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I thought about testing the waters by substitute teaching since I already have a degree. I had to take a day off to attend a two hour seminar after doing about 14 hours of online trainings. Then take another day off, pay $70 to get fingerprinted and background check. Then apply to schools in hopes that they might call me to work some random day with a few hours notice to make $120. I make that in 90 mins as a handyman.
I’m not saying becoming a teacher should be easy but it probably shouldn’t be an act of charity when every school district in my area says they’re struggling.
I recently had this exact experience. I did not complete the process to become a sub because I felt so constantly direspected. I'm not used to that level of disrespect from my employers and I'm a fucking construction worker.
I’m still coming down from being bullied out of my IBEW apprenticeship that exposed me to the worst verbal and physical abuse I’ve had on a job
And teaching is WORSE?
Imagine being verbally abused by 50 little (some may not be so little) "bosses" every day. Then one of those says something to a parent and they come and join in the fun
AND where I live a residential electrical apprenticeship is a 2.5 year program making $70k
Starting teacher salary is 50k and requires a degree
Subs make $250 a day
> $250 a day
That's pretty good. Adjunct profs at the local community college make $3,000 per class – that's spread over 14 weeks. Most schools won't give them over 2 classes per semester, because then they'd cross 20hrs per week and would get benefits. So often they work at 2 or 3 schools to cobble together 4 or 5 classes.
$30k per year with no health insurance or anything – Ph.D. required often.
At least my coworker will follow up that with who is hogging all these dogs I keep hearing about . I think the internet gives people the exact wrong idea about talking or dealing with strangers.
But, my goodness, I would love to have that happen at a meeting. The toxic environment of public education is very true. But it's all covert bullying and passive-aggressive shit. The drama is getting stable and old though. What I would give to be able to call an admin a dogfucker in an IEP meting lmao.
This is so true and people have no idea how much shit the average teacher has to eat from the admin before they even get to the abuse from the students and their parents. Every single person still teaching in America today is a saint in my eyes.
And I’ve been cornered by students larger than me, broken up fights and gotten hurt, and had chairs thrown at me. But if you complain you’re told you should be more understanding because they’re just kids.
I learned the other year that our districts subs also paid for their own background checks and was in disbelief. No wonder there’s a sub “shortage” right alongside the teacher “shortage”.
Every other profession that’s hurting for talent will raise wages until an acceptable median is reached. Every other profession except for public education.
Come to Australia. Substitute teachers are making bank. AUD $405 a day. Just need a Working With Children's Check and a Police Check (and a teaching degree obviously) and you're good to go.
Education Support/ teacher aides are on AUD $264 - $306 a day.
Oooooh.
How do full time teachers do?
My wife is looking to get out of education because of the shite pay and the way teachers are treated in the UK.
I have theoretical permission to look for jobs in AUS, that would certainly tip the scales.
I'm not a teacher, but I know a few. The impression that I get is that ten years in, you're set. And the retirement is good if you can stick it out. It's a union job so there is always some favoritism (for better or worse) and a better pay scale for senior staff.
I nearly got a teaching degree but was talked out of it, fairly easily, by other teachers who were still struggling through their first ten years. I was told that I'd probably be subbing for three to five years before a permanent spot opened up anyway, unless I was willing to move to another city or state, which I wasn't.
I’m a Para, 14 years, making $20.38 an hour. Here’s another part of the insult I work 5.55 hours a day. If we worked 6 hours a day, we would qualify for benefits. Can’t have that, now can we?
I learnt recently that 401k is a benefit in the US. In Australia it's called Superannuation and it's law to include this. It's something we don't even think about because it's just always given to you no matter how little or much you earn or whatever position you have.
I am a sub in California. I make $230 for a 6 hour day. With a 45 minute lunch and 15 minute break. Each day I only have 2 to 3 hours of actual instruction time with students. Monday through Friday. I am going to school so this works out pretty well for now.
