And once you get in that cycle, it's *hard* to get out. Because now, in that last week, not only do you need to make up for the money you were advanced for the previous month, you're also short the interest you paid on that advance. So now you have even *less* money on that last week, and just one financial setback is going to have you borrowing even more the next time.
People in the helping professions (at least where those professions are mostly female) are supposed to do it as a "calling." How dare they demand a living wage! It's not like it's hard or anything!
This is spot on. Education for the masses is simply *not valued*. The ruling class wants to have a 'middle' class level that can read, write, and count well enough to push paper for them, but nothing more. DEFINITELY not no deeper thinkin' about Hey, maybe things shouldn't be this way.
And the working class? Only needs edjumicated enough to read part numbers and punch cash registers. And ideally, all this would either be taught by stay-at-home moms who also don't know more than the basics, or if you must, a schoolmarm in a log cabin keeping the young'uns in line when they're not doing farm chores.
Anything beyond that should be reserved for their own special spawn, who may dabble a bit in non-business topics - but only after their fortune is secured. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and the oligarchs aren't interested in paying for more than this.
This enraged me before, during, and after retiring from my 33 year long public school career.
One of our teachers used to tell the story of his dad's opinion. "you were making $4000 a year as a car salesman, and now after 4 years of college, $2500?" "How does that make sense.?"
Jack was smart enough to keep working both jobs. I started teaching later, so by then I was making $4500 yearly.
My son lasted 14 years in a public charter high school as a specialty teacher (i.e. not gen ed), god bless him. Never got one single raise. Because he was in a specialty field (music) rather than being a classroom teacher, the union screwed him over and negotiated away his right to join, or to receive pay/benefits commensurate with the union (I mean, I believe in unions, but they can be just as shitheaded as management). Now he's a gigging musician and incredibly, it's a lot more stable and lucrative.
Paying them will help, but we also need to trust teachers to do their job. Attacking them for the books in their classroom, teaching US history and calling children by their preferred name is unlikely to make the job attractive.
I'll love it when these same folks are sitting in an ER and there are no trained or appropriately educated people to help them. Or when a bridge collapses or a medicine poisons people because no one was educated enough to do something about it.
Not everyone can do those things, and that is okay. But winnowing it down to "lazy rich fucks' kids" isn't really helping the pool of applicants who are capable, because it's already hard and we don't have enough of them (see STEM initiatives).
Especially when the same folks don't want qualified people to perform these tasks to be allowed into the county.
Glad that in PA we paid into SS and the teachers state retirement fund. Of course that state fud is bit under water since for a few years the state decided to give the districts a break on paying into it , but not the teachers of course we paid always.
I took early retirement in 1998, and we have never gotten a COLA in all that time.
Luckily I was raised to be frugal by my parents who experienced the Depression.
My mother was a teacher here in NYS and she was fine, but I had a friend who taught in TX, and chose the retirement fund. It was not enough for her to live on and she had to move in with one of her children, in another State. They were happy enough together, but it's not a choice she would have made, if she'd had the resources to stay alone.
Because the Constitution did not have anything to say about education (probably because white landowners didn't see the need to educate the masses) the states took over education. Trying to enforce teacher salaries at a federal level likely won't get very far.
The Mild Jrs commute about 45 minutes each way to be able to teach and earn a reasonable salary. They live about a mile from the middle school in their town. If they wanted to switch districts and save themselves a lot of driving they'd have to take a $40k pay cut (combined) and lose their tenure.
Salaries in Northern unionized states are much higher. Up to 25-50 percent. But bad parents rights groups are also in the worst paid states. So I expect biggest shortages are in FL and TX.
And a huge part of alll of this is misogyny. High percentage of female employees? Blame them for whatever made up social ill the patriarchy is het up about. And definitely don’t pay them more, because if women are doing it, it can’t be that hard/they’re probably not doing anything anyway except trying to ruin everyone’s good time!
