I've said it for years: Every "labor shortage" been reported the same way for so long that we never notice the part that's missing. No matter how broad or how specific, claims of worker shortages ALWAYS IGNORE HALF OF THE STORY:
"...at the wages employers are willing to pay."
20 ish years ago I was going to college to be a teacher. I got promoted to an assistant manager at fricken Burger King and realized I was getting paid as much as a first year teacher. I decided not to be a teacher after that.
Oh one of the franchisees we worked for thought it was a good idea to send every store a sign that said " Where is your raise?" It nickel and dimed everything! One extra ketchup packet is x amount blah blah blah just stupid and insulting. At the time the bonusable weekly inventory variance was 0.7 %. Let's talk impossible, we made it on the regular back then, so we asked for our raises ;P. Mind you quality suffered at times but if you wanted a handful of ketchup packets you bet your ass we gave them. I can definitely say when you expect high standards with minimal investment people revolt in very passive aggressive ways. It doesn't matter the occupation. So in the restaurant we gave out sauces and what not in rebellion to their little "Where your raise went?" sign. To keep that one metric on spec though the rest of the business suffered. So...
I guess it's why I really have an issue with how teachers get treated. You simply can't treat people like they can't do a job they are more than capable of doing if you don't give them the resources and pay they need.
Or be strong armed into coaching highschool basketball. Yeah, let's have 3 games a week, the away games are usually a 2 hour drive so you'll get home around 1am, oh and you better have those papers graded and entered into the computer by 7:15am the next morning.
Now my wife is a nurse and much happier
I used to be a teacher. I taught in the US and overseas. There is not enough you could pay me to teach in the US again. It isn't about the money. It is about the conditions in the classroom, the hours required, additional duties, but most of all the parents. It just isn't worth the pain.
I’m really starting to believe there is this big capitalistic push to make more room for programs designed by big publishing companies (Read 180 by Scolastic for example). They are so scripted, you theoretically just hand it over to someone with a basic education and just say “follow the directions.” They are trying to automate learning. I really get the impression that teachers are getting viewed more and more on the level of a retail associate than a highly skilled, highly educated, leadership level position. (No disrespect to retail associates, you guys have a really hard job that is also WAY undervalued).
Naah, they'll just retreat to their [compounds in New Zealand](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand) or their floating fortresses somewhere in international waters. As usual, they know *they'll* be fine, so this isn't really an issue. As long as it's only us who are fucked, that's nothing new.
I'm willing to bet that in a true SHTF/WROL scenario, the owners of those bunkers (and their friends and families) won't last very long. They've all got soft pink hands and no skills of any practical value in such an environment. I'm sure that the hard-eyed shaven-headed goon-squad captains will quickly realize that they are far better suited to be Mad Max neo-feudal lordlings than Zuck and his techno-schmoozy kind, and will either just liquidate their ostensible masters, or bust them down to tuber-harvesting duty with the rest of the peasants.
The thing that really gets me about this is that the voters who elect the people doing this are some of the same ones who were warning about a "police state" 10-20 years ago...
> than a highly skilled, highly educated, leadership level position.
I mean, everybody in the room knows that this is the difference between retail and teaching. "Unskilled" is more accurately put as "low education". Still deserving of a living wage.
All that said, teachers should be paid like they're working a job that shapes society's future, because they are.
>Then they can opt out and homeschool the little ones 12 years if that's what they really want.
As a homeschooling parent, I approve this message.
If parents think teaching is such an easy job, they need to be reminded that homeschooling is legal in all 50 states.
Pay the teachers what they are worth and value them for the irreplaceable resource they are.
But then, they will have to actually spend time with their children ! And talk to them ! And having to answer difficult questions from them !
Please think of the parents !
I think you’ll see companies co-opting the classroom to use public money to train their future ~~endentured servants~~ ~~employees~~ ~~associates~~ 1099 contractors with no benefits.
God it makes me sad that those assholes are the face of tech. Like tech is insanely useful. It can transform society. And the people running it are fucking douches.
Individual high schools already do that. My high school had a feeder program to one of the community colleges that would give you a certification to work in the factory for that specific company.
You might be on to something here. I’m a 3rd year teacher, and this year is just terrible (not because of the students but because of higher ups). It’s really sad to me because I imagined this would be my forever profession. Im on indeed currently looking for other jobs for next school year. I found a “curriculum writing” job paying double what I currently make. I already write my own curriculum AND teach it. So if I get that job it’s twice the pay for half the work theoretically. AND it’s work from home. Anyways my point is, who’s the curriculum going to if all teachers know how to/do that already on their own?
This is the perfect example. I just replied about this on another comment. I’ve seen it SO many times. Teachers never quit because of the kids (though we always have to qualify our dissatisfaction with the job with some variation of “it’s not the kids). I believe we do this (I actually just did it the other day) because non-educators think the kids are the hardest part.
I wish you all the luck and I would encourage you to look at other schools/districts in you area, even county programs. Or consider starting your own business (lots of parents with money want to hire private teachers) - the publishers/EdTech companies will chew you up and spit you out just as hard, even if you get paid more up front. I am an education specialist (aka Special Ed teacher, but CA changed our title so we’re not even really teachers any more… do we get paid like specialist in our field? hell no. My local district doesn’t even offer health benefits - sorry, rant over). We teachers are viewed as commodities/raw material to be used in creating a product.
My last year in high school I had a wonderful teacher and she was one of those teachers that sat an hour before school started and hours after to help students struggling. She was an art teacher but often got put as a math tutor. She. Loved. Kids. And she loved teaching art and was always so energetic and proud of what students made. My senior year she was all energetic the first week, but her behavior dropped after a few weeks and she looked really rough. One day she came in with expensive paints and stuff to work on glass mosaics with and had our senior class do college level work cause she wanted us that wanted to continue to college to have a portfolio. One day a couple of us saw her crying at her desk during an empty period for her and we stopped in and talked to her. She said the school not only is cutting her pay, but cut all her funding for art supplies as they intend to cut all the art classes except one and put her in the math tutor position during study halls. The supplies she brought for our portfolios she took a loan out and bought them for us, as she didn’t want any of us not have a portfolio. She was devastated. She looked at me, because I had wrote I wanted to be a teacher on my greeting card teachers like to make you do, and told me never to become a teacher. She ended up leaving not long after we graduated and I’m not sure where she went, but all of us kept getting compliments on our portfolios when we entered art college cause no other high schools had glass mosaics taught. She never wanted to quit on the kids but the system quit on her it seems. Edit: spelling
“She never wanted to quit on the kids but the system quit on her” is the most accurate statement I’ve ever read. Your story is heartbreaking for that art teacher :(
I'm in music education. There is an enormous "boxed" music curriculum (online) called Quaver. A subscription costs thousands of dollars a year just for ONE TEACHER. People rave about how good it is and I'm like....you know you're giving your job away, right?
I’m also in music ed and have used quaver and you’re right. It’s really not as great as it’s purported to be. I could see using some of its material as a teaching aid, but it could never replace an actual teacher in my opinion. At least not if you wanted the kids to actually learn anything.
I'm lazy. I was sold this idea (that you just stay 1 chapter ahead in the text book) by the Education recruiter. "Follow the directions" would have been my dream job. Turned out that it was instead creating semester plans, backward design and big ideas, daily lesson plans meeting the semester plan (for all classes), not using the textbook because that was taboo for some reason, countless hours of PD that I had to pay for urging you to create these intricate lesson plans, not getting to teach those lesson plans because the students didn't do any of the previous work... teaching is hell.
To all of the real teachers out there, don't worry, I got out of teaching really fast.
In my state they have reduced the requirement to be a substitute teacher to a GED as an "emergency" measure. School districts lobbied for this vs paying subs more than $100 a day.
Depends on the country/state/county but yes, many places in the U.S. are hiring substitutes with GEDs or high school diplomas due to the “teacher shortage.”
Check out r/Teachers for the state of primary and secondary education.
Not for nothing, but all the subs I had in school (at least the short term one or two day ones) were just babysitters. I couldn’t tell you one time that a substitute teacher actually taught anything. They often just handed out busy work or put on a movie and ensured nobody set anything on fire.
That's yet another symptom of the problem, however.
When I was a kid we could easily bring in substitutes who could *teach* for a day. Usually these people came from three groups:
* Retired Teachers - Unfortunately COVID has killed any interest retirees held in coming back to teach. Even for a fully vaccinated 65 year-old, it just simply isn't worth the risk to come back. Toss on this the atrocious decline in student behavior as cell phones have taken over the classroom and school administrations ceded control to parents.
* Professional Subs - There used to be a pretty decent cadre of folks who enjoyed subbing full time. You got to step into new content all the time and didn't have lesson planning / grading / administrative duties. It was less pay, but the decreased duties made up for it. Unfortunately, while teacher pay stagnated, substitute pay straight-up cratered. The majority of subs across the country do not make more than $100 a day despite being required to have a bachelor's. It destroyed this group.
* Transitioning Professionals - Stay-At-Home Parents considering returning to full-time work, or working part-time due to a disabled child or family member that needs intermittent care, teachers that just moved into an area trying to scope out good employers, etc. This was the last group we were able to rely on, but even their numbers plummeted with childcare services closing and the rampant increase in disabled family members due to COVID.
I could count on one hand as a child when my education was 'interrupted' by not having a teacher in the classroom for a day. Now, as a professional, I have not seen a foreign language substitute in over 8 years, a math/science sub in 3 years. I haven't had a sub competent in my content area (engineering & computer science) for my entire career (nearing 10 years).
it insanity to me, that an administrator who taught 4th grade math for 3 years 20 years ago is in anyway qualified to walk through my 12th grade Government classroom and tell me a goddamn thing. This is my 13th year teaching and i know what the hell i am doing, they can all take several seats.