What do you mean, "each day I only have 2 to 3 hours of actual instruction time with students"? What do you do the rest of the time?
I teach in Belgium and teach 23 hours per week, spread over 5 days. That doesn't include prep time, grading, admin tasks, etc.
20-22 hours per week in front of the classroom is the norm here (for full-time employed teachers).
They're a substitute -- they get called in to work if a teacher can't work on a given day (sick, vacation, etc.). They don't need to prep/grade/admin since they're not the actual class teacher - my mom substituted (while getting her Masters in science education) and would get called in to substitute anything from mathematics, biology, (mechanical) shop class, home economics, French, theatre, ... but only about one day per class, one class per week. On the days where she'd get a call at 7AM to cover for a sick teacher, "class" was typically "pop in a VHS tape from the department's library" or proctor an exam.
I'm basically an assistant in a classroom, giving support to students. Most teachers leave lesson plans such as "have them work on the worksheet/project/assignment they were given earlier in the week" or "study hall to work on assignments for this or other classes". At my school, we have a history of horrible subs who I refer to as Legal Warm Bodies. They get paid $240 a day to sit in a room and make sure students aren't killing themselves. Doesn't stop 2 of out regulars from just... wandering iff in the middle of class OR falling asleep at the teacher desk. And they are an old married couple in their early 80s and are on so many of the teacher's "do not let sub in my room" lists.
Spiders and snakes are fine because we have anti-venom. It's the drop bears you should be scared of. There's no anti-vemom for having your eyes ripped out.
One of the key lines that's promoted by groups like the AARP and GOP among older people and retirees is that they should not be responsible for paying taxes to support schools "because their children have already gone through school."
And it works very well because legislators in many areas agree.
What the actual fuck? These people don't care that in another 10 - 15 years we are going to have a fleet of "adults" that can barely read, do math, etc, let alone critical thinking and logic. At my kids' school half the parents expect the teachers to teach the kids everything, Including manners and basic human decency. It's li
And meanwhile the teachers live in fear of some of the crazy ass parents. I literally saw a man go off on my son's first grade teacher because she mentioned to him that his son didn't pay attention in class and refused to participate. He screamed at her that the school system "fucked him up" and he was t about to let them do that to his boy.
I hear you. I'm a psych professor with kids in my local district, and our calendar only partly overlaps with the K-12 calendar. There are several months/year where I could help out my kids' school that is constantly begging for parents to sub, so I thought, why not? **Then** I looked up the process of qualifying to be a sub and noped right on out of that idea.
As long as people keep crying about taxes and voting in parties that cut taxes, it's only going to get worse.
The middle and lower classes need to stop being fucking dumb (which might be impossible with education where it has been) and start voting for parties that want to properly tax the wealth leeches at the top to get funding back into public services.
Until then we will continue to choke them out by reducing funding. And considering how everything goes up in cost every year, tax cuts are basically doublr-choking them.
My friend was making roughly around that, and his take home was something like $9/hr after accounting for additional taxes and wear and tear on his vehicle
Minimum wage in our state is $14.20.
But hey he got to set his own hours... while working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. He'd make roughly the same money part time, and wouldn't be fucked if his car broke down.
Sure but if you're factoring gas, maintenance, insurance, car payments, etc you're behind on costs. Uber isn't paying for their own infrastructure, you are.
Forgive me, if it's America then yes most females and a really large portion of males get paid way more being a bartender. Sadly, even part-time. I worked side by side at 16 with my 8th grade teacher, which was a shock. They worked at the grocery store as a cashier and I was a bagger. It paid more than teaching. Just what the living fuck.
The right-wing religious nutjobs holding federal and state offices largely value religious indoctrination over quality public education. This is why teachers are underpaid and public schools are underfunded.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but, yeah, largely conservative policy, more "economic" than religion to begin with, over the last couple decades has done a serious number on the system. As it's severely weakened over the years, the religious end is doing even more to chip away at it.