I'm proposing a bill to swap the annual budget of the Department of Defense with the Department of Education. Teachers will get paid a starting salary equal to what generals get now (automatically adjusted for inflation). Anything leftover from the drone, tank, and nuke budget can be spent on classrooms, supplies, and staff.
I'd suggest two bills. First ties legislators salary to the median public school teachers salary. The second mandates a minimum of 10 years in prison for any legislator accepting cash or gifts from any lobbyists or organizations that would be impacted by legislation.
Give these losers a choice of paying teachers or going to jail for their kickbacks, and I'll wager teacher salaries go up in a hurry.
Impoverishing educators is not simply a choice, it's a fascist policy. An educated population will resist fascism. Only stupid people can be molded effective reactionary sheeple. Proof positive is the assault that began on public education with the ascendency of St. Ronald Reagan to the White House. His political beatification began with his assault on low cost & free state college & universities in California.
More to the point, it is class warfare policy, assuming (correctly) that the ownership class has been waging class warfare for the past fifty or more years.
Yeah, Republican fascists like the idea of an ignorant and easily deceived public. But they're Johnny-Come-Latelys. The fucking rich have been working hard to create an impoverished and desperate labor force for a very long time. It's best for them if the only educated people in the country are them and the people they hire to manage things for them. Then they have full control.
This is tiring. For decades the media has been publishing teacher shortage articles and they still get it wrong. Teacher shortages are in Special Ed and perhaps a few other subjects, but on the whole, there are plenty opf qualified people to teach the core disciplines. Certification laws are a major obstacle. A college professor cannot teach k12 unless they get a teacher ed degree. I've been through the program, iit does not teach you how to teach and teaches you high fallutin theaories as opposed to helping you figure out the complexities of actual teaching. So there's that.
Most districts pay decent middle-class salaries with benefits. Yes, your first few years are lower-paid, but the generous step system gets you a good wage after a few years and good poensions and healthcare benefits. Not to mention a couple months off in the summer and other well-placed holidays. The media lumps poorly paid teachers in Mississippi and Utah with all the rest. The afluent districts then use the media hysterics to leverage even higher wages. In some places k12 teachgers get paid as well or better than full professors in the nearby universities (not R1 or elite universities, but the typical university that the press often ignores).
The other issue is that the media fails to distinguish among teachers. Special Ed is super demanding and that is why there is a shortage. There is not shortage of History teachers for example. Likewise, shop teachers who can check out at the last bell and phone in their grades are paid the same as English teachers who have to spend nights and weekends grading papers. Not to mention that math teachers have to teach all students whether they want to be there or not. Electives teachers don't have that issue. My point is that there are going to be shortages because the job is tough no matter what the pay. Teacher unions do not address this well because they want solidarity.
But sure, pay them more and your taxes will go up and then all of the other middle class jobs will look at teachers and say they need more too and we get more inflation because industries dependent on people services will have to raise costs. The solution is to stop the pay arms race and tax the wealthy like they should be taxed so that inflation is kept under control. We need holistic solutions instead of each interest group demanding more money and pushing other interest groups to counter with similar demands.
Ah yes, "inflation." We're supposed to just take as an axiom that inflation is the worst thing imaginable. Not poverty, not censorship, not the rich, not the government trying to control our bodies, not mass shootings. "Inflation" is bad just because you say it's bad.
This was not a post about censorship, body-control, etc. That's your reading into it of priorities.
Yes, inflation is bad if we don't address the root problems. If you go sector by sector and give everyone a raise we just get stuck on a treadmill. Yesterday it was fastfood workers. Then it is tipped workers, and so on and so on. Costs just get passed on and pretty soon you gotta complain that you are too low-paid and demand more raises. I for one and tired of teachers getting much of the media spotlight when I have witnessed plenty of well-paid teachers. I was one for a while myself. The problem was not the pay. The problem was that the working environment in schools was stressful and unsupportive. Now I understand that in many Republican states pay actually is low. My beef is with the media not doing enough to make these distinctions.
