Posted on 05/14/2014 6:47:00 AM PDT by blam
Public School Teacher To North Carolina Senate: 'I Am Embarrassed To Confess: I Am A Teacher'
Caroline Moss
“I am embarrassed to confess: I am a teacher.”
That was the subject line of an email Sarah Wiles, a science teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, sent to all 170 members of the North Carolina General Assembly last week.
Wiles talked about her concerns that teachers were not being paid enough. She says she personally has only seen a pay increase once in six years, even though she says she loves her students and has always gone above and beyond to do her job well.
"I am also sick and tired of politicians making my profession the center of attention and paying it lip-service by visiting a school, kneeling next to a child, shaking my hand and thanking me, telling the nightly news that I deserve a raise," she wrote.
In short, she feels like the state doesn't care about educators like herself, and is embarrassed for and by her politicians. (You can read her full email below.)
On Monday morning, North Carolina Sen. David Curtis (R) hit "reply all" and sent a message back.
The email basically says since she's so ashamed to be a teacher, she might as well get a new job.
In his email, he offers Wiles four suggestions for what she should tell her potential new private sector employer, including asking for eight weeks paid vacation per year because that's what taxpayers gave her. (He is misinformed, as teachers are not paid for the summer months when school is not in session, leaving many teachers working summer jobs to make ends meet.)
Though he does say at the end of his email that he supports pay raises for teachers, it was a pretty harsh reply.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
YOu contradict yourself in part….Charter Schools ARE private sector…NOT purely and not in all cases, but in many cases it is.
But you also miss the main point: your indemnification argument is a straw dog. If the system were privatized, that would not be an issue because a monstrous free market would be created, and wherever there is a monstrous free market, the market performs.
“…and yet. so many unthinking taxpayers are all in on every single pay raise and this absurd out of date notion that teachers are underpaid…..it’s that ignorance that sickens me.”
They don;t say that in NJ anymore; in fact, I think it is an idea only pushed on TV nowadays. Chris Christie won a lot of taxpayers’ hearts by exposing the costs of our teachers, at one point telling a teacher at a town hall meeting (who lied about her salary): “You don’t have to do this job”.
To require one to admit to your point of view is tasteless and arrogant.
all you wrote was meaningless over generalized pabulum. Can you possibly be any more cliched than “it starts with leadership?”
No, you can’t…...
I hope you’re right - I’ve been saying this for about 30 years…..and I’ll say this about Christie…he’s a man of many flaws, but he does have his moments where his ability, and WILLINGNESS, to cut thru the crap and tell it like it is really helps our cause.
Christie isn’t perfect, but he has been good for NJ. He has represented the NJ taxpayers well, and has all the right enemies; his 2% property tax cap has stopped the teachers’ union in its tracks, forcing layoffs to come up with the 4% raises they demand from the municipalities that employ them. They won’t grant concessions to save the jobs of less senior teachers, so they are let go.
As long as there are American taxpayers left in NJ, Christie is competitive; he is an original TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Partier.
My brother-in-law is a middle school teacher who loves to coach. He also teaches a few history classes, and his ears perked up when I showed him how to write off his summer travel expenditures as “research”.
BIL is on the road to Happiness.
Beside being married and having raised a child, coaching HS baseball has been the most satisfying endeavor of my life.
I’m retired, so it works out well...beside keeping me in shape too.
We need to cut the education budget
You are an idiot.
Well at least you said something that wasn’t a cliched nothing burger….it was wrong, but at least there was a pulse.
You totally lost me. We have lots of private schools. Just get rid of government run schools funded with other people’s money. Simple as that.
What would probably happen is that you’d start figuring out what the real cost of the education is. Some massive market exists for totally private sector education is what I’ve been told, but I haven’t seen that market.
If there was such a market, it would have probably evidenced itself at the college level perhaps.
There are very, very few private schools that don’t accept some sort of state or federal money.
One is Hillsdale College. Outstanding school, and not cheap. They don’t take a dime of government money for any reason.
I can’t think of another, but if such a market for totally private institutions then I should be able to think of at least a dozen.
People, in short, would have a cow if they had to pay the full freight of their education.
What I will grant is that if they DID have to pay an actual invoice for their education, the kids would be coming to school better prepared. . .
Or more realistically, they wouldn’t be coming at all.
You made so many false equivalencies and straw arguments in there it’s hard to know where to start.
First, you conflated higher education with public school education.
Second, you are apparently unaware of the boom in on line private education.
Third, the “real cost” of eduation as you called it involves paying many high profile professors a few hundred thousand a year NOT to teach a damned class.
Fourth, you miss the point that we already as a society pay for every kid to have K-12 education…..and the massive market would be created if each family could take their allotment of money to whatever school they wanted.
Fifth, it was reported that DC now spends 30 thousand dollars per kid per year. Now please, tell me a huge market wouldn’t spring up overnight if that money could be taken to schools of choice. 30K a year!!!