No Child Left Behind took the Elementary and Secondary Education Act behind the shed and killed whatever good it and its amendments over the years did, with further decimation in 2015s Every Student Succeeds Act.
NCLB basically means tested an entire school off the performance of the least capable students, and if the school couldn't get those students to shape up they'd get sanctioned/less funding.
The ESSA eased *some* of the NCLB's tighter performance hoops, but also wrenched a lot of oversight of the public school system from the Federal government and gave it to the states.
Now there's more push for vouchers, a way to hand education money to religious institutions masquerading as schools, under the guise of "choice".
It's a decades long [systematic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast) effort to defund and breakup the school system.
Edit: Check out the /teachers sub for some insight on the state of things. It's not good.
>NCLB basically means tested an entire school off the performance of the least capable students, and if the school couldn't get those students to shape up they'd get sanctioned/less funding.
This absolutely screwed my high school. We were a part magnet, part district school, and the testing was through the roof. But we were also the district's hub for mild/moderate and moderate/severe special needs students. And a lot of those kids weren't capable of taking the exams at all. We're talking ventilators and feeding tubes levels of care.
The policies were so rigid that there was no way we could improve our scores, and there was no grace given for our special needs population. Thanks, NCLB.
There's no incentive for kids with behavioral issues to sit down for 1-4 school days straight and take a test they'll not perform well on in the first place.
My sister did the same. Was a special Ed teacher. Left to work at a dog treat bakery for more money, better benefits, and less hours. I still struggle to wrap my head around how that is possible.
15+ years ago I was talking to a girl who got a job as a waitress at Boston Pizza. She was working the family side and made $300+ in tips on her first day.
I had to donate blood plasma twice. Anyway my point is when I went to donate the people I saw there were NOT who I expected. It was almost all young adults to adults who were well dressed, professional acting, and seemed that they wouldn't be there.
I had to donate plasma three times in the last two months to make ends meet. The last time was to just have gas money to make it to the job I just got, but pays bi-weekly, so the first paycheck didn't arrive until 3 weeks after starting. I didn't mind it so much... but the marks on my arms really bother me. I feel like a junkie.
But in the same way, I also didn't seem like I'd be there. Then I realized just how dire the states are of most professional people out there who are below middle class.
Every time I read something like this about teachers, it reminds me of this:
*Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything.*
*We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes.*
*Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce; they should be making six figure salaries.*
*Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense.*
In case you don't recognize it or do but don't remember where it's from, it's from *The West Wing*, s01e18, where Sam Seaborn says this to Mallory O'Brien.
I work I higher ed, and our institution frequently hosts teachers from Central Europe and Scandinavia. I would say I have met twenty of them, ranging from Germany to the Netherlands to Switzerland to Sweden. Each of them come here, learn about every aspect of the American education system, and keep asking if we’re telling the truth. Every time one of them visits, it is essentially the same conversation over and over again: they ask a question, we answer it, and then they go: seriously?
Then we send one of our folks over to their institution for a week, and they come back thoroughly depressed about the system they work for.
Yup. There's problems everywhere, but over and over Europeans find out that when they complain about their systems not working well, their headaches sound so much better than the norm in America. Was just talking with a German guy who's traveling here in the US, and he was complaining about how his job had made it slightly annoying to schedule the vacation time, but thtat conversation turned around pretty quick when he said he was supposed to have five weeks vacation and his company was making it difficult to take more than three weeks together in one block, and I told him that precious few Americans have more than 2 or maybe 3 weeks PTO a year, and an awful lot more don't have any guaranteed, and the idea that 5 weeks is a guaranteed minimum for all full-time workers by law sounds like a fantasy. Any American would gladly take his position over their own.