So weird! Brand new account comes out of nowhere to say that the media is LYING about all this well-documented information and yet offers no substantiation of his own. What a puzzle, who can know anything, really?
Maybe my reaction has been colored by hanging around with all sorts of shady internet types for so long, now.
Sorry, I will let you stay in your echo chamber. I have been a teacher and I have paid attention to salaries in several of the places I have lived. Granted, I have lived in northern states where the pay is good. The pensions haave been great as well. That needs to be pointed out. The press does a poor job making these distinctions. But obviously you come from the school of thought that is okay with little distortions in furtherance of larger goals. Ends justify the means I suppose.
For every low paying diustrict you can find some very well-paid districts. It's not hard to do. I have had family members who have taught and worked second jobs. Oh, but they also bought a 5000 square foot house so that was a choice. I also had a teaching job in Massachussetts in 2006 that started me at $48K. If stayed with it it I would be making well over $90K by now. Just type in "average teacher salary" by state. It's not hard. The article above was obviously trting to make it look worse than it really is by quoting a teacher aid in a poor district and ignoring many others. And then benefits are good. Many states have defined benefit packages. If you get a teaching job out of college you can retire by 60 and have a good pension.
So now you're shifting the goalposts, too? News flash: the original post was about national pay standards so that teachers in poorer districts could have a decent living wage. But apparently, the existence of decently paid teachers anywhere else in the country means that there’s no problem. Nothing to see here! For an alleged “teacher,” you sure do seem to have problems with basic reading comprehension.
Sigh, you ad hom like a Maga supporter. Tremendous. I get what you are saying. I'm still critical. The article, as most articles on this subject are, lumps teachers all together. I appreciate the ask for a minimum teacher wage but I still don't like it. 60K for a 22 year old in rural Mississippi or kansas is a lot of money. It makes no sense. To afford that they would have to do away with the step system and cut benefits. Better to keep highlighting the discrepency with other areas of the country. Meanwhile places where teacher pay is good uses articles like this for leverage to get higher pay than is needed. It does not tackle the problem of working conditions or variations between subjects taught. The South has problems all their own. Having the federal government mandate pay for them is a bandage. We end up subsidizing the southern Republican negligence. For example, average pay in Arizona is on the low end. Their economy is booming and people are still moving there. Why would I want to subsidize that?
I guess I'm gonna have to double down on the reading comprehension bit, since you also seem to need a little remedial education in the definitions of certain logical fallacies. For the record, a statement that a debate opponent is ignoring and may not understand the central premise of the topic is not an ad hominem attack no matter how insultingly it may be worded.
However, you did at least address the core issue this time. FWIW, I'm not sure a federally mandated floor on teacher's salaries is the right solution, either. But I'm not trying to imply that the problem doesn't exist just because SOME districts don't have it. And education is not purely a local concern, even a locally uneducated electorate has national consequences. Robyn did not directly make that argument, as I recall, but it's certainly implied by the fact that the subject came up in Congress, not a school board or a state legislature. Maybe next time work harder to use your own personal experience to shed additional light on the problem rather than deny its existence by implication.
When I taught in Florida, we got paid monthly. The local Payday Loan spot was filled with teachers that last week before the first.
And once you get in that cycle, it's *hard* to get out. Because now, in that last week, not only do you need to make up for the money you were advanced for the previous month, you're also short the interest you paid on that advance. So now you have even *less* money on that last week, and just one financial setback is going to have you borrowing even more the next time.
People in the helping professions (at least where those professions are mostly female) are supposed to do it as a "calling." How dare they demand a living wage! It's not like it's hard or anything!
This is spot on. Education for the masses is simply *not valued*. The ruling class wants to have a 'middle' class level that can read, write, and count well enough to push paper for them, but nothing more. DEFINITELY not no deeper thinkin' about Hey, maybe things shouldn't be this way.
