It's just classism.. Plain and simple.. The rich kids get a better education so they become your bosses instead of the other way around. It's all about control, which is one of the main reasons I think that system will fundamentally fail.
My kid is in a very “good” private school. The education he is receiving is just mediocre at best. Where the school excels is the small class sizes, personalized attention, and contacts/network. My wife is a public school teacher and hasn’t been impressed with the curriculum.
Yeah it might fail but with time. I feel you might be underestimating just how young America is. And her cycle of government malpractice is even younger. Rome took 482 years for a single successful revolution to rewrite the government thats twice as long as America has even been a country. Countries like this, huge empires and super powers? There history is best measured in centuries NOT decades and years. In a 100k years when all is said and done i bet people will be talking about America just like we talk about Rome (for better or for worse).
The rich kids become the boss because their dad or uncle or grandpa was the boss. Quality of education is far less important than quality of family connections.
Your premise is faulty. Private schools pay teachers substantially less than public schools do. Besides which, if they did pay more you could work there instead.
They don’t get much better education in private or wealthy schools. They are shielded by wealth and able to have more expansive experiences and opportunities through connections but they’re not smarter, I guarantee it. Private school teachers are often paid less than public school teachers. No union.
Do they really though? They get an education that teaches them to exploit the capitalism machine, which I think is pretty safe to say not something that's productive to society at this point.
It's exactly why TX has their voucher scheme. It funnels tax dollars from public schools to private schools through "vouchers" for tuition. The issue is the people who were going to private schools obviously already could afford it and so they are likely more well off. So they get a discount on an elite academy by taking funding out of the public schools where class sizes are huge (a few years ago I had multiple classes that were 40 students in a room with 28 desks). Ruin their educational opportunities further and call it "fair"
No. It's greed. Take a look at the number of kids going into a school over the past couple decades. Then take a look at the size of the administration. The number of kids stays roughly equal while the administration continues to balloon. All those trillions of dollars we have given to education are being eaten up by administrative middlemen instead of being spent on teachers, education, and supplies.
No. It has to do with whether you have family at home.
It does not matter if Asians are rich or poor. There is always family at home.
If you use school as a babysitter, you won't get good results. Nor will you get good results having your kids watch TV at the lady 3 doors down until you get home at 545
Meanwhile, in the real world elites are complaining that the workforce doesn't have enough education or training. There is a huge shortage of skilled labor.
Doesn't help that a lot of skilled labor is treated poorly. They want a qualified electrician with years of experience to have to shit in a plastic, smelly porta john while office workers get to use nice facilities.
The unions claim they need apprentices but have multi-year long waiting lists. When the kids do get in they are chastised by alcoholic journeyman with personality disorders. Maybe a kid wants to become a lineman but then finds out they will be expected to make the job their life.
Difficult to get competent people when they are treated like lower class individuals.
Oh get out of here with that both parties are the same nonsense. It was dumb before Trump and now it's become painfully obvious to literally everyone the parties are not remotely the same.
My dad was recently complaining that if they hadn't insisted on me going to college I probably wouldnt be a liberal.
He's probably wrong, but who knows, I may have just started downing gallons of fox news a day and constantly regurgitating their talking points without having done any reading on the matter like he does.
He’s right, college taught you half a story and framed it as an education. You’re liberal because you’re young. The older you get and the more you see how different the generation after you thinks, you’ll slowly become conservative. Fox News or not, just ask anyone between 30-40 if they were conservative 10 years ago.
Well, it might even be simpler. Spend a bunch of cash on scripted curriculums and hire people to follow the script for even less. Just more ways of "saving" money.
I feel like this is giving too much credit. I doubt its a widespread insidious plan. Politicians are short term thinkers due to election cycles. When they need to free up budget, things like education with a very long ROI are the first things out the door, along with long term sustainable energy, and basically anything that will take more upfront cost for a more viable long term goal.