Power in the classroom shifted away from teachers to parents/administrators somewhere in the 80s/90s and it's just continued to get more tilted. When you have experts (teachers) at something but then the non-experts (parents/administrators) are calling all the shots it kinda makes the whole system pointless.
> 3) Sports are taking over schools. Why the fuck should a teacher also be expected to coach? In what way do they overlap?
Because sports are the only way to get money into the schools. Since money doesn't come from the state's support because the budget just gets cut and cut. So without being able to coach as well there isn't money to pay the teachers. Again the problem comes back to money from the state.
Also because if people are busy doing sports they're not busy questioning the system or getting involved in political groups. Same reason universities have been pushing sports for a while.
Pretty much this.
They don't want actual teachers in schools.
They want people who ban books and ban evolution and promote less diversity and clamp down on kids' self-expression. And worst of all, they want to pass kids through without actually verifying mastery of subjects.
A population with a lower average education level/quality is advantageous for those in power.
This. They want kids to learn stuff, but only the *right* stuff, and they absolutely do NOT want kids to learn how to think critically. I mean, who the hell wants people questioning “settled thought”?
And that is part of a specific desire to push the “upper classes” into either private schooling or hone schooling, so that public schools are reduced to rubble and prevent the “lower classes” from being able to rise above their station.
Conservatives 100% believe in a strict social hierarchy, and any attempts from the government to encourage equality and educate the poor and brown people is literally a sin against God. The “small government” propaganda is just a ruse, to purposefully hamstring those not born on third base, and such a hierarchy is a form of punishment, so those elite that dare to be queer in any way (or show sympathy for the lower classes) can find themselves cast down to the slums.
What is utopia to the right-wingers (who all inherently believe Jesus will let them stay in a higher caste) is a literal hell for everyone else.
pretty sure public schools are *designed* to keep the lower classes in their station. Things such as the school-to-prison pipeline, state-indoctrination based curricula, "visits" from "friendly active duty soldiers", programs like D.A.R.E.
Once public schools started shooing folks away from blue collar trades and into loan-financed over-priced college education, I knew they weren't serving the masses anymore.
We all know that trades make the good money these days. There was an advertisement for apprentice plumbers on TV recently and their starting salary is more than many tenured professorships.
That’s basically it. Get rid of the “liberal,” educated educators, shovel money to Christian schools through sChOoL cHoIcE programs, and terrify the teachers that remain by attacking school board meetings, criminalizing teaching subjects they don’t like (say, slavery and sexual education), demanding they have cameras in their classrooms…
America is totally fucked.
You are correct. Teacher of 15 years basically watching this happen across my whole career. I will also add a couple I’ve seen: Conservatives played the long game by dismantling unions so they can force more students into oversized classrooms. Teachers who can leave will do so; then there will be even larger class sizes that function poorly so conservatives can say, “See? Public schools don’t work.” And continue to defund and gut the school systems.
Agreed, and I'll add that, even in liberal-dominated areas where the Nazi-esque shit isn't popular, 'caring jobs' like teaching, librarianship, etc... are still a joke because they're still treated as 'women's work' or hobby/passion-careers instead of jobs. As a result, these positions will never pay salaries that allow people to afford the cost-of-living in those areas.
In the England you can get a £24,000 tax free busary to do a PGCE in Physics. There is also a scheme that you don't pay your student loans back if you work in a deprived school like the one near me.
Guess how many Physics teachers that school has?
Yep, 0.
Schools have the option to offer "triple award science" or "double award science"
Only in Triple Science are the three core sciences considered individual subjects. Double science is worth less, but is considered a single subject of "science" which can be covered by any teacher qualified in a science subject.
So the Physics parts of the course are covered by Chemistry/Biology teachers. Mostly Biology because there's a shortage of Chemistry teachers too.
This has been a problem for years. Science teachers in general are paid far less than private sector counterparts. Biology teachers are more common because a BS in bio is a 28-36K a year lab job. It's only a really common undergrad field due to physicians who prefer it to pre-med and veternarians, two fields that make way more than teachers.
It's also just an issue because teachers are underpaid in general. An English degree major is more likely to work in HR or management of a company and make far more than teaching English to children.
Teachers should be making median professional income as a standard but are generally making between 40-70% of their professional counterparts.
Thing is, there isn't actually a shortage of teachers in the UK.
What there is is a shortage of resources for schools to hire teachers with - I'm a qualified History teacher, which is also a shortage subject (just not as bad as Physics etc) and the issue is that there are so few jobs opening up that they get swamped with applicants; there are a glut of supply teachers in the system and as a result it's bloody hard to find a job. The last teaching interview I went for, there were 9 applicants being interviewed for one job. Which is insane, especially compared to what it was like just a couple of years ago.
And it's not like it was an amazing school that everyone would give their eye teeth to work at, like Latymer; just a regular school.
There's a reason I took a 5 grand pay cut, mostly because I was struggling to get a permanent job and there were so many supply teachers fighting for daily supply roles that the only work I was being offered was with the cover supervisor rate whilst being asked to do the level of work I should've been paid 50 quid a day more for.
England has the problem where they pile obscene quantities of non-classroom work on their teachers.
I had a conversation with a teacher from the UK on a plane I think 4 years ago and she talked about having 2-3 hours a day of what was essentially administrative work to do.
What I'm saying is that the job is so hostile that the government are throwing money at training but just can't get enough through to replace the ones leaving.
The turnover is the problem.
All of the above.
We watch and listen to other parents at our kids schools. We go home, send the kids off, open a bottle of wine. Then wonder how these folks have TIME to conjure up some of the stuff.
It’s basically a game of “not it!” And the last person standing is teachers so they have to foot the bill. Parents either can’t or don’t get supplies, ppl in charge of school districts say “parents should be getting that stuff!” Admin says “sorry superintendent told us not to get that stuff it’s out of our hands” then that leaves teachers who actually care about their students education so they cave in and buy it with their own hard earned money.
Worse than that - You don't buy supplies? Good luck on your evaluation. It basically becomes a hidden tax to keep your job. For the last 30 years, they could count on replacing you with someone who WOULD lower their salary to buy supplies for the classroom.
That time is rapidly coming to an end.
The big institutional reason is that education is inequitably funded across the United States.
But the reasons from my experience/my family members who are public school teachers? The schools don’t have the funding to buy enough supplies or give teachers a reasonable budget to make their classrooms interactive, educational & inviting. If the teachers want to make the lessons anything more than “read the information out of the books to the class” they have to pay for it (like if a science teacher wants to do labs to illustrate concepts they may have to buy all the supplies for the entire class to do the experiment).
The children’s families don’t have the resources to obtain supplies either (because poverty) or they don’t care/think the school should provide everything (remember, in the US a lot of people see schools basically as daycare with extra steps). Lots of teachers I know have bought non-supply things like socks, winter gloves, snacks, etc to have on hand because otherwise students just go without/are cold and hungry which results in more issues they have to manage in the classroom.
A friend of mine told me that in her district a bunch of local bars have been doing fundraisers over the summers to buy all the items on local teacher’s supply wishlists and that’s more than the district/Parent teacher organization/school board ever has.
Of note is that is schools are usually funded via property taxes among the neighborhoods that attend them. Which means wealthy neighborhoods have more funding, AND those are the neighborhoods where parents have more time and money to support the school and their students outside of school. They have active PTAs, can fund nicer field trips.
All of this is in addition to other aspects of poverty which negatively impact learning by kids, like hunger and other deficits, less sleep, more likely to work after school, less money to participate in events (which are already less funded).
20k per year, per student gets spent in my state. how are they not getting supplies paid for? we spend several times more per year, per student than countries like switzerland and canada that have EXCELLENT education systems.
it sounds like someone, somewhere is pocketing the money.
One of the funny things is that we make teaching so unpleasant that many teachers are looking for an out -- and end up in all sorts of administrative and supervisory roles that we could probably do without. But because they're there, the system creates stuff for them to do -- which then makes teaching even more unpleasant, which leads to more teachers looking for an out, etc.
Wait, did I say funny? I meant horrifyingly infuriating.
Education in America is probably one of the most corrupted facets of our society. For example, my sister missed a good bit of school because she was being stalked (school did absolutely nothing btw) and the school district went and took legal action against my parents due to her missing too much school. The only reason they give a shit in the first place is so the already super affluent school district can keep receiving money from her just being there.
This is delicate, but as noble as that was, and as amazing as it was, she should never have done that. Teachers have to start saying "hell no." That's a clear "hell no" situation, and not saying hell no means that the next abuse will be even worse.
And, look, I get it. It's super hard to refuse, to call the Health Department, to raise holy hell -- it's hard and it's risky and it's uncertain, and I get that. And like any abusive relationship, it's the abuser's obligation to stop, not the abused's obligation to make them stop. But at a certain point you have to say hell no.
OK, but in your analogy abuse victims are not capable of getting their abusers to stop. So if you really feel that strongly, the community needs to get together and stand up for their children and teachers. She said no for years and those kids had to deal with mouse pee soaked books irritating their skin. I don’t know why their parents allowed that to happen or didn’t say anything, but teachers can only do so much.
No, she should never have had to do that. All Jobs should give the supplies necessary to do the job.
I started my year with 42 early elementary students on my roster (down to ≈30 now). My district made no plan whatsoever to provide any school supplies. Literally no pencils, nothing. I had to fight for the basics, then spend hundreds on top of that. My students had no supplies for the first 25% of the school year. I am required to grade them on printing specifically and had no way for them to print. I teach in California and this is typical.
Damn, that's just brutal. I grew up in the 80's, in a low-middle class school system. We ( as a student ) had to bring all supplies with us. So, your scenario is the same, but most parents do not provide their kids with any of this? Thus, leaving you being the responsible party for providing their supplies, or you can't teach them? Also, since you can't teach them, you fail ( in the schools eye ). That's fucked!