And the working class? Only needs edjumicated enough to read part numbers and punch cash registers. And ideally, all this would either be taught by stay-at-home moms who also don't know more than the basics, or if you must, a schoolmarm in a log cabin keeping the young'uns in line when they're not doing farm chores.
Anything beyond that should be reserved for their own special spawn, who may dabble a bit in non-business topics - but only after their fortune is secured. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and the oligarchs aren't interested in paying for more than this.
This enraged me before, during, and after retiring from my 33 year long public school career.
One of our teachers used to tell the story of his dad's opinion. "you were making $4000 a year as a car salesman, and now after 4 years of college, $2500?" "How does that make sense.?"
Jack was smart enough to keep working both jobs. I started teaching later, so by then I was making $4500 yearly.
My youngest daughter studied education and became a teacher despite our attempt to encourage her into another field
The pay is abismal. The administration doesn’t give a crap. The parents are aholes or uninvolved
She has to work part time at a supermarket to make enough to get by
My son lasted 14 years in a public charter high school as a specialty teacher (i.e. not gen ed), god bless him. Never got one single raise. Because he was in a specialty field (music) rather than being a classroom teacher, the union screwed him over and negotiated away his right to join, or to receive pay/benefits commensurate with the union (I mean, I believe in unions, but they can be just as shitheaded as management). Now he's a gigging musician and incredibly, it's a lot more stable and lucrative.
Paying them will help, but we also need to trust teachers to do their job. Attacking them for the books in their classroom, teaching US history and calling children by their preferred name is unlikely to make the job attractive.
I'll love it when these same folks are sitting in an ER and there are no trained or appropriately educated people to help them. Or when a bridge collapses or a medicine poisons people because no one was educated enough to do something about it.
Not everyone can do those things, and that is okay. But winnowing it down to "lazy rich fucks' kids" isn't really helping the pool of applicants who are capable, because it's already hard and we don't have enough of them (see STEM initiatives).
Especially when the same folks don't want qualified people to perform these tasks to be allowed into the county.
No teachers in public school is a feature, so that we will all have to go to charter schools.
What about allowing teachers in all States to pay into ss and retirement funds? I know that would be a novel idea in TX, and a few other places.
Glad that in PA we paid into SS and the teachers state retirement fund. Of course that state fud is bit under water since for a few years the state decided to give the districts a break on paying into it , but not the teachers of course we paid always.
I took early retirement in 1998, and we have never gotten a COLA in all that time.
Luckily I was raised to be frugal by my parents who experienced the Depression.
My mother was a teacher here in NYS and she was fine, but I had a friend who taught in TX, and chose the retirement fund. It was not enough for her to live on and she had to move in with one of her children, in another State. They were happy enough together, but it's not a choice she would have made, if she'd had the resources to stay alone.
Because the Constitution did not have anything to say about education (probably because white landowners didn't see the need to educate the masses) the states took over education. Trying to enforce teacher salaries at a federal level likely won't get very far.
The Mild Jrs commute about 45 minutes each way to be able to teach and earn a reasonable salary. They live about a mile from the middle school in their town. If they wanted to switch districts and save themselves a lot of driving they'd have to take a $40k pay cut (combined) and lose their tenure.
Salaries in Northern unionized states are much higher. Up to 25-50 percent. But bad parents rights groups are also in the worst paid states. So I expect biggest shortages are in FL and TX.
And a huge part of alll of this is misogyny. High percentage of female employees? Blame them for whatever made up social ill the patriarchy is het up about. And definitely don’t pay them more, because if women are doing it, it can’t be that hard/they’re probably not doing anything anyway except trying to ruin everyone’s good time!
True. But also Republicans hate the teacher’s unions. They don’t support Trump like some male dominated unions.