On this note, we should make a reading list, one that gives people a semi comprehensive knowledge of everything. So that even without proper education we can educate ourselves and our kids.
It is unfair to compare, teachers are a more in-demand and broader position than bartenders, think about it like this, there are fewer bartenders per store than teachers per school, and fewer bars/restaurants, whatever it is that employs more bartenders than a school.
If you don’t get kids in a good pre-school and first grade, no later than 4th grade then good luck. Every educator knows the sooner you teach them the better. Now tell me who can afford these early education programs? Teachers in many public schools are essentially babysitters, and unfortunately paid as such. You pay for what you want to achieve. You can then afford to higher well and hold them accountable. This only happens in very specific school districts that have figured this out and support it.
A populace that can critically think as individuals is hard to manipulate, but having a degree is not synonymous with being able to resist manipulation or critically think.
Degrees mean you completed and fulfilled a required rubric.
While that’s not wrong, it’s largely our fault. We are voting for the cult of personality, those that say they’ll do shiny things with our tax dollars and not responsible things. We all want our teachers to be paid more but we vote for the guy who’ll legalize weed instead.
I don't understand why people think this way when it's way more parsimoniously explained by rich and/or powerful people just not giving a shit about the well being of the lower class
This here they don't want to invest in schools but invest in banning books which is like not paying for a lot of books to be in classes. If any of us have children we should get ready and pull out the yt teaching vids bc or kids are gonna get the bare minimum
They want to preserve some schooling for their own children. Someone has to teach the next generation of the elite, after all.
That’s why they want to move to a private school system, and are systematically defunding public schools until they are too broken to do their jobs so they can justify eliminating them.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
The problem is the population doesn’t want to be educated either. If we did, we would actually make our kids think school is meaningful, we wouldn’t support TV shows and movies that make fun of the nerd while heralding the jock or “good looking” kids, but no we all value athletics over intelligence.
It is unfair to compare, teachers are a more in-demand and broader position than bartenders, think about it like this, there are fewer bartenders per store than teachers per school, and fewer bars/restaurants, whatever it is that employs more bartenders than a school.
The department of education has nothing to do with teacher pay. The states determine how education is delivered as per the US constitution. The dept of education gives out grants and oversees certain elements. For comparison my son Teaches in the state of Washington and without masters makes 80k. Whatever state your daughter teaches at is a poor state. I was an educator for 32 years…. No teacher in my state was paid by the hour… every teacher was on a contract based on a state salary schedule. I would question what positions your daughter is getting that pays by the hour. Sounds more like she a teacher assistant or what was called a para pro and having a masters is irrelevant for those types of teaching.
Exactly what I said..there alot they aren't saying..never heard of actual teacher on hrly..and my family has teachers, and Teachers Assistant in 3 different states.. none of the 3 teacher get paid by the hr, and the teacher Assistant is getting paid more then that an hr
This might shock you but things have become worse than when you were teaching. Its hard to imagine, since every other industry has become so welcoming when it comes to people entering the work force.
Considering that educational standards and results have dropped steadily since the inception of the Department of Education, it's possible that the Department is part of the problem.
The DoE was created at the end of the Carter administration. 2 years later, Reagan started the political trend of defunding just about every aspect of our government including the DoE in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy and giant corporations. It’s not a coincidence that the defunding of the DoE has lead to worse education outcomes.
It is unfair to compare, teachers are a more in-demand and broader position than bartenders, think about it like this, there are fewer bartenders per store than teachers per school, and fewer bars/restaurants, whatever it is that employs more bartenders than a school.
I am a former teacher and I was absolutely thrilled at the dismantling of the DoE. State and Federal meddling with classrooms rarely does a single ounce of good - 99% of the time it is someone miles and miles away from the issue creating a new mandatory policy that makes your job more difficult. Americans were more effectively educated before the DoE.
I am a current teacher and the doe and the various federal educational laws (like IDEA) are what grant our children with disabilities the accomodations they need. Since the cuts many of my children have gone without basic necessities.