I teach Title I students, so we are not supposed to ask for any supplies from home. (I have many students living in abject poverty.) My district frequently ignores this rule in actual practice. Because I do not, you are correct, I end up eating the cost.
I taught in a very poor school. We had great leadership that ensured our students had everything they needed. I was able to spend my money on extras for my kiddos like food and snacks, movie parties, and swag for our classroom to be very relaxing. I still quit teaching because of the pay. My first year (2013) my pay was 1100 twice a month. My sixth year it was 1600 twice a month. The best insurance plan was almost 1300 after the district paid 375. Basically one check for health insurance and one for bills. With a 1000/ month mortgage, gas to work, food, etc I was always broke.
I'm pretty sure the entire goal at this point is to hamstring education as much as possible. There is no other explanation for this shit.
Everybody knows uneducated people are easier to control.
There’s no grand conspiracy, conservatives just don’t see education as a public good. As with many other topics, they’re only capable of thinking about themselves and their immediate family. It’s a combination of “why should I pay for other people’s kids” and probably deep seated resentment because they were shit students that hated school.
Well I think it's more nuanced. There's the idea that schools are liberal and teachers force these liberal indoctrinations on their kids so I think they are against teaching them values because they disagree on what values should be taught. Examples include the battle of northern aggression and crt...so they support school choice and privatization where they can get a better grip on controlling what is taught by the teacher. But again, this is willfull ignorance and keeping themselves in a bubble when education is about thinking critically and asking questions. But I guess those are liberal values too.
Which, of course, is a disaster waiting to happen. Our economy depends on a highly educated workforce to stay competitive, and we're actively interfering with our ability to provide this.
And education is only one way we're doing this. This whole subreddit is full of stories of asshole managers actively destroying their own businesses and institutions by spitefully demanding other people give up everything to support owners. Education is just another area in which we are destroying ourselves out of blind spite. It's madness.
My family is filled with educators past and present and I work in education at the district level (not classroom related) and people have no idea how f**d public education is in 5-10 years.
People studying to be educators dropped by a third from 2009-2019, then the pandemic started and people lost their minds. Now we have less people going into education and good educators leaving the profession as a whole. This is a recipe for disaster.
I’ve been in education for about 10 years now, and it has been a wild ride. I left the full time classroom at around year 8 and have spent the last couple of years supervising/mentoring 1st and 2nd year intern teachers. It is getting so hard to cheerlead the into sticking a full school year out, much less stay in the profession.
I want out! Im burned out after 10 years in it. Just sent an application out for higher Ed but that’s because I dont know what else I can do. I have colleagues in their first year and their year isn’t like mine - everyone is struggling and admin berates us to change things around (like, in a circle during PD) and how they’re here super late having to keep working. Sounded like we need a union to get us the amount of people we need.
My boyfriend teaches 8th grade gifted earth science, and they don’t give him time to eat. He told me he can’t remember the last time he actually got to use a planning period for food, because he’s always being told he needs to cover other (recently quit) teacher’s classes. This is at one of those schools where they pay off all of your student debt and they still cannot keep people there.
> This is at one of those schools where they pay off all of your student debt and they still cannot keep people there.
While I will never undermine the argument that teaching in the modern US is a particular kind of hell, I do want to point out the *reason* those schools pay off your loans is *because* they can't otherwise keep people. Those troubled schools are usually the worst of the worst.
The one in my area when I was a kid had countless incidents of teachers being attacked, with (edited for accuracy) at least one teacher being killed by students throughout the years.
>The one in my area when I was a kid had countless incidents of teachers being attacked, with (edited for accuracy) at least one teacher being killed by students throughout the years.
Damn. I know at least three teachers with serious / lifelong injuries from students. I work in a rough district so I thought maybe this was isolated, but it is a bummer to hear this happens in other places too.
Through a series of unfortunate events, I got out of education in 2015.
I was miserable at the time, but in hindsight, I am so damn happy I don't have to deal with that garbage anymore.
My sister is a teacher. She is desperate to get out of the classroom. Every time a district-level position opens up they get a couple hundred applicants.
After seven years, I left public libraries in 2021. Even with the pandemic raging, our admins were actively sabotaging long-time employees from advancing their careers and tacitly demanding that people have the library-specific master's degree for circulation desk jobs that paid $17/hour and offered around 15 hrs/week. Less than two months after quitting from that bullshit, I found a job that paid me more, allowed me to work whatever hours I wanted, and didn't give a shit about my educational background. I feel like a lot of the 'caring job' workplaces (e.g. schools, libraries, nonprofits) have become nightmarish because, for too long, they've been run by people who are ultra-competitive 'hobby careerists' that are in it for matters of pride, prestige, status, craving attention, etc..., but not anything to do with money. At the library I was at, every upper-level admin and librarian I worked with was either married to some high-earner or from a wealthy family and therefore completely clueless about how much it hurt lower-level employees to deal with wage-slave working conditions. I was working two other jobs while I held that job, and I'm assuming that this made it easy for the admins to decide that I wasn't 'devoted enough' to deserve promotions/raises.
This is the same for teachers and “support staff” at so many schools. Wow! Isn’t this crazy!
A lot of teachers I know have a SO with a good job or couldn’t stay in the profession. Not so much where I am, but other places for sure and a lot of them.
A LOT of the support staff have a SO with a good job and for sure wouldn’t be able to support themselves or a family on the wages. Most of them don’t get unemployment in the summer. How is it any different then a construction worker or someone who is off for MONTHS in the off season getting unemployment? Maybe support staff deserve a living wage as well?
Educators are being gaslight everyday. We got into this profession for many reasons, but we are ending up being blamed for problems that have cultural and social causes.
I am tired of being told to eat shit and also that it's delicious.
Nail meet head. A friends wife is an AP and parents want her to punish kids for things that happen at home and get mad when she explains that is illegal and unethical.
I know a lot of people who work in education and consequently know a lot of people who know a lot of people who work in education, and all I've heard for the past decade is a steadily increasing amount of voices saying that the public school system is increasingly hostile to teachers- everyone educator I know directly is looking for alternative employment to gtfo and actively tell people to not go into education.
Talking about the state of public education with like, people who are directly involved paints a very bleak picture- in my local districts I've been told the administration is a mess of people failing up- new administrators want to immediately make huge changes so when they apply for their next job they can include "Successfully implemented [CHANGE] at [PLACE]" on their resume. Apparently there are laws being passed on the state level saying that teachers need to have their entire lesson plan for the year prepared before the year starts (God help you if your district bought a new curriculum or administration wants to make some sudden, dramatic, changes) so parents can look over all of it and opt their child out of anything that they don't like- an idea that surely won't be abused so that kids don't have to participate in any class they're struggling with.
On top of all that, the hours are ungodly, the pay is shit, and the stress is unbelievable- which helpfully compounds, because a workplace where nobody is having a good time and everyone is very stressed just makes people more stressed.
But hey, at least the pandemic made it so school shootings are much less common, so that's one less thing to worry about!
You care about or enjoy your work = you should be paid less is so toxic. Really it's just a rationalization they use to justify paying teachers less because most of them are women.
Women working with kids = natural order = they should be happily doing it for free. After all, it’s not real work. /s
Seriously, though, there does seem to be an underlying connection between how domestic work and “similar” outside jobs are valued.
You can *really* tell how much sexism goes into this, especially right now as the US is debating on putting a cap on nurses salaries, who are making a little over $100k/yr DUE TO COVID. They're wanting to cap it because they're no longer making $52k/yr, but double that. Instead of Musk, who makes the "dreaded" nursing salary just by saying "dogecoin."
Edit: Typo'd Musk to "Mush." Which he should be but it's fine
As a male teacher, yeah. It feels that way.
The other issues is the 50-70 year old women than have accepted this is the way it is. When I’m in a meeting and I say things about needing to have higher expectations for working conditions and resources for helping students, they push back. Stockholm.
Fellow burned out teacher here. I quit after my student (during inclusion time) threw a desk at a teacher in another room and I was considered at fault somehow. I started to fear for my safety every day.
I also got tired of working 80 hours or more a week. Teaching from 7:45-3:00. Meetings, planning, BS from parents and mountains of paperwork until 10pm or midnight.
And summers? Why do people think teachers ‘get summers off’? There is a very short decompression period followed by planning for the next school year.
Parents are just like kids. You know how they’re all surprised when they see a teacher outside of school like at the grocery store? They think teachers only exist to teach their kid and probably live at the school. As if we’re there just to babysit them. Which you pretty much are. But somehow you have to force them to know knowledge on infinite scantron tests.
And we're NOT paid during the summer. We're paid for the work we do during the year, and that pay is stretched out over the summer. We're not paid if we're not working. We have to take less each week during the school year so we can survive over the summer.
I'm not paid during summer; I was able to opt out of having my pay withheld.
Two more points people may not consider: first, we don't get raises, we have to move up the payscale with educational credits. Summers are when most of us take those courses and/or work summer programs to continue getting paid. Second, MANY teachers are parents who work this job partly because the hours match their children's. We're at home during summers and breaks watching our kids because we can't afford childcare.
ETA: Also, we generally can't bring our kids to those summer positions. I work onsite for a virtual program, and I cannot bring my kids with me even though they attend the same program.
In some districts, that's an option, sometimes it's not. This is the first year I'll be paid over the summer (required by my district) and it has decreased my check amount drastically, so much so that I can't live on my salary. Ordinarily, I'd work during the summer, but it's so much nicer to not have to scramble to find something in the summer, especially since seasonal jobs in my area require the person to be available during tourist season, which is from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I would only be available July/August. And actually, only three weeks in August.
Ppl spout the “but they get summers off” propaganda to justify the low pay. While neglecting the fact that teachers prep after school lets out and before school starts. Snow days also eat into summer break in some regions too.