I'm proposing a bill to swap the annual budget of the Department of Defense with the Department of Education. Teachers will get paid a starting salary equal to what generals get now (automatically adjusted for inflation). Anything leftover from the drone, tank, and nuke budget can be spent on classrooms, supplies, and staff.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, Louisiana Republican, ranking member of the committee is not part of the solution.
I'd suggest two bills. First ties legislators salary to the median public school teachers salary. The second mandates a minimum of 10 years in prison for any legislator accepting cash or gifts from any lobbyists or organizations that would be impacted by legislation.
Give these losers a choice of paying teachers or going to jail for their kickbacks, and I'll wager teacher salaries go up in a hurry.
Impoverishing educators is not simply a choice, it's a fascist policy. An educated population will resist fascism. Only stupid people can be molded effective reactionary sheeple. Proof positive is the assault that began on public education with the ascendency of St. Ronald Reagan to the White House. His political beatification began with his assault on low cost & free state college & universities in California.
More to the point, it is class warfare policy, assuming (correctly) that the ownership class has been waging class warfare for the past fifty or more years.
Yeah, Republican fascists like the idea of an ignorant and easily deceived public. But they're Johnny-Come-Latelys. The fucking rich have been working hard to create an impoverished and desperate labor force for a very long time. It's best for them if the only educated people in the country are them and the people they hire to manage things for them. Then they have full control.
𝘔𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘐’𝘮 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘱𝘶𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘯𝘢...
Cream cheese here, and I don't care who knows it.
And before you ask, yes, that IS why Edmonton lost Game 7. As long as we're blaming stuff on other stuff.
I knew there had to be a logical reason for their loss.
> Is it because we, as a people, just really started hating children?
"Just"? 🤨
Look at how we fund things -- or don't fund them. Look at our safety regulations -- or lack thereof.
Lots of us, as a people, have clearly hated children forever.
Hey, we banned Lawn Darts, what more do you want from us?
They were fun while they lasted.
This is tiring. For decades the media has been publishing teacher shortage articles and they still get it wrong. Teacher shortages are in Special Ed and perhaps a few other subjects, but on the whole, there are plenty opf qualified people to teach the core disciplines. Certification laws are a major obstacle. A college professor cannot teach k12 unless they get a teacher ed degree. I've been through the program, iit does not teach you how to teach and teaches you high fallutin theaories as opposed to helping you figure out the complexities of actual teaching. So there's that.
Most districts pay decent middle-class salaries with benefits. Yes, your first few years are lower-paid, but the generous step system gets you a good wage after a few years and good poensions and healthcare benefits. Not to mention a couple months off in the summer and other well-placed holidays. The media lumps poorly paid teachers in Mississippi and Utah with all the rest. The afluent districts then use the media hysterics to leverage even higher wages. In some places k12 teachgers get paid as well or better than full professors in the nearby universities (not R1 or elite universities, but the typical university that the press often ignores).
The other issue is that the media fails to distinguish among teachers. Special Ed is super demanding and that is why there is a shortage. There is not shortage of History teachers for example. Likewise, shop teachers who can check out at the last bell and phone in their grades are paid the same as English teachers who have to spend nights and weekends grading papers. Not to mention that math teachers have to teach all students whether they want to be there or not. Electives teachers don't have that issue. My point is that there are going to be shortages because the job is tough no matter what the pay. Teacher unions do not address this well because they want solidarity.
But sure, pay them more and your taxes will go up and then all of the other middle class jobs will look at teachers and say they need more too and we get more inflation because industries dependent on people services will have to raise costs. The solution is to stop the pay arms race and tax the wealthy like they should be taxed so that inflation is kept under control. We need holistic solutions instead of each interest group demanding more money and pushing other interest groups to counter with similar demands.
I dunno, $30,000 a year does not sound very "middle class" to me.
Ah yes, "inflation." We're supposed to just take as an axiom that inflation is the worst thing imaginable. Not poverty, not censorship, not the rich, not the government trying to control our bodies, not mass shootings. "Inflation" is bad just because you say it's bad.