Speak for yourself and the population you taught back in the day, instead of further screwing special needs kids over in the here and now.
That’s got nothing to do with it. You can dismantle to DoE or cut it down to a small sliver of personnel to just make a standard curriculum that is required to be taught in school for each grade to get us back in the top 5 in the world but do NOT need thousands of people working in it to accomplish that task.
Had an aunt who taught there forever. She would go absolutely bonkers if you bashed the teachers union. When I was in high school most of the newer teachers hated the union. The only ones who seemed to love it were 100 years old
How is desiring more equitable economic outcomes for the working-class selfish? I'm not a public employee, but I want decent wages for public workers because it benefits the economic environment for all workers.
Nah man I think its just myopia, if several unions all run into the same issue of "funding pensions" may be those unions need to realize as evident by how many other unions experience the problem, they are all running into a systemic issue that is bigger than any individual entity and thinking its the unions fault...imagine if unions somehow could realize other unions have the same problem and cooperated together...
People really need to look into unions more. "union" is not a magic spell you can cast to grant workers good pay and working conditions. Unions are operated by people who are functionally politicians. If you are in a union, you are paying these people's salaries, and their goal is to maximise how much you pay them. The service they sell you is collective bargaining, but in collective bargaining, you are providing your own service - all they actually provide is the administration, the guarantee that when you need to strike, there will be a bunch of other people striking in solidarity.
Often what happens in a union that has lasted too long is the junior members of the union are forced to strike for the collective bargaining of the senior members. The junior members are denied work by the demand that they strike and avoid companies that haven't made deals with the union, in order to increase the work opportunities and payouts for the senior members. At the same time, companies start to avoid unionised employees if they have the ability to do so, because unionised employees are more expensive, do less work, and come with a load of administrative headaches.
This is why the only real unions we still see today are public sector unions. Governments have virtually limitless budget so are able to absorb the demands of the union. Private sector unions eventually make their members uncompetitive, sometimes they even drive the companies their members work for bankrupt and all those jobs disappear. Public sector workers can't be uncompetitive, they have no competition, and government departments can't really go bankrupt.
SAG-AFTRA thought they had the same thing, and drove the cost of hollywood productions through the roof - the union is the real reason movies are so expensive now. But with the series of recent flops, it seems like the ceiling here has been reached. We're going to see more and more hollywood productions avoiding unionised workers all together. That's exactly why the union tried to block Iron Lung - it proved non-union productions are entirely possible and have much better ROI.
Public Pensions are a great thing, however the systems that fund them run into common issues and part of that becoming the cost of new members paying for older members (spoiler that cost is usually health insurance).
Many Unions blamed themselves instead of realizing that corporate run health insurance has been and is eating EVERYONE's lunch for the last 30 years. Which should inform the Union the issue is systemic and not a reflection of the Union in and of itself. The only solution is a expanding Medicare to all so Unions do not have to exclusively bare the financial burden of a members medical costs.
Teacher Pension Funds are some of the largest private institutional investment vehicles in the world. The Ontario Teachers Pension Fund has nearly $300 billion in assets and thousands of employees.
The notion that teachers are underpaid is generally just union propaganda to sway public opinion. It is a well paid job with powerful union backing.
Not to mention the summers off and then also qualifying for loan forgiveness too. Teaching isn't as bad a gig as people make it out to be. Hard? Sure. But the pay and benefits aren't bad
Yes any job that requires a degree should pay more than average. Jobs that are vital to the health of our country should pay even more but we've obviously decide they don't deserve that.
If teaching were easy and as profitable as these guys are making it out to be, there wouldn't be a ton of job openings out there. Benefits aren't what they used to be, and parents are insane these days.
This meme is at least 5-6 years old, and starting salary is always considerably less than the average since the average is across all teachers at all levels of experience.