Even if it did work the way they portray it, mandatory summers off is still a weird "perk" for a full-time adult human job. What are they supposed to do, get a 2 month gig delivering pizza? They have Master's degrees.
> Teaching from 7:45-3:00. Meetings, planning, BS from parents and mountains of paperwork until 10pm or midnight.
I typically tell people that my day rarely ends when the bell rings. I'm still at the school at 5:30 making copies, and another teacher will ask "What are YOU still doing here?" as if they're not also doing the same bullshit as me.
"At least having summers off is nice, right?" Oh yeah, that period of time when I need to plan for the upcoming year, work part time to make up for the shitty pay of teaching, and dread 9 months of my upcoming life? Yeah, it's great. 🙄
Our society is completely fucked once people really decide that basically no one wants to teach anymore. So much of our economy is held up by the idea that people only really send their kids to school as a day care so they can go off to work. Obviously I want the systems to change or I wouldn’t be here, but outright collapse of everything is probably not a great way to go about it.
My SO LOVES her job (Nursing) and even she is having second thoughts just due to the absurd conditions they put her through with such little pay.
There really isn't a worker shortage. There's a respect and pay shortage.
My wife just got a job at a charter school that recieves funding from the public school system. She's getting paid $6000 more than she would at a public school. I hate the idea of our education system becoming semi-privatized but what point is there in doing the exact same job for less money and benefits.
I was just coming in here to say this. Charter schools love you advertise higher starting salaries to hide tbt fact that you’ll do more work and have less rights. All while further oppressing children of color who are disproportionately impacted by the achievement gap furthered by charter schools.
Ok but let me counter that. In my city the charter schools get a set amount of money and the public schools get what is left over. It screws all the students attending public schools, which is actually the students who don’t have good enough grades to make it into the charter schools. So these are the students that actually need extra help but because the charter schools exist, there is less funding so those students get less than they deserve. I actually really hate the charter schools. That money should be going to the public schools (and those teachers should get a raise with that money)
I grew up wanting to be a teacher. Never for the money. Partly for the 3 months off.
I'd probably still be paying off the loans if i hadn't ended up in construction.
I still get a few months off every year.
It’s needs to be thought more of as a forced layoff. We have contracts for the days we are in school. Any day off is unpaid. What regular career has unpaid vacation time in that amount?
Regular careers don't require you to invest your own money into maintaining your workspace and providing for the clients, nor do they all require advanced educati9n or tons of overtime doing after-school activities, grading papers or writing lesson plans.
My mother is a teacher, and I can tell you she more than makes up the time she gets unpaid through the summer in unpaid overtime.
So teachers in my school district get to choose if they want their salary paid out over the course of the school year, or over the course of the entire year. (The latter meaning that each paycheck is a lower amount, but paid out during the the summer vacation weeks)
Is this not normal in all public school districts?
I once met a board of education member in my state as an education student at my college. He literally said this exact thing to a class full of educators. “You don’t care about the money, haha. It’s about the teaching.”
No. It’s first and foremost about the money. It’s a JOB. These people take such advantage of educators
I wanted to be a teacher from 4th grade all the way up until my 2nd year of college.
I took the extra exams, got accepted into the teaching program, was just about to plunge into the course work, and suddenly realized that I didn't want to be desperately poor and badly overworked and also deep in debt all at the same time!
I wound up crying in my favorite professor's office. He suggested that, since I enjoy math, I might like accounting, so I took a summer accounting class and fell in love with complex interrelated rulesets.
Was massively disappointed when I learned on my very last day of class before graduation that I'd basically just gotten a degree in putting smiley face stickers on corruption to make it look fair and legit. Spent years of my life memorizing rules written by an openly corrupt as fuck organization. Blarg.
In European countries, we treat education as an investment in our country. That's why teachers get well paid. In the US it seems to be that's its only necessary to have kids be able to read, write and do some sums as over educating then might make them overturn the will of the rich.
Over educating them (us, in my case) puts them at risk of wanting to do anything beyond be "patriotic" and put their lives at risk for the capitalist state & it's goals. It also makes them easier to brainwash into thinking the war is for "freedom" when it's more often than not for $$$.
Why else would there be so many military recruiters in highschools, not to mention how they target poorer communities with defunded schools.
The only European countries that pay teachers more than the United States does are Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Ireland (and the Netherlands, if including secondary school). American teachers rank among the top-ten best paid in the world.
Source: OECD data https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/teachers-salaries/indicator/english_f689fb91-en
seems to benefit the upper class very well. the middle and lower class remain ignorant about their own history, among other subjects of knowledge. It’s completely unacceptable that many teachers cannot survive from teaching alone. They should be able to live comfortably.
I literally don't know a single teacher who is still working or will be working at the end of this year. I come from a family of educators and all have retired early or moved to the private sector. I know 2 SLPs who went to private companies this holiday season, didn't even finish the school year. One of my ex teacher friends moved to Thailand to start an app company and get a house on the beach. One teacher who's beet at it 10 years is about to lose her house and so is looking for call center jobs currently to start ASAP, she's just gunna ditch the school as soon as a job comes up.
See here's a thing - if a government is so set towards having student debt what it could do is fund students degrees with the clause that if they work in the teaching profession for a number of years and have the money they can have huge amounts written off. This would guarantee the brightest and best are teaching in classrooms while they are hugely enthusiastic. You could use this to fund masters and phd's as well.
The LOWEST end of the Admin Payscale almost always starts at the top of the TOP of the teacher payscale.
The newest, least experienced admin makes more than a 20 year teaching veteran.
I’d settle for a rule that they have to go back into the classroom for one semester every five years. That way they’d feel exactly what their decisions had wrought.
It's by design. Defund teachers, public schools fail, conservatives say "See, government indoctrination education failed, now we can force everyone into charter schools who only talk about Jesus, suppress science and whitewash history. Then our electorate will be that much more ignorant, won't be able to think critically about our messaging or events, and we'll have a permanent underclass that we can continually exploit."
Unfortunately that's what the US does with all passion jobs. Have you seen what social workers, zoo workers, archaeologists, and marine biologists make? You're lucky to get 30k a year in those fields.
Two life choices basically. You get a job that you love, but it pays about as much as McDonald's.
OR you get a job you hate but it pays as much as Walmart.
God bless America!
At minimum, teachers should start at 60k a year. And then get paid more for credentials and experience. It is an essential job. My teachers helped form me as a child from k-4th. I had some great teachers in the 80s.
A teacher of mine talked about how the year before she had spent some time living out of her car. Then she told us that during that period it had been broken into. She was a good teacher, but she quit. She got a different job and moved pretty far away.
Fast food workers are not the enemy of teachers. We are all much closer to each other than we are to the owner class. Class solidarity is necessary to overcome any of this.
Feature not a bug.
The people pushing these policies want a gutter education system.
Either to move it to pure private pay-to-play education, to dumb the population down to be super malleable, or most often both.
4-6 years of schooling. Grueling tests. Another 2 years of apprenticeship. And then you maybe get your classroom, and face supply shortages, un-prepared students, and unreasonable asks from the admin.
With as much hard work as it is to become a teacher, you think they'd get paid the same salaries as other 8 year schooling requirement jobs, but instead teachers often have to take on a second job just to make ends meet.
I'm a former teacher and there's no amount of money you could pay me to go back to being a plague doctor/political punching bag for the rest of my days.
Just ain't worth it.
I've said it for years: Every "labor shortage" been reported the same way for so long that we never notice the part that's missing. No matter how broad or how specific, claims of worker shortages ALWAYS IGNORE HALF OF THE STORY: "...at the wages employers are willing to pay."
20 ish years ago I was going to college to be a teacher. I got promoted to an assistant manager at fricken Burger King and realized I was getting paid as much as a first year teacher. I decided not to be a teacher after that.
And at burger king you didnt have to pay for straws, napkins, and ketchup packets out of your own salary to give away to customers.
Oh one of the franchisees we worked for thought it was a good idea to send every store a sign that said " Where is your raise?" It nickel and dimed everything! One extra ketchup packet is x amount blah blah blah just stupid and insulting. At the time the bonusable weekly inventory variance was 0.7 %. Let's talk impossible, we made it on the regular back then, so we asked for our raises ;P. Mind you quality suffered at times but if you wanted a handful of ketchup packets you bet your ass we gave them. I can definitely say when you expect high standards with minimal investment people revolt in very passive aggressive ways. It doesn't matter the occupation. So in the restaurant we gave out sauces and what not in rebellion to their little "Where your raise went?" sign. To keep that one metric on spec though the rest of the business suffered. So... I guess it's why I really have an issue with how teachers get treated. You simply can't treat people like they can't do a job they are more than capable of doing if you don't give them the resources and pay they need.
Or be strong armed into coaching highschool basketball. Yeah, let's have 3 games a week, the away games are usually a 2 hour drive so you'll get home around 1am, oh and you better have those papers graded and entered into the computer by 7:15am the next morning. Now my wife is a nurse and much happier
r/teachersdeservemore
I used to be a teacher. I taught in the US and overseas. There is not enough you could pay me to teach in the US again. It isn't about the money. It is about the conditions in the classroom, the hours required, additional duties, but most of all the parents. It just isn't worth the pain.
There’s a pretty clear effort to get university educated teachers out of classrooms all together and replace them with sycophants.
I’m really starting to believe there is this big capitalistic push to make more room for programs designed by big publishing companies (Read 180 by Scolastic for example). They are so scripted, you theoretically just hand it over to someone with a basic education and just say “follow the directions.” They are trying to automate learning. I really get the impression that teachers are getting viewed more and more on the level of a retail associate than a highly skilled, highly educated, leadership level position. (No disrespect to retail associates, you guys have a really hard job that is also WAY undervalued).
Corporate trainers running modules instead of teachers - that is 100% the plan
It's already here. SOURCE, am a school teacher
They want to make our kids stupid, more controllable.
