How to be good democRAT

Would you take $35K to do their job? I wouldn't even consider it. Double it and I'd still say no. Everybody has a price but knowing how much BS my wife deals with.....they can't afford me.

 

If I would take the job isn't the issue.

The issue was that they are underpaid. At least in this area, that is false. Entry-level teachers in this area were getting starting salaries on par with entry level engineering positions. Keeping in mind that, as students, these same individuals flunked out of engineering school and into the college of arts and sciences majors (never the other way around). So the notion that they're the same as engineers is false, on it's face, because the academic program is considerably less rigorous. I won't even bother with the lawyer comparison since law school and the bar exam are also clearly more rigorous academically than their program. Same with doctors and medical school.

So becoming a teacher is less academically challenging than becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Given that, why would one expect to be paid on the same scale? I'm an engineer; I don't expect to make the same money as a neurosurgeon, just because we both have BS degrees, because he's got significantly more skills than I do. Teachers don't see it that way. They also don't bother to note that the professions they like to compare themselves to are also not unionized and that merit, not seniority, is what determines your employment and advancement in those fields. Not so with teachers, as performance means nothing to your employment, thanks to tenure.

Next, we have that lovely thing called "summer vacation." I get paid for twelve months of work. Teachers want to get paid on the same scale, but while only working nine months. By my math, they should get paid at a 75% rate since they only work 75% of the year. If they want that last 25%, get a job and work the last 25% of the year. Otherwise, take your three months of vacation and quit your bitching.

Finally, they don't even work full days. Yeah, yeah, spare me the song and dance about grading papers and home and all that because I don't buy it. My own experience is that the local school parking lots do not stay full of cars for a full 9-hour day (8 hours plus an hour for lunch) with any kind of regularity. I leave for work in the morning and the school parking lot is empty. When I get home from work, it's still empty. If we worked the same amount of hours, one or the other of those couldn't possibly be true. I also don't recall too many teachers sticking around much past the final bell when I was in high school. Somehow, I don't think things have gotten more difficult for them since 1987, considering the rush to embrace computer-graded tests back then. I'm certain those are even more common today than back then.

Does this mean that all teachers are worthless? No, not at all. But some of them clearly are and the union does nothing to weed out these individuals. That makes the NEA part of the problem, not part of the solution.

 

I wouldn't for a moment equate the School of Educacation with the School of Engineering or any other advanced degree (giving myself a little pat on the back ). I would however put it on par with the School of Business, Marketing, CIS, etc. That aside, a secretary at my company makes more than a teacher and she's a dipshit (no degree either). No degree and no union but she does make the going rate for a department secretary. That strikes me as wrong but I'll leave it to you to decide who is overpayed.

My wife works from 7 am to 5 pm and has a 22 minute lunch which she must navigate 31 kids through the line and choke down her food. The computer age is stuck in the mainframe era in this county so she must do most of her work at school. She does a little grading at home but not enough to add an hour per week. That's more hours than I put in and ignores the open houses, PTA's, etc. The "3 months off in the summer" is really 6 weeks which is 4 weeks more vacation than most company's I know of so you've got a valid point there.

There are certainly some slack teachers but that's what you get when you drive those that can leave away. The unions may be guilty of protecting some slack teachers but they didn't recruit or hire them. In this state your job is not protected by the union for the first 4 years so there is plenty of time to weed them out if administration wants to. In reality they don't have luxury.

I think things have changed alot since 1987. I graduated in 1988 and my impression is that they have changed drastically. Remember, we went to school before Political Correctness and the enlightenment that there are no bad kids just misunderstood ones. We didn't have Individual Education Plans, weekly progress reports, and we did leave those kids with no motivation to learn behind.

 

Yeah, things have changed since 1987. They have NOT gotten better.

Everything you described bears no relation on teachers in the Pittsburgh area.

Like I said, in the south teachers ARE underpaid. Not so in this area. Here, they're overpaid, underworked, and generally not worth a good dump. More money certainly won't fix the problem. The union protects those who are grossly incompetent. How do I know? Easy, I had classes with those incompetent assholes and they're still on the payroll. How do I know they're incompetent? Easy, I went off to college and actually learned something, instead of the chunk of my life I wasted listening to a waste of human life. A waste that happened to be making $60k a year to regurgitate the same crapola from a lesson plan he wrote when he first got the book three years before. But since he's got two decades of senority, he's totally immune from his poor performance jeopardizing his employment status. The only one getting screwed in that arrangement are his students and the people paying his salary. But since he's tenured, he's untouchable.

As for the PTA, open house, etc. I still don't think it's a big deal, at all. I spend a week at a time on the road, living out of a suitcase in a hotel room, as part of my job. My heart bleeds for the teacher who's got to get home late one day a month due to a PTA meeting. Other professionals have equally large demands on their time as part of thier job. But teachers are the only ones I hear whining about it.

Like I said, your area is different. But up here, I have no sympathy at all for teachers.

 

You also need to add in a week off at Christmas, a week in February and a week in April. They also get every holiday off, few private companies give more than Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and July 4 anymore. On top of that, in my area teachers get up to 15 days paid sick time plus a few personal days. This probably isn't the norm, but I'm sure it's not rare in metropolitan areas. All of this adds up to a substantial amount of time off per year.
Most private sector jobs are also production or performance-based, you don't do a good job, you don't keep your job. No such requirement exists for teachers. We have a large school system in town and I have never known a teacher to be fired for anything less than criminal activity, and even that has to have taken place in the school setting. My wife's best friend is a teacher, and she can tell you who every inept teacher is in her school and several others. Their performance is never addressed or corrected and they remain in the system until they quit or retire. I have been in the position of voicing personal complaints to the administrators concerning a teacher's lack of performance or personal quirks, the answer has always been along the lines of "well, that's just the way he/she is". They might offer to move the student to a different class, but addressing the shortcoming of the teacher isn't a consideration.

 

Apparently my wife's experience in Florida and North Carolina isn't indicative of the norm. Perhaps there is a reason these states annually rank in the bottom half of national averages. But in 2 months I won't care anymore!

 

Here is another example of why this is so broken. This info is factual and current at a Texas school.

School to remane nameless.

First year teacher: $22,216
Second year teacher: $24,225
5th year teacher: $31,266
20 year teacher: $47,592

Now the interesting part:

Principal: $52,000
Asst Principal: $48,000
Head Football Coach: $74,220
Athletic Director: $89,565 (WTF?)

Now you tell me, what is important to this school? Football or academics?

 

my oldest son is a first year teacher. His back ground is he got a chem E degree at 19 with over 250hr because he could not decide what he wanted so he may not be avg in tx. He did tell me that they are going to pay him well over 30k.

 

Personal:

Hey 612, are you going to race in the 5 hour mini endurance next Saturday?

Thread:
The example I have was for one school. Dallas, Austin, etc. pay a little more. For my example, think lower Rio Grande Valley.

 

I hope so I have to check with the team I am supposed to be on. I am making a camara mount for a bike too.

 

Cool. If you see us please come and join for a brew or soda or something.

31' Funmover, Red SV550, Red YSR50. Also, look for an American Flag flying about 25' off the ground and you have found us.