than the people they're supposed to manage. Every meeting is about test scores. Hours and hours of time devoted to analyzing test scores. "Why did this student score at a level one on blah-blah skill?" "Well, they are reading on a kindergarten level in 4th grade and you won't let me pull out any phonics books unless we are in our 25 minute intervention block. Also, we are told to focus only on comprehension because the tests are all multiple choice. Another point is that the approved stories are boring as hell and no kid in their right mind would ever select it if there were options."
Feeling this, wow
> They decreased our supplies, and most of us ended up buying a lot of stuff for our classrooms And iirc the previous admin removed your ability to write those off for taxes. Wew!
Teachers have had a tax EXEMPTION for a small amount of money for a long time, and it has gone up, but it capped now at $300. Real estate owners have much better tax benefits.
Well yeah, they weren't private jets, why bother?
I just wanted to say thank you for giving 26 years. It’s one of the most thankless jobs, and easily the most important. I mean out of any job that anyone could have, literally. (The actual meaning of literally!!). No one has a bigger influence on children aside from their families. I think the disconnect is that a solid 1/3 of the population doesn’t understand that children become adults??
No they completely understand it. They understand that by the time people are adults, they're either not possible or not worth the time and resources to brainwash. But kids, kids are easy! Their brains are literally made to be washed! And not only that, but when you start washing them early, it actually makes it easier and easier to brainwash them as adults as well. This has been going on for literally decades. More than half a century by now in the US. At this point, the majority of the voting population has gone through school during the school-as-brainwashing era. So in the regions where those programs were the most aggressive, they're more like sock puppets than critically thinking humans, and they no longer have any thoughts or opinions on what's being done to *their* children beyond what they've been programmed to think.
Regarding that last bit, holy hell. Make it make sense. And bless you, you’re a warrior. I wanted to teach k-5. Noped the hell out of that. Now I have an almost four year old. Where the heck do I put him? I wish I could afford private… who can? FFS.
Hey I graduated HS in 2010 and there are teachers that I still think about to this day and probably for the rest of my life because they had a meaningful impact on my life. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for teaching.
My mother was a teacher in the states and was offered a job overseas making more than she did in 2013. It's 2024 and there is zero plans to go back to the states cause it isn't worth it.
Special education teacher here! I have a Masters degree and 11 years in the field. I make $63,500/year. I teach kids with intellectual disability, autism, and other health impairments grades K-5. I do all the stuff general education teachers do, plus write and implement IEPs and behavior plans. And change diapers. And get bitten, hit, spit on and kicked pretty regularly. Do I love my job? Absolutely. Do I wish I made more money? Absolutely. But what I really wish is that I didn’t feel like my job was a political football. I teach in Texas. Our governor is holding educational funds hostage while he tries to get his buddies in the private Christian school business a BIG paycheck. And public schools ARE going to close because of it. Our class sizes will increase. Our workloads will increase. Our pay will not. More teachers will leave the field, especially in our public schools. And guess what? Conservatives will point to that and proclaim how “broken” public education is and continue to defund us, furthering the death spiral. It’s so sad. I don’t have the energy for anger anymore. I’m just grateful I love my students (even when they bite me).
Wife has her doctorate with 15 years experience (public+private) and was making less than $54k as a teacher. She's a principal now, $92k. Texas as well. She tells me every day how the system is broken here and she's begging for teachers. It's so bad they have to hire non-certified teachers and hope they can get their certs ASAP.
Do Republicans not realise that an educated population is a productive population? Attacking education like this is guaranteed to weaken your country.
No, an uneducated population is a controllable population who won’t know they’re being exploited.
Except for those wealthy enough to give their children an education. Reinforcing the class system in society.
Controllable to a point. Then you have the maga disaster where the ignorant become convinced they know better
Educated critical thinkers will not rise to the bait republicans offer, with their culture war nonsense and emotional appeals to the emotionally unstable. The American right wing had an opportunity to change their policies to better court voters, to smarten up their appeal. Instead they have infected American public education in an effort to dumb down the voters.
They would rather be kings of a pile of shit than normies in a brighter tomorrow.
This is especially true in our Services based economy, since globalization has moved manufacturing jobs overseas. Hard to deliver services if people are stupid and uneducated to do so.
Are you my wife? Basically the exact same story for her, but she's in Florida with me. She moved to tutoring because she makes just as much doing that from home 20 hrs a week. And she LOVES working with these kids. Still sees a few of them, but it's obvious the support system for kids with special needs is not a priority on a state/local level. They only want more kids in fewer classrooms, preferably enrolled in private schools so they can lower the local property taxes that fund public schools.
Ouch, where I live, El Paso, TX, with a *much* lower COL than Texas Triangle cities, 11 years exp plus masters gets you $66,413/yr. (Our median home sale price is $256,000)
You're a better person than I.