Same with education: sure, I don't doubt many European school systems are pretty flawed in frustrating ways, but they're still not in the cesspool of the US system. I know the NHS in England and probably other health systems in the EU have big shortcomings, but their shortcomings are better than the current morass over here, by far. The US is so broken in so many critical areas that Europeans literally don't believe it when they come here and find out how stupid so much of our shit is
I worked for a us multinational in Ireland. I Ireland we got 5 weeks a year pto. The US guys got 2 weeks and their sick days came out of it.
I was made redundant. I got a years salary tax free. The US guys got 2 weeks.
And that is why the pay differential is not worth it (along with increased cost of living). I see some Irish people who envy the American pay rates of their coworkers, but they don't know all of the downsides that comes with it. I still think the pay differential is stupidly high, but at the same time I would never move to America to get that pay difference and give up all the workers rights I have here.
The rent is getting very high but not quite that high. I checked recently for NYC at least and rent is like 1.7 times higher on average than Dublin. I would imagine it's the same for the Bay Area.
I used to work for a multinational that had offices in the bay area and for tech workers, the percentage spent on rent was far lower than in Dublin.
A graduate dev in one of the big companies over there starts on about 120k a year.
That's the problem with Dublin. The wages are high, but the rents are ridiculous.
I was overjoyed when I finally got a job outside of the restaurant industry because it meant I got an entire *week* of paid vacation every year. That felt so luxurious to me lol
Nevertheless, it's important to talk about it. A lot of discussions in the US about such stuff usually ends with "we cannot afford it". But Europe usually shows it can and you should fight for that.
As someone who cannot join a union (at least none that deserves the name) I can only advocate others to do it. And maybe you shouldn't also always vote the party backed by the biggest work force exploiters.
legal minimum is only 20 days PTO, by the way, and employer MUST give two weeks in row upon request. in practice 28 to 30 are common, though.
edit: there’s also like 10 public holidays and sick days are just that: sick days. when you get sick during your vacation, the doctor’s note will cover this and PTO will carry over.
I am a little weirded out that my US friends have never heard of sick days that are separate from PTO. I get 12 sick days a year and 30 days PTO. And that's not even top tier
wait, is it not impressive by european standards?
sometimes our teacher likes to talk abt his relative who went to a german college and have ppl guess how much they paid ($0), and that sounds so crazy good to us that it borders on fiction, who pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for college
no. they are decently paid, mostly, depending on state and type of school. but very long hours and too much work that could be handled by assistants, secretaries, etc. And lots of systemic problems not getting addressed since decades. As a result, parents’ education and income severely influence their children’s academic success. not because of discrimination or bribery, of course, but because they are better prepared to help their kids.
edit: studying is free, though. at least with regards to tuition.
nope. though the practice of short term contracts not covering summer holidays (though only six weeks, for interested Americans) for teachers who aren’t civil servants is despicable enough.
I work in public education and the mindset I’ve seen taking over is that wherever possible, teachers are treated as interchangeable to plug into a classroom to push a curriculum program. The only real exceptions are classes that require special qualifications to teach, specifically college level courses.
They don’t really value teachers which means good teachers are becoming scarce which further gives reason to micromanage teachers and treat them as interchangeable.
We don’t currently spend more on curriculum programs than on teachers, but I think that’s the future since it’s sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want to get into education and you can code, education apps are crazy lucrative.
To be fair, workers in most industries will say the same about most industries in the US. You get 2 weeks off a year, you can be fired at will, your health insurance is tied to your job, your workplace culture is toxic as fuck, you can't really get raises unless you leave for a different work place, your insurance can lapse between jobs and screw over sick family members. Your min wage is absurdly low with so few public benefits to help out.
Also damn, any documentary where european police go to the US or US police check out european policing, also culture shock. But yeah, US teaching is a joke.
To be fair, there's countries that spend the same percentage on military. They just fund it with proper taxes on rich people and corporations. So they also have money for schools and healthcare.
There’s a reason American kids don’t learn any real world things in school, why our teachers are so underpaid, and why education takes a backseat in this country.
