Cherry-pick the high salaries and go ahead criticize.
A LOT of teachers don’t make near this amount - just call your local Catholic school teacher if you don’t believe me.
Anyhow, I challenge YOU to try and deal with a classroom, given all the legal, curricular, parental, etc. pressures, never mind the little imps themselves.
The table isn’t cherry picking. Shows quantities of teachers within a range. It does not support the myth that teachers are poorly paid. Everyone has pain-in-the-butt people to deal with in their jobs, with limitations on their actions.
I think you’ve fallen into the trap that the teacher’s unions would like you to: that any attack on the current system is an attack on teachers (and you’re exactly right in that dealing with a class full of antsy adolescents is a thankless and often underpaid task).
The attack here is on the teachers unions - the folks at the top of that salary list are likely there not because they’re the best teachers, but because they’ve got the longest tenure, and because of salary scales negotiated by the unions that have nothing - zero - to do with performance. Teachers unions fight tooth and nail against any compensation packages based on performance.
The Catholic school teachers you cite aren’t unionized, and they’re almost certainly underpaid relative to their public school colleagues. Most often, they teach because they love it, and they put up with crappy salaries because they don’t want to put up with the crappy bureaucratic restriction of the government school systems - and (for many) because they see it as their vocation.
Somewhere there’s a happy medium, and whether or not it involves teachers union I don’t know. But teachers unions as they’re currently constructed are the problem. By their own admission (at the highest levels of the NEA) all they care about is sucking every bit of advantage they can for their members: students be damned.
If I was confident the teachers at the top of that list were the best teachers in Janesville, I’d say more power to them. What I expect is that there is no correlation between those salaries and actual teaching ability - and that things are likely to stay that way until the teachers unions are broken, or until they change the adversarial attitude they have to their employers (who are ultimately you and me).
I don't know of any Catholic schools with a teachers union, the salaries are a matter of supply and demand, not union extortion and political shenanigans.
Before the unions and liberal cultural corruption, the classes I were in had 30-32 students, teachers who knew their subject, were devoted to teaching and earned the respect of their students. The 60s changed all that when radicals dropped into teachers colleges en masse for deferments.
We are not talking about Catholic school teachers. We are talking about public school teachers. Teachers immunized by their union (for now) against being fired, no matter how lazy or stupid they are.
Anyhow, I challenge YOU to try and deal with a classroom, given all the legal, curricular, parental, etc. pressures, never mind the little imps themselves.
How many teachers would like to be challenged to deal with a downed power line in a sleet storm? Or searching a dark alley with a gun in her hand, looking for a murderer? Or putting up roofing in the hot August sun?
Stop whining.