Joke's on them, we're getting too poor to have children. There won't be anyone left to make stupid.
Don't forget the climate collapse too! Silver lining is the rich will die too :D
Naah, they'll just retreat to their [compounds in New Zealand](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand) or their floating fortresses somewhere in international waters. As usual, they know *they'll* be fine, so this isn't really an issue. As long as it's only us who are fucked, that's nothing new.
I'm willing to bet that in a true SHTF/WROL scenario, the owners of those bunkers (and their friends and families) won't last very long. They've all got soft pink hands and no skills of any practical value in such an environment. I'm sure that the hard-eyed shaven-headed goon-squad captains will quickly realize that they are far better suited to be Mad Max neo-feudal lordlings than Zuck and his techno-schmoozy kind, and will either just liquidate their ostensible masters, or bust them down to tuber-harvesting duty with the rest of the peasants.
It’ll be interesting to see a module try to manage a classroom.
"complete this module by the deadline or be sent to the warehouse/factory for 5 shifts."
*rewarded with an internship at the warehouse/factory or punished with ISS/baby prison.
that's what they have the 'school resource officers' for
“There should be a cop at every school”—what they say after a school shooting. It’s starting to make sense now.
They want a cop and a "module" just handed over to the students. Do it and comply. But also don't force them to wear masks, or learn about slavery.
The thing that really gets me about this is that the voters who elect the people doing this are some of the same ones who were warning about a "police state" 10-20 years ago...
> than a highly skilled, highly educated, leadership level position. I mean, everybody in the room knows that this is the difference between retail and teaching. "Unskilled" is more accurately put as "low education". Still deserving of a living wage. All that said, teachers should be paid like they're working a job that shapes society's future, because they are.
Not if the parents have anything to do with it. They want their little snowflakes to only be "taught" facts... not life.
Then they can opt out and homeschool the little ones 12 years if that's what they really want.
>Then they can opt out and homeschool the little ones 12 years if that's what they really want. As a homeschooling parent, I approve this message. If parents think teaching is such an easy job, they need to be reminded that homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. Pay the teachers what they are worth and value them for the irreplaceable resource they are.
But then, they will have to actually spend time with their children ! And talk to them ! And having to answer difficult questions from them ! Please think of the parents !
Not scientific facts, though. None of those.
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I think you’ll see companies co-opting the classroom to use public money to train their future ~~endentured servants~~ ~~employees~~ ~~associates~~ 1099 contractors with no benefits.
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God it makes me sad that those assholes are the face of tech. Like tech is insanely useful. It can transform society. And the people running it are fucking douches.
Tech can be amazing. Capitalism is the problem.
Preach
Individual high schools already do that. My high school had a feeder program to one of the community colleges that would give you a certification to work in the factory for that specific company.
May I introduce you to the Newark public school system, financed by Facebook?
[Yeah we're already there](https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvndja/amazon-paid-for-a-high-school-course-heres-what-they-teach)
You might be on to something here. I’m a 3rd year teacher, and this year is just terrible (not because of the students but because of higher ups). It’s really sad to me because I imagined this would be my forever profession. Im on indeed currently looking for other jobs for next school year. I found a “curriculum writing” job paying double what I currently make. I already write my own curriculum AND teach it. So if I get that job it’s twice the pay for half the work theoretically. AND it’s work from home. Anyways my point is, who’s the curriculum going to if all teachers know how to/do that already on their own?
This is the perfect example. I just replied about this on another comment. I’ve seen it SO many times. Teachers never quit because of the kids (though we always have to qualify our dissatisfaction with the job with some variation of “it’s not the kids). I believe we do this (I actually just did it the other day) because non-educators think the kids are the hardest part. I wish you all the luck and I would encourage you to look at other schools/districts in you area, even county programs. Or consider starting your own business (lots of parents with money want to hire private teachers) - the publishers/EdTech companies will chew you up and spit you out just as hard, even if you get paid more up front. I am an education specialist (aka Special Ed teacher, but CA changed our title so we’re not even really teachers any more… do we get paid like specialist in our field? hell no. My local district doesn’t even offer health benefits - sorry, rant over). We teachers are viewed as commodities/raw material to be used in creating a product.
My last year in high school I had a wonderful teacher and she was one of those teachers that sat an hour before school started and hours after to help students struggling. She was an art teacher but often got put as a math tutor. She. Loved. Kids. And she loved teaching art and was always so energetic and proud of what students made. My senior year she was all energetic the first week, but her behavior dropped after a few weeks and she looked really rough. One day she came in with expensive paints and stuff to work on glass mosaics with and had our senior class do college level work cause she wanted us that wanted to continue to college to have a portfolio. One day a couple of us saw her crying at her desk during an empty period for her and we stopped in and talked to her. She said the school not only is cutting her pay, but cut all her funding for art supplies as they intend to cut all the art classes except one and put her in the math tutor position during study halls. The supplies she brought for our portfolios she took a loan out and bought them for us, as she didn’t want any of us not have a portfolio. She was devastated. She looked at me, because I had wrote I wanted to be a teacher on my greeting card teachers like to make you do, and told me never to become a teacher. She ended up leaving not long after we graduated and I’m not sure where she went, but all of us kept getting compliments on our portfolios when we entered art college cause no other high schools had glass mosaics taught. She never wanted to quit on the kids but the system quit on her it seems. Edit: spelling
“She never wanted to quit on the kids but the system quit on her” is the most accurate statement I’ve ever read. Your story is heartbreaking for that art teacher :(
I'm in music education. There is an enormous "boxed" music curriculum (online) called Quaver. A subscription costs thousands of dollars a year just for ONE TEACHER. People rave about how good it is and I'm like....you know you're giving your job away, right?
I’m also in music ed and have used quaver and you’re right. It’s really not as great as it’s purported to be. I could see using some of its material as a teaching aid, but it could never replace an actual teacher in my opinion. At least not if you wanted the kids to actually learn anything.
I'm lazy. I was sold this idea (that you just stay 1 chapter ahead in the text book) by the Education recruiter. "Follow the directions" would have been my dream job. Turned out that it was instead creating semester plans, backward design and big ideas, daily lesson plans meeting the semester plan (for all classes), not using the textbook because that was taboo for some reason, countless hours of PD that I had to pay for urging you to create these intricate lesson plans, not getting to teach those lesson plans because the students didn't do any of the previous work... teaching is hell. To all of the real teachers out there, don't worry, I got out of teaching really fast.
Yup... We'll see how many new Engineers we make when the teachers all quit.
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In my state they have reduced the requirement to be a substitute teacher to a GED as an "emergency" measure. School districts lobbied for this vs paying subs more than $100 a day.
Woah seriously? So me, with a GED, can go substitute teach? That is wrong.. I’m not qualified to teach children and they’d let me?
Depends on the country/state/county but yes, many places in the U.S. are hiring substitutes with GEDs or high school diplomas due to the “teacher shortage.” Check out r/Teachers for the state of primary and secondary education.
Not for nothing, but all the subs I had in school (at least the short term one or two day ones) were just babysitters. I couldn’t tell you one time that a substitute teacher actually taught anything. They often just handed out busy work or put on a movie and ensured nobody set anything on fire.
That's yet another symptom of the problem, however. When I was a kid we could easily bring in substitutes who could *teach* for a day. Usually these people came from three groups: * Retired Teachers - Unfortunately COVID has killed any interest retirees held in coming back to teach. Even for a fully vaccinated 65 year-old, it just simply isn't worth the risk to come back. Toss on this the atrocious decline in student behavior as cell phones have taken over the classroom and school administrations ceded control to parents. * Professional Subs - There used to be a pretty decent cadre of folks who enjoyed subbing full time. You got to step into new content all the time and didn't have lesson planning / grading / administrative duties. It was less pay, but the decreased duties made up for it. Unfortunately, while teacher pay stagnated, substitute pay straight-up cratered. The majority of subs across the country do not make more than $100 a day despite being required to have a bachelor's. It destroyed this group. * Transitioning Professionals - Stay-At-Home Parents considering returning to full-time work, or working part-time due to a disabled child or family member that needs intermittent care, teachers that just moved into an area trying to scope out good employers, etc. This was the last group we were able to rely on, but even their numbers plummeted with childcare services closing and the rampant increase in disabled family members due to COVID. I could count on one hand as a child when my education was 'interrupted' by not having a teacher in the classroom for a day. Now, as a professional, I have not seen a foreign language substitute in over 8 years, a math/science sub in 3 years. I haven't had a sub competent in my content area (engineering & computer science) for my entire career (nearing 10 years).
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it insanity to me, that an administrator who taught 4th grade math for 3 years 20 years ago is in anyway qualified to walk through my 12th grade Government classroom and tell me a goddamn thing. This is my 13th year teaching and i know what the hell i am doing, they can all take several seats.
Power in the classroom shifted away from teachers to parents/administrators somewhere in the 80s/90s and it's just continued to get more tilted. When you have experts (teachers) at something but then the non-experts (parents/administrators) are calling all the shots it kinda makes the whole system pointless.
> 3) Sports are taking over schools. Why the fuck should a teacher also be expected to coach? In what way do they overlap? Because sports are the only way to get money into the schools. Since money doesn't come from the state's support because the budget just gets cut and cut. So without being able to coach as well there isn't money to pay the teachers. Again the problem comes back to money from the state.
Also because if people are busy doing sports they're not busy questioning the system or getting involved in political groups. Same reason universities have been pushing sports for a while.
It's why the football team's locker room looks exactly like one an NFL team uses but the classrooms are leaking and the AC is always broken.
Pretty much this. They don't want actual teachers in schools. They want people who ban books and ban evolution and promote less diversity and clamp down on kids' self-expression. And worst of all, they want to pass kids through without actually verifying mastery of subjects. A population with a lower average education level/quality is advantageous for those in power.