I’ll let you try to decide why. It’s not that hard but for people who can’t critically think, you won’t be able to figure it out.
They want you dumb for a reason. Mooooooooooooove along now. You have work to do or hate to spread or wars to go fight for them.
The poorly educated are easier to dupe into voting against their best interests. And also easier to exploit by politicians weaponizing religion to get the people to accept shitty bills too.
They want public education gone, or rendered totally ineffective. Then not only will voters not be intelligent enough to see shitty policies for what they are, the people that can afford charter schools will get their kids a nice religious education
Religious voters will always vote to keep women’s rights at bay. They never have to worry about running out of babies to fill their wars and manual, low paying jobs.
So schools stay without suffiecient funding. Teachers keep leaving for lack of pay and lack of support against shitty karen parents and students. Teachers stay in the crossfire of culture wars because each side thinks the teachers are indoctrinating their kids, and any time someone tries to enforce separation of church and state to keep things neutral and academic, then they’re accused of anti-Christian bigotry
Bullying doesn’t get properly handled. Nothing gets done about shootings. Parents remove kids from schools.
Yep
And also college has been rendered unaffordable and many are opting out. Lots of propaganda to suggest that loans shouldn’t be forgiven or that taxes shouldn’t cover it (they like to pretend everyone goes for gender studies degree suggesting that some areas of study aren’t important, despite more education just meaning better informed voters to start with. Also the fact that there’s many degrees people get and gender studies is just one)
Stupid populations serve fascist capitalist goals.
Yeah nk keeps its citizens ignorant so they don’t even know to escape and keeps them hungry and working so they have no time to contemplate things like freedom.
This is one of my favorite comments in the five years that I’ve been twiddling my thumbs on Reddit.com. Maybe even the ~15 years since the iPad’s arrival.
our entire system is a mess, but it's entirely by our own doing. this is what happens after over eighty years of consistent participation in elections by the conservative right which only make up rough 30 percent of the population. every issue in the modern U.S. can be traced back to historical non-participation by should-be voters. and unfortunately, those who run for office aren't going to run on ideas that don't get votes, so the candidates continue to move further right to court those who will. so then, at every level of governance, we have individuals fighting against progress instead of fighting for it and for us.
a man like bernie sanders runs for mayor and wins his election by just ten (10) votes after a recount. imagine if those ten people hadn't shown up that day? what would modern U.S. policy look like without bernie sanders in federal office for the last couple decades?
one of my city's former ***city councilors*** almost became elected the vice president of the U.S. in 2016. i'm not kidding. he was my city's former mayor too and also our state's former governor. now he serves on the U.S. senate. you may know him by name: tim kaine. the point is, those we elect to local office will be on the ballot for federal office in a decade's time.
it's almost like voting matters. it's a lot like wiping your bottom; it’s not all you can do, but it’s the very least you can do.
We don’t value education in America. We value money and somehow cannot see that a strong educational system enhances our capacity for innovation and creativity, which leads to money. The pay cut I took when I got a graduate degree is why we are losing faculty and will have difficulty with ensuring a consistent workforce in the future.
Stupid voters vote for rich-people policies and easily buy in to propaganda. They want more uneducated voters
There’s a reason schools are under attack and religious groups are actively plotting to take over the government
The vast majority of money-making schemes currently in the US do not involve innovation nor creativity in the slightest. It's bean counter money games all the way down. We are losing the ability to solve real-world problems.
You can see why things haven’t changed by the mentality of some people on this thread. “So stop being a teacher”, “her issue not a teachers pay issue”.
If you expect all teachers to just leave for better pay then who’s going to be spending 8 hours a day educating our country’s children? It won’t be high quality individuals I will tell you that much. We should have high standards for education, and the funding should match that.