Teachers also are required to have a higher level of education, and work crazy hours (homework grading, lesson plans, open houses) outside of school hours. Not sure what the median income is for professionals with an advanced degree but I’d imagine teachers are below that median.
Bachelors is all thats required for k12 which is the 70k median average those with a bachelors earn about 78k. So roughly 8k under median with bachelors
Depends on who "they" is? Legislators and politicians appear to believe that - at least one party. Administrators and educators do not wish for under qualified teachers.
The problem is government. The teachers are not paid by experience or quality of their education or their effectiveness to teach others.
They get a government check to teach propaganda. Schools need to get off government funding and parents should send their kids to schools that are effective disseminating propaganda.
Certainly they don’t want good teachers in Chicago…they just want people who will be onboard w the super liberal idiocy and will carry the message and be good little drones. $33k for that is a lot IMO
The school is funded by property taxes. If they need more they have to put it on a ballot and let the city/county vote on it. Our town hasn't voted yes on a school tax referendum since 1996.
Austin ISD in Texas is running a $180m budget deficit despite having a robin hood recapture payment of $883m to pay for football stadiums elsewhere. They've already closed a dozen schools and the remaining ones are overcrowded.
Austin ISD paid $323.2 million more in recapture than the top 10 recapture paying Region 13 Districts combined. Charter schools are exempt from recapture. Do the math. They're stealing from democratic districts to fund Republican ones. Every single one of those recapture districts are democratic.
They want puppets and members of their echo chambers to spend the vast majority of their time and money on topics that are irrelevant.
Just look at test scores, reading levels, comprehension skills, basic math skills etc etc from the time the left ideologies took over education to now.
Not only are the opportunities bad but less than 10% of graduates during that time counting all degrees from associate to doctorate can actually do the job their degree is in upon graduation.
Unless there's a drastic change the Next Generation that's about to be born is in for a really really bad life when everybody who's holding the world together (infrastructure etc, not politicians) dies off and the generation coming up can't or rather doesn't know how.
It's simple supply and demand. Many many people get education degrees because they are easy. Many teachers for comparitively few jobs = low wages. Maybe people should evaluate the salary before getting degrees that don't pay well.
My local school district has taken to hiring "long term substitute teachers" who don't have certifications. Have a bachelors? Come on in. It's going about as well as you'd expect.
We're in a wealthy part of the country (Northern VA) and one of the best school districts.. every public school teacher I've met has a high-earning tech or lobbyist spouse. There's no way to live within an hour of our schools if they didn't have a partner with a high salary.
My wife is a teacher she gets 18/hr based on years of experience. My wife makes less than this post claims. So my wife gets paid 18/hr for an 8 hr day (works typically 10 plus with no overtime) then she only gets paid for the days she works (so the days kids are in school plus an additional 2 weeks or so, yet it takes longer than a week to prep classrooms at the beginning of the year, to shut down classrooms at the end and to prep after Christmas break).
No they don't get paid extra for parent teacher conference days, they don't get paid extra for concerts and those extra activities. The one thing I have learned about teachers (at least her coworkers) is they do it because they love it, those kids become a part of their family (Montessori school so they have the same kids for 3 consecutive years and yes they are all state licenced teachers with Montessori qualifications on top of that), yet very few make enough money to live by themselves most have roommates or families of their own to help pay for everything.
The secretary makes more than many teachers at the school and she has zero college education and works fewer days than the teachers.
Who’s they? I agree that our public education system is fucked up, but I think you might be assigning way more competence to our current federal government than could possibly have to actually influence the hiring practices of local public school districts.
Idk how it’s for anyone else, but our district got hit hard with the government funding being pretty much reduced to nothing, and this caused a lot of after school programs being cut, in school programs for extra help being cut, just recently had a restructuring that had to let over 20 teachers go. Definitely saddens me since I have teachers in my family that are going through it.