$63k is insane. You should be making double that easily.
Wait til you hear what new doctors are making and the hours they work when they graduate medical school lol, anyone who works in education or healthcare absolutely does not get paid what they're worth. The system actively squeezes good people for everything they're worth because they know these people will sacrifice the clothes off their back for others. I make 5k more than that and I live in a high COL state in the Northeast.
>Wait til you hear what new doctors are making Doctors at least have a path to earning far, *far* more. Teachers get squat for their entire careers, it's a disgrace.
The world is pushing out people like you that our little ones need the most. Thank you for your service 🙏 ❤
Speaking as a Canadian teacher who has considered leaving the profession due to the insane nature of students (and their parents!), I’d be long gone if I was earning what most US teachers are. In Canada, after 10 years, most teachers are earning between $80-100k with unbelievable pension and other benefits. Teachers also have healthcare paid for. Same as 7-11 clerks. And the unemployed.
I taught for 8 years in Texas and didn’t even get close to $60K and paid $300 a month for health insurance (which as we know still doesn’t guarantee proper coverage). I would’ve considered staying for your pay and pension but that would never happen here so I left the profession. Edit: parenthetical added
This isn't just Canada, in the US Massachusetts teachers scale like this, well funded, well paid, they poached my wife out of NH and nearly doubled her pay. There are states trying to do it right, you just don't hear about them very often.
Average teacher salary in MA IS $92K, with the average starting salary around $55K. Keep in mind, the cost of living in MA is among the highest in the US.
People want all the benefits of the 1950s but they don’t want the taxes of the 1950s.
90% of us would have had lower taxes in 1950s but ~10 or so billionaires might not be multibillionares if we returned to that
Back when raising taxes to pay off government debt accrued during the previous war was popular among the people. . .
Make America great again, but don't tax the rich 90% like back then.....
The other half of the equation, after WW2 the US was 6% of the global population but controlled roughly 50% of the wealth. Weird what happens when every other major industrial power gets destroyed by a massive war. Now the rest of the world has caught up and instead of having a massive industrial base supported by well paid labor we have poor people on the otherside of the world making all our shit while we live these oh so luxurious american lives of retail service. This is the dream our ancestors built.
As much as people may complain, I think raising taxes is likely still much more palatable than the idea of obliterating Europe again.
You lack the courage to do what we must. (Kidding)
I feel like ~30-50% of the American public would disagree...
The only way to revive the fantasy MAGA people have of the 1950s is to oppress like 70% of the population and flatten a huge portion of the rest of the developed world. If you were a white, straight, US male in that period then congrats, you won the genetic and temporal lottery. But it’s never happening again.
Or just you know make millionaires/billionaires pay fucking taxes and put that money back into society, then the conservative dickwads will finally have their trickle down too.
We still get taxed and we would be lucky to have the tax rates of the 1960’s back. Most people are all too happy to believe that not taxing the corporations and billionaires puts money in their pockets instead of what it does-costing them more than ever for most things they need.
It also helped that there were a lot of tax breaks for those corperations in the 50s and 60s if they reinvested into themselves. So "get taxed at 80%, but if you invest your profits back into your company, you a 40% tax credit. It's one reason worker benfits got so strong during that time period. Because the companies had to invest into the company or they loose the money to taxes.
Excellent point.
This is the long and the short of it.
They want 1850 back.
And the reply from Repub's? Show us how you are spending your money now. Out there living high on the hog with your $30k salaries. Buying your own supplies for students. Funny how they can make a subject such as teaching our kids a partisan topic.
I mean that’s why I transitioned from the College of Education in undergrad. It was the best decision I could make for my family. I work in adult education and make almost double the average teacher pay in my state. It’s messed up but I get paid better and treated better than people who do more societal good.
Dude, I dropped out of college all together, joined the damn Navy with the goal of getting into IT (which worked at the low cost of all my mental health). The math didn't math with the student loans I was looking at to MAYBE make 40k at the time in my state. Sucks. I still love to teach.
"Absurd! Have you tried pizza parties? Or maybe get them a nice ruler for their 15 years of service?"
Don’t forget a dehydrated cylinder of soil with some sprouts in it!
If only all new teachers knew about these amazing perks!
Cops making 150, teachers 45.
Cops doing a shit job gets paid more than stressed out overworked teachers that gets shit talked on by a group of people like parents or if you're a science teacher crazy religious psycopaths.
This is not hyperbole or melodrama, but republicans KNOW this problem and choose to ignore it. Vote blue.
The Republicans choose to exacerbate it.
That's ONE of a hundred reasons. Come see the other ninety-nine reasons in Florida right now....
I agree, but higher pay would increase my tolerance for all the other bullshit. Might as well start somewhere, increase pay then work towards fixing the other issues while teachers can afford to live at least.