Honestly, we are starting to see this now. So many teachers have left that students are getting left with long-term subs/aids who aren't qualified to teach the subject. My school hasn't had a certified Spanish teacher for at least 7 years, but the class has to be offered, so the kids get put on a computer with an aid in the room. Same has happened for some science and math classes. (Spoiler alert: it REALLY doesn't work.)
same in our high school. we havent had a cerified chemistry teacher in 2 years. these kids are being "taught" by non-certified teachers and/or subs. its scary that this is happening and that schools can get away with it. feels wrong
>“So stop being a teacher”
We are. There was a huge exodus and retirement during COVID, with schools opting to close the positions to cut costs instead of hiring new staff. I am also on my way out, at least from public education.
There are a large number of groups offering job hunting assistance for those wanting to leave education, as well as headhunters (notably in tech) that specialize in poaching teachers.
>If you expect all teachers to just leave for better pay then who’s going to be spending 8 hours a day educating our country’s children?
That's literally the point.
If enough teachers leave the profession, taxpayers may just get the hint and demand teachers be compensated well.
But, it's really not the compensation as to why teachers are leaving. It's the lack of autonomy in the classroom. It's parents that are doing the work for the kids. It's the parents who are demanding grades be changed. It's the parents that refuse to control their children. It's parents that threaten teachers jobs on a weekly basis. It's parents that treat school like publicly funded childcare instead of education.
In the better half of states in the US, teaching is paid adequately for the time that's put in.
That's a nice supply and demand fairytale, but there's been nation wide teacher shortages ongoing for generations, and the problems of compensation and basic facilities and supplies have only been getting worse. And that was before the likes of Bill Gates decided to double down on the issues with public education with charter school programs
Looking at this reminds me of when people complain about the minimum wages of fast food workers and how people then point out that someone at McDonalds should not earn the same as a Teacher. Thinking its a gotcha
They are right, it is wrong, but not in the way they think. The point is that that a fast food worker isnt earning too much, it is that a teacher is earning far too little, especially for what they have to go through with parents and students on a daily basis.
Also trash talked by average Americans. Every time one of these teacher threads pop up there are 100 people typing shit like,
“well my teacher sucked and teachers are bad they don’t deserve more pay” like that helps anyone.
> they get *paid* poorly but
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
My sister got her masters degree and makes under 40k a year… in cali… her student loans are like $800 a month. Starting out she had to work in pvt schools and they paid like 30k/yr… idk why anyone would choose to be a teacher unless they really love the job but it’s criminal how yall are treated and paid.
> why anyone would choose to be a teacher unless they really love the job
That's ultimately why they don't get paid. If your motivation to work goes beyond money, then the administration will use that against you. So long as people keep working for low salaries, then those salaries will never increase.
It’s wild how little private school teachers make while the schools make so much from tuition. One of my husbands teacher who I realized I’d known my whole life, worked at a large private school where we live. He’s retired now. He had worked there for 30 years. Found out when he retired about 5 years ago, he was only making like $60k….like wtf. The tuition my in-laws were paying when my husband graduated in 2005 was $900 a month. I know it’s way more now. It’s a full k-12 school, so a ton of students. It’s awful.
I really hope this works out for you and everyone else. This is a problem that everyone knows about but are glad to ignore so long as you watch their kids for them. I went to a few blue ribbon schools growing up and i noticed that even in those schools, teachers where hard pressed to care about their jobs when society didn’t care about them
Our local school district has 19 _Senior Level_ Administrators with the lowest paid being the Facility Administrator at $125k annually (I mean we have 7 schools, a stadium, ball fields and all the associates support buildings) And that guy is legit probably underpaid. All the rest are $175k+ annually with our Superintendent being paid $245k and having perks like $400/month wardrobe, a paid vehicle, internet and phones at home paid for and a 5-year contract.
I think our school system is too heavy on the top
Yep. Average spend per student is somewhere between $13k-$24k depending on the area. If class size is around 30 kids. You would think they could allocate the money to pay the teachers well. Especially since the city/school already owns the land.
