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 ...
That certainly was not the case when I went to college (1964 - 1968.)
**& I worked a solid 12 months a year**
I knew a teacher that taught history during the school year, and during the summer had a roofing business. He said, “I’m not going to sit around for three months, I’m going to make money!”
one (of many, many) issue is that good teachers get paid exactly what bad teachers get paid - and they will get paid the same next year, and the next, and so on...
I was speaking of public schools and not 1960s colleges, and not even many of the late 1960s public schools.
We have always assumed-and conservatives often go along with it too- that government is the best overseer of education.
We are 50 years late in challenging that assumption.
The failure of the public schools thanks to teachers’ unions is one of our countries biggest societal failures over the past 4 decades, yet nothing is being done about it.
For me, it’s a top 5 issue I want Trump to address. They have enough money, that can no longer be argued. It is also the HIGHEST “state” TAX BILL for many homeowners, second only to Federal Income taxes and SS taxes.
Too many, not all.
DEI destroyed all the standards that teachers should have. Many of them are far-left agitators.
I was in a technical field in the Government (DOD). So much of what you point out (not the breakfast, obviously) bogged down the productivity and morale of the staff.
New programs sold to higher Command as ultimate solutions when presented to us - it was obvious there were giant holes in the program. When we would try to point them out and ask how it does such and such that the existing (and much simpler program that everybody already knew how to use) did, we were told that would be worked out later or that information was no longer going to be reported.
After the program went live and didn’t work as promised we were still expected to use it. Meanwhile, the missing reports and data that had been in the legacy system was still being demanded.
So the worker bees were stuck operating and maintaining two systems. Meanwhile the upper echelon updated their resumes with glowing tales of how they improved things. And the snake-oil salesmen cashed their checks even though the program was crap.
And yes, the mandatory training for things nobody had issues with was never ending.
Not true. There are far dumber people with “Journalism” degrees.
Interesting post.
Now if we look at the cost of living we get some interesting results.
The average house in CA cost five times as much as the average house in WV.
What that means in practice is that WV teachers can easily afford to buy houses while CA teachers probably have to live in apartments.
Not good enough for today's world.
Although students must learn underlying principles, it is necessary that they learn to use modern tools.
That was my observation. Parents are the next big problem. They will sue good teachers if their child can't get high grades.
The trick is the STEM subjects. A teacher’s salary will not attract an engineer. A young engineer is not the best choice for teaching.
Hopefully they have a good grasp on the use of punctuation.
It is good enough, in HS they do not need to learn
“modern tools” until they learn the basics. Once they get into advanced classes such tools can be introduced.
As far as a calculator, NO ONE needs to be taught or use one for basic math and 1st year algebra, Calculators interfere, not enhance learning at that level.
Anecdotally proficiency overall has gone down, not increased since the introduction of those “modern tools” into the elementary and HS basic courses.
I strongly disagree.
>one (of many, many) issue is that good teachers get paid exactly what bad teachers get paid - and they will get paid the same next year, and the next, and so on...
Yeah, the problem is that you can’t renumerate lives changed and good lessons taught objectively. If you grade performance through observations, teachers will chill and then teach an awesome observed lesson. If you grade performance through “results”, then teachers won’t fail anyone.
As American society in general has lost it’s moral bearings bear in mind that teachers were a respected profession. If the society values education as all societies must then respect for elders, parents, those in authority should remain at the top. Look at the Japanese.
There seems to be a direct correlation between religion of the Judeo-Christian kind in the West that acted as an anchor in terms of what is right and what is wrong. We lost that with the counter-culture movement and the assassinations of JFK/RFK/MLK, then Watergate. That is why the government should come COMPLETELY clean about these document releases, no matter what.
Since then it has been a slippery slope of cynicism, dumbing down and superficial lifestyle goals, fashionable, transient goals and pure ignorance via the smokescreen of drugs.
Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s we still had a smidgen of fear-respect for our elders and teachers. Of course, they used the threat of violence against us but it actually worked.
One of the only ways to restore young adult responsibility instead of just the gimme, gimme, gimme of modern consumer life is to re-instate the mandatory, military draft.
Of course nobody will want to give or sacrifice anything after 52 years of no draft but it just might restore the fabric of American society.
They loved school and excelled. They are opposite of me. I hated every single minute of being in a classroom and I guess it shows.
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