This was not a post about censorship, body-control, etc. That's your reading into it of priorities.
Yes, inflation is bad if we don't address the root problems. If you go sector by sector and give everyone a raise we just get stuck on a treadmill. Yesterday it was fastfood workers. Then it is tipped workers, and so on and so on. Costs just get passed on and pretty soon you gotta complain that you are too low-paid and demand more raises. I for one and tired of teachers getting much of the media spotlight when I have witnessed plenty of well-paid teachers. I was one for a while myself. The problem was not the pay. The problem was that the working environment in schools was stressful and unsupportive. Now I understand that in many Republican states pay actually is low. My beef is with the media not doing enough to make these distinctions.
So weird! Brand new account comes out of nowhere to say that the media is LYING about all this well-documented information and yet offers no substantiation of his own. What a puzzle, who can know anything, really?
Maybe my reaction has been colored by hanging around with all sorts of shady internet types for so long, now.
Sorry, I will let you stay in your echo chamber. I have been a teacher and I have paid attention to salaries in several of the places I have lived. Granted, I have lived in northern states where the pay is good. The pensions haave been great as well. That needs to be pointed out. The press does a poor job making these distinctions. But obviously you come from the school of thought that is okay with little distortions in furtherance of larger goals. Ends justify the means I suppose.
For every low paying diustrict you can find some very well-paid districts. It's not hard to do. I have had family members who have taught and worked second jobs. Oh, but they also bought a 5000 square foot house so that was a choice. I also had a teaching job in Massachussetts in 2006 that started me at $48K. If stayed with it it I would be making well over $90K by now. Just type in "average teacher salary" by state. It's not hard. The article above was obviously trting to make it look worse than it really is by quoting a teacher aid in a poor district and ignoring many others. And then benefits are good. Many states have defined benefit packages. If you get a teaching job out of college you can retire by 60 and have a good pension.
So now you're shifting the goalposts, too? News flash: the original post was about national pay standards so that teachers in poorer districts could have a decent living wage. But apparently, the existence of decently paid teachers anywhere else in the country means that there’s no problem. Nothing to see here! For an alleged “teacher,” you sure do seem to have problems with basic reading comprehension.
Sigh, you ad hom like a Maga supporter. Tremendous. I get what you are saying. I'm still critical. The article, as most articles on this subject are, lumps teachers all together. I appreciate the ask for a minimum teacher wage but I still don't like it. 60K for a 22 year old in rural Mississippi or kansas is a lot of money. It makes no sense. To afford that they would have to do away with the step system and cut benefits. Better to keep highlighting the discrepency with other areas of the country. Meanwhile places where teacher pay is good uses articles like this for leverage to get higher pay than is needed. It does not tackle the problem of working conditions or variations between subjects taught. The South has problems all their own. Having the federal government mandate pay for them is a bandage. We end up subsidizing the southern Republican negligence. For example, average pay in Arizona is on the low end. Their economy is booming and people are still moving there. Why would I want to subsidize that?
I guess I'm gonna have to double down on the reading comprehension bit, since you also seem to need a little remedial education in the definitions of certain logical fallacies. For the record, a statement that a debate opponent is ignoring and may not understand the central premise of the topic is not an ad hominem attack no matter how insultingly it may be worded.
However, you did at least address the core issue this time. FWIW, I'm not sure a federally mandated floor on teacher's salaries is the right solution, either. But I'm not trying to imply that the problem doesn't exist just because SOME districts don't have it. And education is not purely a local concern, even a locally uneducated electorate has national consequences. Robyn did not directly make that argument, as I recall, but it's certainly implied by the fact that the subject came up in Congress, not a school board or a state legislature. Maybe next time work harder to use your own personal experience to shed additional light on the problem rather than deny its existence by implication.
*laughs in North Carolina *