For starters, I get paid for 8 hours a day, 196 days a year. I can choose to have my salary spread out over the year, or I can be paid for the 10 months I teach.
In my school district, teachers CAN be covered 100% for their insurance, however, to add on family members is quite pricey. According to a fellow teacher, covering her entire family costs her $735 a month.
As far as pass rates go? Sorry, you just cannot include my rural Va kids in with the Detroit kids. Radically different situations. We are in the middle of our state exams - standards of learning, called SOL's. The pass rate in my rural county school. is over 85% for both reading and writing. The math SOL's will be taken next week. Last year's pass for 90%+ with 95% pass rate for Algebra I and 100% pass rate for geometry. And that 15% failure rate? Fun fact - we can only exempt the tiniest percent from those SOL's and those exemptions are reserved for the absolute lowest functioning kids. My 2 students with a 65 IQ did indeed take, and fail, the 6th grade reading SOL. The student who arrived in March from Mexico knowing no English, he too took the reading SOL, and yes, failed it.
While the article has some good points about poor teaching which applies to only parts of the country, the author is misguided to take a broad brush and include the good with the bad. What makes the difference here? To be plain spoken, it's the parents and working together so that the kids are successful. The school cannot do the job of the home and I suspect in many places that is the expectation.
As far as the current events quiz? I'd fail that flat out. I never watch the news, I never read a paper. I get most of my news from here, Drudge, and on occasion a UK paper.
And no, I'm not cleaning toilets with a toothbrush nor am I going to jail for doing a poor job.
All that being said, believe what you want to believe rather than the facts presented by fellow conservatives doing the work.
Yes, parents are taxed heavily and maybe public school is the "only option." Yea, I know...we can't go back to the 1950s and have only one parent working, times have changed, blah blah blah. And yes, I've seen my fair share of bad teachers and the NEA is a weaponized arm of the DNC.
But as the late, great, Evil Irv Homer, talk show host extraordinaire out of Philadelphia said, it is hard to raise a thoroughbred when the parents are asses. Indeed, a plurality of voters went for Hillary.