Posted on 03/26/2025 5:21:12 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Quite the statement, eh? Let me explain. I’m well into my 60s and for my entire adult life I’ve heard that public school teachers are underpaid. It has been repeated as a mantra for decades.
Ignoring for a moment whether it is true or not -- and the answer to that is generally, it depends -- let’s accept the mantra and analyze why public-school teachers are still underpaid after all these years.
It’s not spending. As most voters know, it seems that every stinking year there is some ballot initiative or measure or legislative move to increase spending for our woefully underfunded public-school systems. It never seems to end. There doesn’t seem to ever be a point of “we’re good.”
Total nationwide spending on public K-12 education is approaching a trillion dollars! In most states, public K-12 education consumes around 50% of the entire state budget. Nationwide, we now spend an average of $17,000 per student per year. In New York it is $33,000! Yet teachers remain underpaid.
The Department of Education’s spending has gone from just under $11 billion in 1980 to a high of almost $193 billion in 2010 to last year’s spending of $158 billion. Yet teachers remain underpaid.
The number of administrators versus teachers has exploded -- “The number of district administrators in U.S. public schools has grown 87.6 percent between 2000 and 2019 compared to student growth at 7.6 percent and teacher growth at 8.7 percent.” And many (most?) of the administrators make more than teachers. Yet teachers remain underpaid.
Remember when technology was going to transform public education? We’ve spent billions on classroom technology and what have test scores done? At best stayed flat, in many cases they went down.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Dear Mr. Conlin:
You neglected to mention “unions” and the GOPe/uniparty that cheerfully funded these “Stupidest Creatures” the last decades. It is ludicrous to blame this only on the retards of the left and every other mess we are in.
>I had a few superstars as school teachers, the majority were mediocre on a good day.
Yeah, it’s usually like that. The good teachers are really good, but in the minority. The mediocre teachers are in the majority, and just shuffle paper. The bad teachers are usually really bad, but half are gone in a few years.
What annoys me is there are almost as much admin and support now as teachers.
I think that the administrators are a big part of the problem.
If you ever went to college and sat in class with some educations majors, you understand the problem.
The kids in my second son’s high school math class had to teach themselves from the math book, the “teacher” was so thick. On the other hand, the chemistry and Latin teachers were great.
A degree in Education should be eliminated. The stupidest morons in the world can get a degree in education. Look at Jill Biden.
The whole culture of developing teachers revolves around leftists and leftist institutions that produce and only hire leftists.
This has resulted in ‘feelings driven agendas’ as most of them are virtue signaling women. They believe those are THEIR KIDS and THEIR CLASSROOM....which is a bully pulpit to teach their personal ideologies.
Apparently nobody told them, they’re OUR KIDS and OUR CLASSROOMS and it is NOT YOUR JOB to inject your personal ideology, or behave as some sort of psychiatrist with the responsibility of ‘transitioning’ kids - which is nothing more than practicing without a license.
It’s become a cesspit, churning out kids well exposed to drugs, sex, and disrespectful attitudes to adults.
The only bright side seems to be that it’s becoming obvious to all, including the kids - that are rebelling against wokeness.
I can’t say exactly what all teachers are paid, but i worked most of my working years as a skilled technician in a shop with very few raises. I daresay that most teachers with a few years under them made as little as I did & I worked a solid 12 months a year.
That and school boards.
The best teachers generally are those who majored in their preferred field—math, English, history, etc; then went back and picked up a certificate to teach. Hillsdale enables this strategy and produces some great teachers.
According to this article, the country spends $1T a year on education.
Imagine if there were no government schools. No teachers unions. No need for a heavy administrative layer.
There are about 3.8M teachers in the US. If we spend $1T, then that would provide for more than $250,000 for each teacher.
Imagine if we encouraged Home Schooling. Or provided money for parents to choose a private school. Books and whiteboards and other materials are not really that expensive. In the end, teachers would not get $250,000 each, but they could get a lot more than they do now.
We just have to structure our education system differently.
liberal media told the entire country that Trump loves the uneducated but what they didn’t mention is it was democrat policies that created the uneducated in the first place. thank you democrats...I think.
I will say that in a state known for low teacher pay(high school) I did have maybe 2 real superstars as teachers who were probably paid less than they were worth.
I will say that in a state known for low teacher pay(high school) I did have maybe 2 real superstars as teachers who were probably paid less than they were worth. Can’t say what administrators were paid.
Yes, the singular purpose of public schools is to employ adults.
We all know there are good teachers out there.
My oldest sister in law is a teacher at a private school in Charlotte. She teaches first grade. Both of their sons got to go to this expensive private school for free. She has been there for 35 years.
My younger brothers daughter just took a job at a public school in central PA as a kindergarten teacher. Her first full time job out of college. She graduated last spring.
They are both nice people. They are both generally conservative to the best of my knowledge. However, they both know/knew that taking that job is generally underpaid for a person with a 4 to 5 year college degree. Many times a Masters. Yet, they knew that going in. It is also a PART TIME JOB. They work nine months per year. Plus they get the best benefits package to make up for lower than average compensation. So, IF you CHOOSE to be an underpaid teacher, quit complaining about it.
Another guy I work with is married to a woman that recently took a job as the assistant to the school superintendent here at a public school in southern NH. She has a Masters in English but did not work after college because she was a MOM raising three kids. Now the last one is in college. She got the job because she was elected to the local school board. She is an attractive well spoken Democrat age 58. Her starting pay was $106K. As I stated she had no work experience in the previous 36 years other than a stay at home mom.
The teachers in the same school district with a similar degree would start at half that salary or less.
In NJ there are 21 counties and every year the teacher’s union would declare that county x was the lowest paid. The next year, county y was the lowest paid. That’s how the scam worked for years. If a district vetoed the “education” budget, the State overrode the decision.
Oh, the waste. Here's a few examples.
1. BREAKFAST - They decided they'd feed all the kids Breakfast in the Classroom. At first the food was good, but after a while it deteriorated to soggy, pre-packaged burritos, pizza, poptarts and coffee cake, and an apple or banana. The kids threw most of it away (I always scavenged what I could and kept it for snacks later, because what they rejected at 7:30 they were sometimes hungry for by 10am.) But the amount of food that went directly into the garbage was just sickening.
2. BOOKS AND PROGRAMS - Independent contractors would sell the district all sorts of new books and programs meant to fix this or that. A principal would buy hundreds of these things for the teachers. The teachers would try them, find they were useless, and put them in the storage room where they remained collecting dust with all the other silver bullet programs they'd accumulated over the years. Rooms full of stuff.
3. TRAINING - They were constantly sending us to trainings that we didn't want or need, often to learn how to use these new programs. This was a money sinkhole paying for the training, paying for the subs to cover our classes for days... then we found the programs were crap anyway. These trainings were almost always mandatory.
4. TRANSFERS - Teachers move around a lot. They'd train us to use the programs that our school was using, and then a year later we'd transfer, taking that invested money (but not the program materials) with us... so that was wasted.
5. TESTING - They tested the kids constantly. Every 6-8 weeks there'd be a standardized test of some kind, which materials had to be bought, administered, scored, analyzed... there was always more money for more testing.
A lot of times, the teachers weren't the problem. It was the administrators spending on stuff like this, putting it on their CVs, and then after three years they'd leave their position touting all these programs and trainings they'd implemented. Up the ladder they went, leaving a mess behind them every time.
They never miss a year.
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