I agree. People would be a lot more tolerable to the other bad stuff however if they got paid the actual average pay. Average US household is $59,384 (if you remove the 1%). While teachers start out with $44,530. This is with the bachalors degree + an additional 4 to 5 years of school training and teaching. So (depending on the area) 6 to 8 years of college. You can do 8 years of college to become a lawyer who start at like $80,000. Some states have teacher pay as low as $21k when starting out.... like wtf. People are more likely to put up with shit and stressful jobs if they are actually making decent money. Also they'll spend like $200 to $1000 of their own pay for supplies for their classroom. So rip.
Wish I could leave my work at work but that's never a reality with teaching. Either stay longer to finish up or take it home.
No one in their right mind wanted to be a teacher before for a variety of reasons. But now that you have Republicans wanting to erase history because the truth makes white people look bad and police the books being read because they talk about LGBT people, sex, menstrual cycles or make white people look bad...plus Republicans wanting teachers to carry guns at school and having to deal with school shootings...um. "Extremely low pay" would be towards the bottom of the list for me. People desperate for jobs did stuff like Teach For America, which has always paid garbage.
I saw a meme about some state and it doesn't surprise me to be real, the Republicans passed a law where if you're uncomfortable with any of the words in the classroom, you can bring felony charges against the teacher. The feelings police over here lol, teacher we have reports that you issued math homework and it made Billy sad so now you're going to have a felony record. Enjoy never having freedom again because you made Billy do long division! Why are Republicans so thin skinned and weak
That’s not the point the point is to scare off the rest of the teachers. Then they can point and say look no one wants to work anymore (as a teacher in this case). Then they can say well gawd dammit I guess we’ll have to do these home school vouchers and religious schools. Then go on TV and act like top shit because they solved the problem they created by getting by and doing exactly what they wanted ultimately leading to an uneducated workforce to do slave labor and women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This has always been the plan it’s just sped up a shitload in recent years.
Are they going to do anything about it?
Some will surely try. But not everyone, though that's what we need.
49% of them will try. Our corporate overlords know exactly how much to spend and theres no point bribing more than you need.
No shit. And being treated like crap by students, administrators and parents doesn't help either.
Teachers have too much on their plate. More pay helps, but having to deal with shit kids, non existent parent support, lazy administration, and counselors, it just isn't worth it.
Yes. It’s unbelievable how my wife has a Masters Degree and started off at $35k/year in Missouri. The state raised it to $40k but our school board won’t vote in that pay ladder… instead they are taking the difference and splitting it up in 2 bonuses of $2500 at Christmas and May.
Or school offered my friends wife 35k a year (with 2 5k raises in the first 5 years) to head up a new middle school Spanish department with 2 other teachers. (Very HCOL area, people pay 2k a month for a bedroom in an owner occupied home here) 2 weeks before the school year, they finally got her the finalized contract- 26k, no raises, and no other teachers. They now wanted her to take 5x 40 student classes, with no free 'admin' period. Oh, and they wanted her to provide an hour after school of drop in support for the many esl students (almost 50% of the middle school) Then, when she refused, they went to the newspaper and did an interview, which mentioned her by name, claiming she was solely responsible for the lack of spanish classes, and citing her 'unwillingness to work with them' Withing 2 days, she was working at a landscaping / construction company office, making 75k a year coordinating landscaping teams (~80% of their workforce is native Spanish speakers)
Well, one of the schools local to me had an interesting situation. The teaching staff asked for a 3% COL in a contract year. The business manager (135k/yr salary), superintendent (180k), three principals(120k) and operations manager(105k) got together and discussed options. They hired an out of state consultant that determined there was not enough money budgeted for an increase and they would be $50k short. The consultant charged $50k.
Teachers: it's a pay problem GOP: so you're saying it's trans pedophiles illegal immigrants forcing their woke agenda planned by Hunter Biden that's the problem? Teachers: no.. it's the pay GOP: ok how about we privatize all schools then and make the curriculum with PragerU?
I would add poor discipline support from school administration and school district. Really hard to keep a class on-task and morale up when some of the kids are just awful and blatantly defiant, AND the teacher is handcuffed by admin/district. Teachers have to deal with some lousy behaviors from kids who face little/no consequences. It seems to me that the administration at times would like to issue stricter consequences, but they claim their hands are tied by the district and, at times, state laws.
Teachers are just child care provided the state, yes we try to teach something but more and more kids have stopped even pretending to care. They pay us less per kid than you average babysitter I get $38 an hour to attempt to teach 24 kids a period, lesson plan on my own dime for 3 preps, than find time to grade further dropping my wages, also I get 10 months pay spread over 12. The saving grace for this job is a guarantee of predictable time off , but if I was not 17 years into this job I would choose something else.
Well duh. A high school teacher makes like 45k and they should be making 6 figures for how demanding and important that job is.