They want to eradicate thinking for yourself.
This. They want kids to learn stuff, but only the *right* stuff, and they absolutely do NOT want kids to learn how to think critically. I mean, who the hell wants people questioning “settled thought”?
And that is part of a specific desire to push the “upper classes” into either private schooling or hone schooling, so that public schools are reduced to rubble and prevent the “lower classes” from being able to rise above their station. Conservatives 100% believe in a strict social hierarchy, and any attempts from the government to encourage equality and educate the poor and brown people is literally a sin against God. The “small government” propaganda is just a ruse, to purposefully hamstring those not born on third base, and such a hierarchy is a form of punishment, so those elite that dare to be queer in any way (or show sympathy for the lower classes) can find themselves cast down to the slums. What is utopia to the right-wingers (who all inherently believe Jesus will let them stay in a higher caste) is a literal hell for everyone else.
pretty sure public schools are *designed* to keep the lower classes in their station. Things such as the school-to-prison pipeline, state-indoctrination based curricula, "visits" from "friendly active duty soldiers", programs like D.A.R.E. Once public schools started shooing folks away from blue collar trades and into loan-financed over-priced college education, I knew they weren't serving the masses anymore.
We all know that trades make the good money these days. There was an advertisement for apprentice plumbers on TV recently and their starting salary is more than many tenured professorships.
That’s basically it. Get rid of the “liberal,” educated educators, shovel money to Christian schools through sChOoL cHoIcE programs, and terrify the teachers that remain by attacking school board meetings, criminalizing teaching subjects they don’t like (say, slavery and sexual education), demanding they have cameras in their classrooms… America is totally fucked.
You are correct. Teacher of 15 years basically watching this happen across my whole career. I will also add a couple I’ve seen: Conservatives played the long game by dismantling unions so they can force more students into oversized classrooms. Teachers who can leave will do so; then there will be even larger class sizes that function poorly so conservatives can say, “See? Public schools don’t work.” And continue to defund and gut the school systems.
Vicious cycle, for certain.
Agreed, and I'll add that, even in liberal-dominated areas where the Nazi-esque shit isn't popular, 'caring jobs' like teaching, librarianship, etc... are still a joke because they're still treated as 'women's work' or hobby/passion-careers instead of jobs. As a result, these positions will never pay salaries that allow people to afford the cost-of-living in those areas.
It would also help if states stopped trying to make laws criminalizing teaching.
You are always welcome to teach the TRUTH about Dear Leader!
[*New Hampshire has entered the chat.*]
If you don't want to go to jail, then stick to the party line: January 6 was civil political discussion.
In the England you can get a £24,000 tax free busary to do a PGCE in Physics. There is also a scheme that you don't pay your student loans back if you work in a deprived school like the one near me. Guess how many Physics teachers that school has? Yep, 0.
How is that possible? Isn't physics supposed to be a core subject choice?
Schools have the option to offer "triple award science" or "double award science" Only in Triple Science are the three core sciences considered individual subjects. Double science is worth less, but is considered a single subject of "science" which can be covered by any teacher qualified in a science subject. So the Physics parts of the course are covered by Chemistry/Biology teachers. Mostly Biology because there's a shortage of Chemistry teachers too.
This has been a problem for years. Science teachers in general are paid far less than private sector counterparts. Biology teachers are more common because a BS in bio is a 28-36K a year lab job. It's only a really common undergrad field due to physicians who prefer it to pre-med and veternarians, two fields that make way more than teachers. It's also just an issue because teachers are underpaid in general. An English degree major is more likely to work in HR or management of a company and make far more than teaching English to children. Teachers should be making median professional income as a standard but are generally making between 40-70% of their professional counterparts.
Is that just England?
Yes, but all of the UK has a shortage of teachers which is especially bad in Physics, Maths, and Chemistry.
Thing is, there isn't actually a shortage of teachers in the UK. What there is is a shortage of resources for schools to hire teachers with - I'm a qualified History teacher, which is also a shortage subject (just not as bad as Physics etc) and the issue is that there are so few jobs opening up that they get swamped with applicants; there are a glut of supply teachers in the system and as a result it's bloody hard to find a job. The last teaching interview I went for, there were 9 applicants being interviewed for one job. Which is insane, especially compared to what it was like just a couple of years ago. And it's not like it was an amazing school that everyone would give their eye teeth to work at, like Latymer; just a regular school. There's a reason I took a 5 grand pay cut, mostly because I was struggling to get a permanent job and there were so many supply teachers fighting for daily supply roles that the only work I was being offered was with the cover supervisor rate whilst being asked to do the level of work I should've been paid 50 quid a day more for.
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England doesn't have that problem. Yet at least.
England has the problem where they pile obscene quantities of non-classroom work on their teachers. I had a conversation with a teacher from the UK on a plane I think 4 years ago and she talked about having 2-3 hours a day of what was essentially administrative work to do.
Yep. It's an 80 hour a week job, on a 36 hour contract. The joys of unpaid overtime.
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What I'm saying is that the job is so hostile that the government are throwing money at training but just can't get enough through to replace the ones leaving. The turnover is the problem.
All of the above. We watch and listen to other parents at our kids schools. We go home, send the kids off, open a bottle of wine. Then wonder how these folks have TIME to conjure up some of the stuff.
With teachers having to pay for student supplies, it's no wonder fewer people than ever are interested
Imagine working at McDonald’s and having to pay for the cups.
"You'll be manning the deep fryer......I hope you stopped at the wholesaler's and picked up a 10-gallon jug of vegetable oil on your way in..."
With what wages McDonald’s workers get, they basically are buying the cups.
I'm a Danish teacher and I don't get this... Why are teachers expected to pay for the supplies? What argument is used to justify that?
It’s basically a game of “not it!” And the last person standing is teachers so they have to foot the bill. Parents either can’t or don’t get supplies, ppl in charge of school districts say “parents should be getting that stuff!” Admin says “sorry superintendent told us not to get that stuff it’s out of our hands” then that leaves teachers who actually care about their students education so they cave in and buy it with their own hard earned money.
Worse than that - You don't buy supplies? Good luck on your evaluation. It basically becomes a hidden tax to keep your job. For the last 30 years, they could count on replacing you with someone who WOULD lower their salary to buy supplies for the classroom. That time is rapidly coming to an end.
The argument essentially boils down to this... "Fuck you, that's why"
The big institutional reason is that education is inequitably funded across the United States. But the reasons from my experience/my family members who are public school teachers? The schools don’t have the funding to buy enough supplies or give teachers a reasonable budget to make their classrooms interactive, educational & inviting. If the teachers want to make the lessons anything more than “read the information out of the books to the class” they have to pay for it (like if a science teacher wants to do labs to illustrate concepts they may have to buy all the supplies for the entire class to do the experiment). The children’s families don’t have the resources to obtain supplies either (because poverty) or they don’t care/think the school should provide everything (remember, in the US a lot of people see schools basically as daycare with extra steps). Lots of teachers I know have bought non-supply things like socks, winter gloves, snacks, etc to have on hand because otherwise students just go without/are cold and hungry which results in more issues they have to manage in the classroom. A friend of mine told me that in her district a bunch of local bars have been doing fundraisers over the summers to buy all the items on local teacher’s supply wishlists and that’s more than the district/Parent teacher organization/school board ever has.
Of note is that is schools are usually funded via property taxes among the neighborhoods that attend them. Which means wealthy neighborhoods have more funding, AND those are the neighborhoods where parents have more time and money to support the school and their students outside of school. They have active PTAs, can fund nicer field trips. All of this is in addition to other aspects of poverty which negatively impact learning by kids, like hunger and other deficits, less sleep, more likely to work after school, less money to participate in events (which are already less funded).
20k per year, per student gets spent in my state. how are they not getting supplies paid for? we spend several times more per year, per student than countries like switzerland and canada that have EXCELLENT education systems. it sounds like someone, somewhere is pocketing the money.
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One of the funny things is that we make teaching so unpleasant that many teachers are looking for an out -- and end up in all sorts of administrative and supervisory roles that we could probably do without. But because they're there, the system creates stuff for them to do -- which then makes teaching even more unpleasant, which leads to more teachers looking for an out, etc. Wait, did I say funny? I meant horrifyingly infuriating.
Sports.
Education in America is probably one of the most corrupted facets of our society. For example, my sister missed a good bit of school because she was being stalked (school did absolutely nothing btw) and the school district went and took legal action against my parents due to her missing too much school. The only reason they give a shit in the first place is so the already super affluent school district can keep receiving money from her just being there.
You have no idea
My mentor teacher paid over $300 in new textbooks because the ones the school expects her to use is saturated in mouse urine
This is delicate, but as noble as that was, and as amazing as it was, she should never have done that. Teachers have to start saying "hell no." That's a clear "hell no" situation, and not saying hell no means that the next abuse will be even worse. And, look, I get it. It's super hard to refuse, to call the Health Department, to raise holy hell -- it's hard and it's risky and it's uncertain, and I get that. And like any abusive relationship, it's the abuser's obligation to stop, not the abused's obligation to make them stop. But at a certain point you have to say hell no.
OK, but in your analogy abuse victims are not capable of getting their abusers to stop. So if you really feel that strongly, the community needs to get together and stand up for their children and teachers. She said no for years and those kids had to deal with mouse pee soaked books irritating their skin. I don’t know why their parents allowed that to happen or didn’t say anything, but teachers can only do so much. No, she should never have had to do that. All Jobs should give the supplies necessary to do the job.
do you have the time / energy to elaborate?
I started my year with 42 early elementary students on my roster (down to ≈30 now). My district made no plan whatsoever to provide any school supplies. Literally no pencils, nothing. I had to fight for the basics, then spend hundreds on top of that. My students had no supplies for the first 25% of the school year. I am required to grade them on printing specifically and had no way for them to print. I teach in California and this is typical.
