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 ...
The please do explain why.
I currently teach adult education on Math, Physics, Chem, and a few other technical specifics for a Nuclear Corporation (power plants)
I see sooo many young adults totally disconnected from the basics of math and Algebra, without a calculator they can not do the required math.
I have had to rewrite courses and add back in concepts like the associative and distributive laws just to get them through the material. For Algebra they cannot even look at an equation and know if it is a parabola nor how the variables affect the shape of the curves without using a graphing enabled laptop or calculator.
This is easily attributable to the overuse of those devices at the middle and HS levels. The basics must be learned first before introducing technical short cuts.
As a generality you’re correct. But then there’s my brother.
But he teaches CAD Design and other engineering type electives. He’s in a different wing of the school from the lunatic lefties.
Oh yes, Geez, yes, this. They kept selling us new systems for reporting grades and posting assignments online, and this exact same thing happened again and again. I remember spending an entire weekend posting all my grades into the old system (which worked) before putting them in the new system (which erased them, so I was ordered to input them all again.) And of course there was no liaison type program that could import data from one system to the other. No, that had to be done one field at a time. Absolutely maddening.
“Americans of the past were educated by very high quality, intelligent people”
How far back is “past”? In his book the Graves of Acageme Richard Mitchell pointed out that the teaching population was from the lowest level of intelligence of college graduates. That was in 1981.
Way back intelligent women filled the teachers roles. Now they have better opportunities.
In addition, the “education” courses they are required to take are mostly useless and a waste of time, but the Education Department needs to justify its existence.
Earning a degree in education today is not difficult. It is time-cosnsuming and annoying, but it does not take to much intellectual effort. A monkey could do it.
Exactly.
Time in a classroom is too short. Physics and Chemistry, plus electronics, and other engineering problems are not about the mechanics of calculation but rather the results of a calculation. Manual math should be mastered before passing out of middle school, because from that point on applying mathematics is what is needed.
When I taught Embedded Computing in high school, I allowed students access to the Internet, use of calculators, cheat sheets, and any other source of information excluding past tests or the work of neighboring students. After all, that is the working environment of actual employment. If the student didn't know the core material, no outside reference helped. There was no special grading for when they made mistakes in the arithmetic. Only the correct answer sufficed.
Your philosophy seems like you'd require students to nap arrow heads from flint rather than giving them access to a lathe or a mill.
From a personal standpoint, I never could do arithmetic in my head or large math problems on paper. I have worked miracles with a calculator because I know what is going on with the Physics.
I'd really prefer my space capsule and its subsequent navigation be done to 12 significant digits rather than just the three of a slide rule. Precision and accuracy are far more important than being able to do arithmetic without a calculator. All said and done, I still have my Post Versalog.
You are so right.
That should be finalized long before students reach high school.
****How far back is “past”? In his book the Graves of Acageme Richard Mitchell pointed out that the teaching population was from the lowest level of intelligence of college graduates. That was in 1981.
Way back intelligent women filled the teachers roles. Now they have better opportunities.****
Where I saw the dramatic changes hitting hard was in the late 60s, the teacher’s unions were taking over the schools and nationalizing them, and curriculum and the behavior rules and dress codes were being thrown out of the window and new teaching methods that didn’t work were coming in, soon added to by teaching in students foreign languages and teaching them their old country’s history and encouraging non-assimilation, reworked history books, the ending of classes for the super smart, combining special needs with classes that were slowed down by them, and so on.
It is true that feminism and the new competition for white female talent drained the talent pool for teaching.
I’m old enough to remember when they sold lotteries as a way to cure the school funding problems.
Very much agree!
One issue is that many undergraduate education majors are often not the best of the best academically and I have seen many often struggle with even watered down science classes. The educational establishment also adds in many classes on teaching methods to get a teaching certificate that would discourage talented students getting degrees in other fields from pursuing a career in teaching. I personally knew a student who was pursuing a degree in chemistry and had excelled in her advanced chemistry classes, but to fulfill her dream of teaching high school chemistry she was saddled with taking several rinky dink science for teachers classes. I have a graduate degree and taught undergraduate college classes for 15 years, but would need take many hours of undergraduate education classes in order to be certified to teach those same classes to high school students. It is little wonder our educational system is a mess.
Curious, do you teach?
Most students will not master Algebra “long” before HS, some yes, the majority no. In fact many will not even master basic Math until HS.
Mastering it requires not just learning it once and moving on, it requires years of practice to create a lasting proficiency for many between the ages of 10 and 18.
Yes a good number can become accomplished with it earlier but not necessarily maintain a long term proficiency.
It is not the same as riding a bike.
Are you disagreeing just to be a contrarian? I ask because you offered literally not argument and only blind assertions of opposition.
Let me correct myself, I missed your post about what you taught, sorry. I take back my question about not adding an argument, you did. Sorry I missed that post of yours.
Yeah, they can't buy an entry level computer for $400 but they can buy a fancy iPhone 15 for $1,500.
The students should have to provide them, just like I had to purchase my own pencils, erasers, rulers, calculators, graph paper, book covers, etc., when I was a student. The notion that public school students should never have to put out a dime and have everything provided for them by the taxpayer is ridiculous.
And don't even get me started on the need for "hot lunch programs" at school, which by the way is complete and utter garbage from a nutritional perspective (it's just fast food).
Just have them pack a peanut butter sandwich and a thermos of milk from home for their lunch. We can even bring back the lunch boxes of old that we used to also buy, the ones that had Flintstones, Adam-12, and The Partridge Family on them (updated for today's shows of course).
I do need to address your statements like accuracy / precision of a slide rule. They can be incredibly accurate when used correctly. Surely you know that.
Also my point is simple as I have a real life examples, I have seen repeated in many students. These students could not determine how a parabola would open on a graph without a graphing calculate, they had no idea what the equation meant.
That is the result of not graphing by hand countless equations until you learn what the equation actually means, much like reading words in a book requires countless hours of reading in context to truly understand how they relate.
I am glad your experience is different but i would consider it the exception and not the norm. If it was the norm we would not have so many math illiterate “advanced STEM” students coming out of HS.
That was my observation. Parents are the next big problem. They will sue good teachers if their child can't get high grades.
That's the entitlement mentality. That's a big part of the problem if you hire American workers.
That's one of the reasons corporations use h1b visas.
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