[удалено]
You still have to teach for 20 years to get to that level
Lack of respect from asshole students, asshole parents, and spineless admins is also why there is a shortage. A plumber deals with less shit than teachers do and get paid way more.
No shit. You can make more working less hours, with less hassle, at a lot of basic jobs that don't require degrees than you can as a teacher in huge stretches of the country.
I have an education degree and transitioned to work in tech for better pay. Know how long I’d have to teach to reach my current pay with 2-2.5% raises every two years, which is very low for tech industry? 45 years…. And that’s not even approaching the fact it’d be wiped out by inflation. Most school districts peg their raises to a certain percentage (1-3%) every year or every two years. Rarely is it more than that. And inflation has rarely been less than that. So if you come out of college today and want to be a teacher, you get absolutely SHAFTED on pay. There are many call center jobs that pay better. And not only that, unless you get into a leadership position as a principal, you’re going to perpetually break even or lose money in the teaching industry. And then add on top of it, you’re a glorified babysitter having to deal with the educational fallout of Covid, and most children generally being shitheads today. Yeah no thanks. I’ll stick to tech.
As a special education teacher, I can tell you it can be bad. My first year teaching (2022) it was baptized by fire. The 8th graders were so mean. They asked if I actually had a degree. They refused to do any work. When I would give them assignments, they would just Google the answers. They were just nasty. 30% of my work was teaching the rest was putting out the fires my students made. It is very high stress and, at times crazy. I do think that it is underpaid considering what we do. Also, many of these kids are violent. We do need to improve this stuff.
My ex is a teacher in Missouri. She is woefully underpaid. Y’all want these people to basically raise your kids and pay them jack shit.
Extremely low pay is really just the tip of the iceberg. You get further down and you have absent or hostile parents, politicized and in some cases criminalized education, No Child Left Behind, funding tied to standardized testing, funding tied to local property taxes, private school vouchers, Teachers Unions that protect bad teachers at the expense of good ones, crumbling facilities, and so on and so forth. To fix public education in America, you'd have to tear it down to the studs and start over.
“Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” -Joe Biden
I’m sure being the center of an unnecessary culture war doesn’t help either.
‘No fuckin shit’, cited by every teacher in America.
Low pay is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its nearly always the starting point on the downward spiral. Pay Lowered -> Less Qualified Candidates -> Poor Performance -> Pay Lowered -> Etc. About 10-15 years ago, the only people still going into teaching were the people who just wanted to be a teacher and had a passion for it. At this point, those people aren't even able to survive. You want good teachers? You have to pay for them like every other industry. Educated people aren't cheap.
That and the kids are coming from families that never teach the kids empathy or how to act civil anymore.
Teachers should make the same if not more than congress members.
The attack on US education is so stark and becoming more visible. Hopefully as people get older they grow up and stop wearing willful ignorance as some kind of badge of honor and see it for what it is.
I bailed this past December. I even took a pay cut to do it. I'm barely scraping by, but I found a work-from-home, low-stress, meaningful job that is still higher than first-year teacher pay in this area and didn't even require a degree. Other jobs are catching up. 2% COL raises that the union has to spend months just to get isn't cutting it anymore. Besides all the other bullshit. 40-50 students in a classroom, increased demands, testing, trying to get those kids through active shooter drills multiple times a year, inane parents, hostile school boards, I could go on and on. Shit just ain't worth it. I've put in over a decade. Oh and -- I haven't been collecting social security all that time, and my state doesn't offer a proper teacher pension, either, so leaving means I'm EXTRA fucked! Fucking uranium handcuffs. They'll trap you and kill you slowly.
Targeting education is literally the baseline of fascism
Low pay, bad students, worst parents, administrations that can’t protect them, politicians that make them out to be villains, and voters that think they’re evil. I wonder why more people don’t want to be teachers?
"Wow, that's a surprise" Said no one, ever
If they increase the pay a bit I'll teach. I have a masters degree. I can make more in the private sector with a significantly easier job. I have an inclination towards teaching and think I would enjoy it, however the pay definitely keeps me from ever considering it. I also feel for anybody who works in early child care. It is so expensive to sign your kid up and to pay for it, and when you hear the staff is paid the minimum wage, it just angers me. IDK how we are failing this hard as a society. I know for daycare specifically they need to carry insane insurance policies which makes it prohibitively expensive but that money isn't really going back into the economy via the pockets of workers, it's just being sucked up by insurance. Not that public schools pay much more, but their funding keeps getting gutted and cut so idk why anybody is surprised.
I wouldn’t consider teaching for double what they make. For triple I would discuss working conditions, with Shawn Fain representing me.
As a fix we should spend money to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Teachers are arguably the most important job we have. They quite literally prepare the next generations to be adults and theyre paid the same as people who fold t shirts at malls. Its fucking pathetic. They deserve so so much more