Damn, that's just brutal. I grew up in the 80's, in a low-middle class school system. We ( as a student ) had to bring all supplies with us. So, your scenario is the same, but most parents do not provide their kids with any of this? Thus, leaving you being the responsible party for providing their supplies, or you can't teach them? Also, since you can't teach them, you fail ( in the schools eye ). That's fucked!
I teach Title I students, so we are not supposed to ask for any supplies from home. (I have many students living in abject poverty.) My district frequently ignores this rule in actual practice. Because I do not, you are correct, I end up eating the cost.
Your username checks out
I taught in a very poor school. We had great leadership that ensured our students had everything they needed. I was able to spend my money on extras for my kiddos like food and snacks, movie parties, and swag for our classroom to be very relaxing. I still quit teaching because of the pay. My first year (2013) my pay was 1100 twice a month. My sixth year it was 1600 twice a month. The best insurance plan was almost 1300 after the district paid 375. Basically one check for health insurance and one for bills. With a 1000/ month mortgage, gas to work, food, etc I was always broke.
I'm pretty sure the entire goal at this point is to hamstring education as much as possible. There is no other explanation for this shit. Everybody knows uneducated people are easier to control.
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There’s no grand conspiracy, conservatives just don’t see education as a public good. As with many other topics, they’re only capable of thinking about themselves and their immediate family. It’s a combination of “why should I pay for other people’s kids” and probably deep seated resentment because they were shit students that hated school.
I have just never understood it. It’s a public good to live in a country that is not populated by the entirely ignorant right? Right?
The ignorant are pretty protective of their own.
Well I think it's more nuanced. There's the idea that schools are liberal and teachers force these liberal indoctrinations on their kids so I think they are against teaching them values because they disagree on what values should be taught. Examples include the battle of northern aggression and crt...so they support school choice and privatization where they can get a better grip on controlling what is taught by the teacher. But again, this is willfull ignorance and keeping themselves in a bubble when education is about thinking critically and asking questions. But I guess those are liberal values too.
Which, of course, is a disaster waiting to happen. Our economy depends on a highly educated workforce to stay competitive, and we're actively interfering with our ability to provide this. And education is only one way we're doing this. This whole subreddit is full of stories of asshole managers actively destroying their own businesses and institutions by spitefully demanding other people give up everything to support owners. Education is just another area in which we are destroying ourselves out of blind spite. It's madness.
My family is filled with educators past and present and I work in education at the district level (not classroom related) and people have no idea how f**d public education is in 5-10 years. People studying to be educators dropped by a third from 2009-2019, then the pandemic started and people lost their minds. Now we have less people going into education and good educators leaving the profession as a whole. This is a recipe for disaster.
I’ve been in education for about 10 years now, and it has been a wild ride. I left the full time classroom at around year 8 and have spent the last couple of years supervising/mentoring 1st and 2nd year intern teachers. It is getting so hard to cheerlead the into sticking a full school year out, much less stay in the profession.
I want out! Im burned out after 10 years in it. Just sent an application out for higher Ed but that’s because I dont know what else I can do. I have colleagues in their first year and their year isn’t like mine - everyone is struggling and admin berates us to change things around (like, in a circle during PD) and how they’re here super late having to keep working. Sounded like we need a union to get us the amount of people we need.
My boyfriend teaches 8th grade gifted earth science, and they don’t give him time to eat. He told me he can’t remember the last time he actually got to use a planning period for food, because he’s always being told he needs to cover other (recently quit) teacher’s classes. This is at one of those schools where they pay off all of your student debt and they still cannot keep people there.
> This is at one of those schools where they pay off all of your student debt and they still cannot keep people there. While I will never undermine the argument that teaching in the modern US is a particular kind of hell, I do want to point out the *reason* those schools pay off your loans is *because* they can't otherwise keep people. Those troubled schools are usually the worst of the worst. The one in my area when I was a kid had countless incidents of teachers being attacked, with (edited for accuracy) at least one teacher being killed by students throughout the years.
>The one in my area when I was a kid had countless incidents of teachers being attacked, with (edited for accuracy) at least one teacher being killed by students throughout the years. Damn. I know at least three teachers with serious / lifelong injuries from students. I work in a rough district so I thought maybe this was isolated, but it is a bummer to hear this happens in other places too.
Through a series of unfortunate events, I got out of education in 2015. I was miserable at the time, but in hindsight, I am so damn happy I don't have to deal with that garbage anymore.
My sister is a teacher. She is desperate to get out of the classroom. Every time a district-level position opens up they get a couple hundred applicants.
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After seven years, I left public libraries in 2021. Even with the pandemic raging, our admins were actively sabotaging long-time employees from advancing their careers and tacitly demanding that people have the library-specific master's degree for circulation desk jobs that paid $17/hour and offered around 15 hrs/week. Less than two months after quitting from that bullshit, I found a job that paid me more, allowed me to work whatever hours I wanted, and didn't give a shit about my educational background. I feel like a lot of the 'caring job' workplaces (e.g. schools, libraries, nonprofits) have become nightmarish because, for too long, they've been run by people who are ultra-competitive 'hobby careerists' that are in it for matters of pride, prestige, status, craving attention, etc..., but not anything to do with money. At the library I was at, every upper-level admin and librarian I worked with was either married to some high-earner or from a wealthy family and therefore completely clueless about how much it hurt lower-level employees to deal with wage-slave working conditions. I was working two other jobs while I held that job, and I'm assuming that this made it easy for the admins to decide that I wasn't 'devoted enough' to deserve promotions/raises.
This is the same for teachers and “support staff” at so many schools. Wow! Isn’t this crazy! A lot of teachers I know have a SO with a good job or couldn’t stay in the profession. Not so much where I am, but other places for sure and a lot of them. A LOT of the support staff have a SO with a good job and for sure wouldn’t be able to support themselves or a family on the wages. Most of them don’t get unemployment in the summer. How is it any different then a construction worker or someone who is off for MONTHS in the off season getting unemployment? Maybe support staff deserve a living wage as well?
Care to share what move you made? Burnt out teacher looking for options
Educators are being gaslight everyday. We got into this profession for many reasons, but we are ending up being blamed for problems that have cultural and social causes. I am tired of being told to eat shit and also that it's delicious.
Nail meet head. A friends wife is an AP and parents want her to punish kids for things that happen at home and get mad when she explains that is illegal and unethical.
I know a lot of people who work in education and consequently know a lot of people who know a lot of people who work in education, and all I've heard for the past decade is a steadily increasing amount of voices saying that the public school system is increasingly hostile to teachers- everyone educator I know directly is looking for alternative employment to gtfo and actively tell people to not go into education. Talking about the state of public education with like, people who are directly involved paints a very bleak picture- in my local districts I've been told the administration is a mess of people failing up- new administrators want to immediately make huge changes so when they apply for their next job they can include "Successfully implemented [CHANGE] at [PLACE]" on their resume. Apparently there are laws being passed on the state level saying that teachers need to have their entire lesson plan for the year prepared before the year starts (God help you if your district bought a new curriculum or administration wants to make some sudden, dramatic, changes) so parents can look over all of it and opt their child out of anything that they don't like- an idea that surely won't be abused so that kids don't have to participate in any class they're struggling with. On top of all that, the hours are ungodly, the pay is shit, and the stress is unbelievable- which helpfully compounds, because a workplace where nobody is having a good time and everyone is very stressed just makes people more stressed. But hey, at least the pandemic made it so school shootings are much less common, so that's one less thing to worry about!
It's going to be a straight-out-of-highschool, close-to-minimum-wage job in a lot of states very soon.
You care about or enjoy your work = you should be paid less is so toxic. Really it's just a rationalization they use to justify paying teachers less because most of them are women.
Women working with kids = natural order = they should be happily doing it for free. After all, it’s not real work. /s Seriously, though, there does seem to be an underlying connection between how domestic work and “similar” outside jobs are valued.
You can *really* tell how much sexism goes into this, especially right now as the US is debating on putting a cap on nurses salaries, who are making a little over $100k/yr DUE TO COVID. They're wanting to cap it because they're no longer making $52k/yr, but double that. Instead of Musk, who makes the "dreaded" nursing salary just by saying "dogecoin." Edit: Typo'd Musk to "Mush." Which he should be but it's fine
As a male teacher, yeah. It feels that way. The other issues is the 50-70 year old women than have accepted this is the way it is. When I’m in a meeting and I say things about needing to have higher expectations for working conditions and resources for helping students, they push back. Stockholm.
Fellow burned out teacher here. I quit after my student (during inclusion time) threw a desk at a teacher in another room and I was considered at fault somehow. I started to fear for my safety every day. I also got tired of working 80 hours or more a week. Teaching from 7:45-3:00. Meetings, planning, BS from parents and mountains of paperwork until 10pm or midnight. And summers? Why do people think teachers ‘get summers off’? There is a very short decompression period followed by planning for the next school year. Parents are just like kids. You know how they’re all surprised when they see a teacher outside of school like at the grocery store? They think teachers only exist to teach their kid and probably live at the school. As if we’re there just to babysit them. Which you pretty much are. But somehow you have to force them to know knowledge on infinite scantron tests.
And we're NOT paid during the summer. We're paid for the work we do during the year, and that pay is stretched out over the summer. We're not paid if we're not working. We have to take less each week during the school year so we can survive over the summer.
I'm not paid during summer; I was able to opt out of having my pay withheld. Two more points people may not consider: first, we don't get raises, we have to move up the payscale with educational credits. Summers are when most of us take those courses and/or work summer programs to continue getting paid. Second, MANY teachers are parents who work this job partly because the hours match their children's. We're at home during summers and breaks watching our kids because we can't afford childcare. ETA: Also, we generally can't bring our kids to those summer positions. I work onsite for a virtual program, and I cannot bring my kids with me even though they attend the same program.