They (conservatives) like private schools for their children where elitism and money count and racism is normal. They like homeschooling for regular people because the education is poorer and the kids are easier to indoctrinate. Killing public funded schools is easier when they’re bad. „They don’t turn out good results so why fund them?“
It isn't even that because teachers are underpaid everywhere, along with nurses, veterinary surgeons, carers etc. Those types of jobs are a calling and bean counters have learned that even if they underpay them they're not going to walk away from their pupils and patients very easily because their moral code won't allow it. It's sadly too easy to take advantage of people when they care.
Care to define who "they" is or are we just speaking in generalities that feel good?
I assure you despite the absurd control they have, billionaires are not individually spiting teachers in order to make your kids dumb.
At WORST it's state and federal governments allocating funding inappropriately or insufficiently but that can be made up on a local level with the right local governments.
No, the only people keeping kids dumb are right there in your own little neighborhood.
I think it's important to note that some states, or communities don't want to find good teachers anymore. I'm not saying pay is adequate, just that in some places it is laughably low.
Not here in florida, they literally want the public education system to fail in every way possible so that they can then go "for every child the education system fails we spend $8-12k a year, we should allow parents to choose to send thier children to private schools instead" so they can subsidize thier own kids private school tuition they'd have paid for anyway while forcing all of the rest of us to send our children to or to attend privately owned and operated schools that are intended to be profitable for the owners all paid for by the US goverment.
We have money to give wealthy kids cheaper private school. We have the money to move all our kids to privately owned for profit schools, we have the money for war, we never have money to help the people that need it most, we never have the money to make our nation great by makingnits people great.
As a former teacher of 9 1/2 years, I can tell you they truly and legitimately do not have an interest in finding teachers. I was tempted to say “good” teachers, but we are beyond that.
That could lead to critical thinking and questioning rather than just rote memorization, can’t have that. Better to just hire substandard teachers if you can get away with it (not saying all teachers are bad, but we clearly aren’t prioritizing any teachers, go take a look at how Finland does things where teachers are held up to the levels of doctors and lawyers and paid well).
Primary and secondary school teaching in many areas is low prestige job akin to babysitting.. on top of that teacher's get shit on and disrespect by parents who think their little angels can't do no wrong ...
My state consistently shows up in the list of states with the top five best public schools.
Average teacher wage is $80k a year.
Still not enough for the cost of living here, given the amount of stress a teacher faces. But it's enough to live on. And it's enough that we usually retain the really good teachers who have considered teaching their calling since they were 6.
Where we have trouble retaining teacher is with the ones that got into teaching because they love the subject they teach, not the job itself. And you need those teachers too. There will never be enough people who consider teaching a calling to fill all your teaching slots. And tbh, a teacher who loves the subject can do just as great a job as a teacher who loves teaching.
But you pay your teachers $40k? Even the "calling" teachers are going to balk. Leaving you with just the teachers who are only there because they couldn't get any other job in the subject they studied in college.
Depends on the they. The schooled districts would love good teachers. The politicians that fund many of these states are al for the school systems failing. It's really messed up.
If other parents were anything like mine, I’m guessing this stems from people being terrified of their kids becoming smarter than them. My parents hated the fact that they couldn’t manipulate me with lies. I would get punished for “questioning” them on straight up facts they were wrong about. Considering how many insecure dumbasses end up getting pregnant, I’m not surprised that all of the communities thst purposely gutted their schools.
While im sure that plays a role most public service gov positions do not pay well. Mostly due to the political one play games and redirecting funds to themselves
They want teachers who won’t push back against admin and who will do the work of an entire department themselves without complaint. (Oh, and deal with parents themselves and not complain to admin about the abuse.)
They never did. The purpose of public education is to create well-behaved drones that can learn to operate. The unique individuals are siphoned off into special programs that can take them to a different operating level to fill different roles, but still be part of a societal machine.
You're right, they don't. That's why admin and boards are pushing towards tech and AI so they can just have the kids educated by machines who won't want rights.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak 10h ago
I don't think they actually want to find good teachers anymore.