Hey, put a business plan together and go for it. People thought running prisons would be wildly profitable too.
If you think there’s a market teaching inner city DC kids, then go for it. I think you are eventually sued out of business, whether the claims are meritorious or not.
Modern universities are there to generate IP, to subsist on government grants, etc. Tuition pays for about 11 percent of a college education, as it sits today.
Let’s not talk about the massive amount of debt they all piled up building gaudy monstrosities during the 2000’s.
The reason why I’m talking about the sencondary market is because it is relatively unregulated as compared to the K-12 market.
As a business person teaching inner-city DC kids, don’t forget you’ll be forced to take the special ed kids too (LEAST RESTRICTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT). You’ll be forced to evaluate each kid, every day, to see if they had been beaten or abused the night before, and report the same.
Then, you’ll be evaluated on test scores, whether they graduated, and then ultimately on whether they could hack college-level math.
But look at the gold in them thar hills pa! $30K per student in one of the most corrupt systems in the country - like there’d be $30K available to you if you took over. That’s all borrowed money. The actual PARENTS would have to pay, and they don’t have $30K per year.
Lots of private schools out there already, its just that each one gets to pick and choose its students. You won’t.
How obtuse are you??????? How in the hell do you keep missng the point, other than stupidity or just obstinance??
The market is not there because there is STILL A PUBLIC SCHOOL MONOPOLY - you numbskull. I’ve no time for ignorance.
A monopoly means there is only one place to educate your kid K-12. There isn’t. There are already private schools.
You haven’t made a point yet, except to say that public schools are bad, which is true. Not universally, but generally.
However, they are free, at least to the kid, and if you are coming from a bad home, that public school is a goldmine.
If you are coming from a good home, or a politicians home, well Sidwell Friends, Bellermine Prep, and others await.
Charter schools work, pretty much everywhere they are attempted.
I’m not sure in what world you think the left would give up their public school boondoggle, but even if they were willing to do it, there are hundreds, if not thousands of barriers to profitability posed by universally privatized K-12 education.
The research has been done. The central question is ‘Will parents pay, given the choice?’
The answer is ‘No’. No, for enough people that it would create massive public and private economic issues, crime issues, etc.
If I missed your point, I apologize. Your original point was simple: End it - the free market will do a better job.
My point was, maybe not, if the mandate is ‘least restrictive learning environment for ALL KIDS’. If you can pick and choose, no problem. If you have to take all the kids, and you are going to be evaluated in several, not very well connected ways, I don’t think it can be done.
All of this through the stupidity, I grant you.
My point is the money idiot…..there is a monopoly because THERE IS ONLY ONE PLACE WHERE THE PUBLIC MONEY GOES….TO THE GOVT MONOPOLY. My point from the beginning was that a market would ONLY EMERGE if THAT changes…..
REALLY HOW THICK ARE YOU???????? There should be a law against it.
You realize that the money for public schools come from property taxes for each school district in the US, right?
Each district sets its own salaries, makes its own decisions on text books, etc. (the exceptions being CA and TX). In WA state, teachers in Everett make more than teachers in, say, Moses Lake.
The Feds do kick in some money, but it is a lot less than you think and it generally goes to food.
The problem most districts have is that they want to tell the districts what to do even though they are putting in any cash.
So, when you refer to the government monopoly, which doesn’t exist because there are private schools available almost everywhere, you are referring to each individual State run school, as in the State of Oregon’s schools, the State of Louisiana’s schools, etc.
The feds don’t pay. The states do, and the feds try to tell the states what to do.
There is nothing stopping a state from deciding its going to eliminate its public schools and replace them with something else. This is why I said you should put a business plan together and go for it. Pick a red state and go to town.
There’s nothing in the US Constitution which mandates children are educated in public schools. Each State has its own constitution which speaks to that. WA State’s Constitution goes over the top on the issue. The union took the State to WA supreme court and the court ruled the State was not fulfilling its constitutional mandate.
So, avoid WA state in your business planning.
What your last point seemed to be, through the screaming, was you want to mandate that the money collected by taxes go to private schools instead of public. Correct me if I’m wrong.
You want the public money to go, potentially, to private schools. That sounds a lot like vouchers, which is fine by me. There are some fairness issues with that, in that you want to point a gun and collect money to fund schools, but you want there to be a free market in what schools you are mandated to attend (Pick a school, but you have to go).
Some would argue, senior citizens for example, that if you want to have a free market in K-12 education, let the seniors opt out of that portion of their property taxes, since they have no kids in schools.
“Let the parents pay. We are squeezed enough as it is, and this sounds like an excellent tax break.”
Where should the public money go?
The public money - should go in the form of vouchers. And so you know, I catch your first mistake and do not read 99% of what you write…you are close minded and don’t even understand what I’m saying. You are obviously a bureuacrtic type B left brain thinker.
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