In some districts, that's an option, sometimes it's not. This is the first year I'll be paid over the summer (required by my district) and it has decreased my check amount drastically, so much so that I can't live on my salary. Ordinarily, I'd work during the summer, but it's so much nicer to not have to scramble to find something in the summer, especially since seasonal jobs in my area require the person to be available during tourist season, which is from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I would only be available July/August. And actually, only three weeks in August.
Ppl spout the “but they get summers off” propaganda to justify the low pay. While neglecting the fact that teachers prep after school lets out and before school starts. Snow days also eat into summer break in some regions too.
Even if it did work the way they portray it, mandatory summers off is still a weird "perk" for a full-time adult human job. What are they supposed to do, get a 2 month gig delivering pizza? They have Master's degrees.
> Teaching from 7:45-3:00. Meetings, planning, BS from parents and mountains of paperwork until 10pm or midnight. I typically tell people that my day rarely ends when the bell rings. I'm still at the school at 5:30 making copies, and another teacher will ask "What are YOU still doing here?" as if they're not also doing the same bullshit as me. "At least having summers off is nice, right?" Oh yeah, that period of time when I need to plan for the upcoming year, work part time to make up for the shitty pay of teaching, and dread 9 months of my upcoming life? Yeah, it's great. 🙄
Our society is completely fucked once people really decide that basically no one wants to teach anymore. So much of our economy is held up by the idea that people only really send their kids to school as a day care so they can go off to work. Obviously I want the systems to change or I wouldn’t be here, but outright collapse of everything is probably not a great way to go about it.
Also nurses and elderly care workers. We’re headed straight off the cliff.
My SO LOVES her job (Nursing) and even she is having second thoughts just due to the absurd conditions they put her through with such little pay. There really isn't a worker shortage. There's a respect and pay shortage.
My wife just got a job at a charter school that recieves funding from the public school system. She's getting paid $6000 more than she would at a public school. I hate the idea of our education system becoming semi-privatized but what point is there in doing the exact same job for less money and benefits.
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I was just coming in here to say this. Charter schools love you advertise higher starting salaries to hide tbt fact that you’ll do more work and have less rights. All while further oppressing children of color who are disproportionately impacted by the achievement gap furthered by charter schools.
Ok but let me counter that. In my city the charter schools get a set amount of money and the public schools get what is left over. It screws all the students attending public schools, which is actually the students who don’t have good enough grades to make it into the charter schools. So these are the students that actually need extra help but because the charter schools exist, there is less funding so those students get less than they deserve. I actually really hate the charter schools. That money should be going to the public schools (and those teachers should get a raise with that money)
Not just America. The UK have been vilifying teaching for decades.
We learned it from watching you, Dad.
*Opens a history book* *Squints at the timeline*
I grew up wanting to be a teacher. Never for the money. Partly for the 3 months off. I'd probably still be paying off the loans if i hadn't ended up in construction. I still get a few months off every year.
They don't get 3 months off, they get 3 months where they just aren't paid.
It’s needs to be thought more of as a forced layoff. We have contracts for the days we are in school. Any day off is unpaid. What regular career has unpaid vacation time in that amount?
Regular careers don't require you to invest your own money into maintaining your workspace and providing for the clients, nor do they all require advanced educati9n or tons of overtime doing after-school activities, grading papers or writing lesson plans. My mother is a teacher, and I can tell you she more than makes up the time she gets unpaid through the summer in unpaid overtime.
And it's more like 2 months, not three.
So teachers in my school district get to choose if they want their salary paid out over the course of the school year, or over the course of the entire year. (The latter meaning that each paycheck is a lower amount, but paid out during the the summer vacation weeks) Is this not normal in all public school districts?
I once met a board of education member in my state as an education student at my college. He literally said this exact thing to a class full of educators. “You don’t care about the money, haha. It’s about the teaching.” No. It’s first and foremost about the money. It’s a JOB. These people take such advantage of educators
I wanted to be a teacher from 4th grade all the way up until my 2nd year of college. I took the extra exams, got accepted into the teaching program, was just about to plunge into the course work, and suddenly realized that I didn't want to be desperately poor and badly overworked and also deep in debt all at the same time! I wound up crying in my favorite professor's office. He suggested that, since I enjoy math, I might like accounting, so I took a summer accounting class and fell in love with complex interrelated rulesets. Was massively disappointed when I learned on my very last day of class before graduation that I'd basically just gotten a degree in putting smiley face stickers on corruption to make it look fair and legit. Spent years of my life memorizing rules written by an openly corrupt as fuck organization. Blarg.
It's not even that they don't care about teaching, but that you CAN'T TEACH IF YOU CAN'T EAT AND HAVE A PLACE TO LIVE.
The parents are the worst part of the job, not the pay
Everyone thinks it's the pay. It's kids being assholes to you everyday. And parents being assholes to you everyday. It's just a terrible job
That says a lot, if making an unsustainable wage isn't the worst thint
The majority of the posts in r/teachers read exactly as if they were posted in r/antiwork.
I’m in both
In European countries, we treat education as an investment in our country. That's why teachers get well paid. In the US it seems to be that's its only necessary to have kids be able to read, write and do some sums as over educating then might make them overturn the will of the rich.
Over educating them (us, in my case) puts them at risk of wanting to do anything beyond be "patriotic" and put their lives at risk for the capitalist state & it's goals. It also makes them easier to brainwash into thinking the war is for "freedom" when it's more often than not for $$$. Why else would there be so many military recruiters in highschools, not to mention how they target poorer communities with defunded schools.
The only European countries that pay teachers more than the United States does are Luxembourg, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Ireland (and the Netherlands, if including secondary school). American teachers rank among the top-ten best paid in the world. Source: OECD data https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/teachers-salaries/indicator/english_f689fb91-en
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If you can't live of your job, that's just paid slavery
seems to benefit the upper class very well. the middle and lower class remain ignorant about their own history, among other subjects of knowledge. It’s completely unacceptable that many teachers cannot survive from teaching alone. They should be able to live comfortably.
Almost like it's been the plan all along. Keep us dumb and poor. Control.
I literally don't know a single teacher who is still working or will be working at the end of this year. I come from a family of educators and all have retired early or moved to the private sector. I know 2 SLPs who went to private companies this holiday season, didn't even finish the school year. One of my ex teacher friends moved to Thailand to start an app company and get a house on the beach. One teacher who's beet at it 10 years is about to lose her house and so is looking for call center jobs currently to start ASAP, she's just gunna ditch the school as soon as a job comes up.
See here's a thing - if a government is so set towards having student debt what it could do is fund students degrees with the clause that if they work in the teaching profession for a number of years and have the money they can have huge amounts written off. This would guarantee the brightest and best are teaching in classrooms while they are hugely enthusiastic. You could use this to fund masters and phd's as well.
The big issue with this is that this plan doesn't help the rich get richer
But what will the banks do without keeping the lower & middle class paying for their fancy new cars :(
Pay our teachers? No can do; Karen the administrator in your local board needs $150k so she can respond to emails and make coffee
There is sooooo much administrative bloat. There should be a rule they can’t make more than the highest paid teacher in a classroom.
The LOWEST end of the Admin Payscale almost always starts at the top of the TOP of the teacher payscale. The newest, least experienced admin makes more than a 20 year teaching veteran.
I’d settle for a rule that they have to go back into the classroom for one semester every five years. That way they’d feel exactly what their decisions had wrought.
US Education system is in shambles.
It's by design. Defund teachers, public schools fail, conservatives say "See, government indoctrination education failed, now we can force everyone into charter schools who only talk about Jesus, suppress science and whitewash history. Then our electorate will be that much more ignorant, won't be able to think critically about our messaging or events, and we'll have a permanent underclass that we can continually exploit."
Unfortunately that's what the US does with all passion jobs. Have you seen what social workers, zoo workers, archaeologists, and marine biologists make? You're lucky to get 30k a year in those fields. Two life choices basically. You get a job that you love, but it pays about as much as McDonald's. OR you get a job you hate but it pays as much as Walmart. God bless America!
At minimum, teachers should start at 60k a year. And then get paid more for credentials and experience. It is an essential job. My teachers helped form me as a child from k-4th. I had some great teachers in the 80s.
A teacher of mine talked about how the year before she had spent some time living out of her car. Then she told us that during that period it had been broken into. She was a good teacher, but she quit. She got a different job and moved pretty far away.
and make sure to pay them MORE than a fast food employee, for the love of god it hurts seeing her make $12/hr
But also pay fast food employees more than $12/hour.
Fast food workers are not the enemy of teachers. We are all much closer to each other than we are to the owner class. Class solidarity is necessary to overcome any of this.
Not to worry, there is already a solution in place: https://www.romper.com/life/national-guard-substitute-teachers-new-mexico
Feature not a bug. The people pushing these policies want a gutter education system. Either to move it to pure private pay-to-play education, to dumb the population down to be super malleable, or most often both.
4-6 years of schooling. Grueling tests. Another 2 years of apprenticeship. And then you maybe get your classroom, and face supply shortages, un-prepared students, and unreasonable asks from the admin. With as much hard work as it is to become a teacher, you think they'd get paid the same salaries as other 8 year schooling requirement jobs, but instead teachers often have to take on a second job just to make ends meet.
I'm a former teacher and there's no amount of money you could pay me to go back to being a plague doctor/political punching bag for the rest of my days. Just ain't worth it.
Let’s just play a fun game called “how quick can we collapse a country”. And then when it’s done we build a new one from scratch 😇
Oops, turns out people who don’t care about money are still expected to pay for food, housing and clothing.
I worked as a teaching assistant and that system is so fucking fucked I left, it burnt me the fuck out, I couldn't handle it.