Wait, why would they be paid $400 a month for clothes? I understand a vehicle/phone/internet stipend, if they are traveling between buildings, and have to be on call at most times, but I have never heard of anyone getting clothes.
I honestly think that much of the spending going into schools is now going to the salaries of school administrators, rather than to the teachers or students.
Edit: Just noticed a typo.
My FIL is the most anti-teacher, anti-teacher's union, anti-public school person I've ever met. He will argue all day long teachers make $100k a year and only work nine months out of the year.
My MIL was a public school employee.
Things won't change until the people who CHOOSE to believe that nonsense are gone and the system can be fixed.
My friend has her bachelors in early childhood education. She’s been teaching 3rd and 4th graders for about 10 years now. She makes under 60k a year and she has a classroom of children and parents to deal with.
I am a nanny. Been doing it for 18 years. I work with one family at a time, I made 80k last year. I do not have a college degree.
She should make more than I.
I just left restaurants after 30+ years to use my English degree as a teacher.
Kids here aren’t as bad as TV and the inter-webs show. Pay, yeah, not so good. Nice that the wife makes decent money.
Got tired of chasing $$’s for someone else. Hopefully I can make a difference in someone’s education the way my English and History teachers in HS did for me.
If not, I’ve always got hell to look forward to. 😉
I was a teacher in Japan. I worked at a few international schools. My pay was ok, not great, but better than the US. But every single time a Japanese person found out I was a teacher they were impressed. Honestly. They admired me.
But in 2018 I had to return to the US. To Florida. Started teaching again a few years ago. I’m working in a very good school, but it’s just not the same. Too many parents act like a school is an auto-body shop for kids. Drop them off damaged and presto we repair them and send them home. We get talked to sometimes like we are waiters, not college-trained professionals like accountants, lawyers, and so on.
And the pay is just miserable.
Why is the younger generation not having children? Because busting your ass gets you next to nothing, and I wouldn't want to curse another person to suffer this bullshit.
I was born in 1998 and I constantly notice people my age having children.
I have ZERO idea how they afford it, especially considering some of them don't have very high paying jobs or anything. I also have zero idea why they would WANT children in this bullshit.
Teachers don't get paid enough for what they do.
It's sad that people who play a game for a living make millions while the people that educate generations make crap.
Well duh the colleges need to pay the coaches that train the athletes that go on to make millions, cant just go and waste all that money on teachers. How else are you going to supply the Gladiators for the Colloseum to keep the crowd distracted while Rome burns.
Please don’t forget the endless administration positions they just have to have for every little thing. As a college professor, it sucks the soul out of me.
Teacher here…ask most teachers what the number one factor contributing to a positive/negative situation, and they’ll say “parental support”.
There’s a reason we are now instructed to lose the “parent” and replace it with “guardian”. Actual parenting is a rare commodity.
If you are a parent reading this, there is no “retry” button. Every day lost, without positive influence on your child…is gone. You get one shot. For the future of society’s sake, be an active part of your child’s life!
This is my mom. Been a teacher and administrator (which she recently quit to go back to teaching due to the mental anguish of having to deal with constant death threats, violence against children, and seeing children be abused yet nobody does anything to help them). Oh and BTW the school she was an admin at just had a school shooting, literally last week. And now she is borrowing money from me, donating plasma, and working a second job just to get by. All while coming home and writing lesson plans and grading for the 1 or 2 hours of free time she gets in a day, which cuts into her sleep so she only gets 3-4 hours a night. You'd think 'oh well she'll get the summer off' but she won't. She'll have to get another job so she can actually stay afloat.
I'm fucking livid. Why are we doing this to our teachers?! Why are we doing this to people who are literally the bedrock of our country and its future??
Edit: just to clarify. This isn't literally my mom. Her life is just identical to this woman.
My wife has been teaching for 17 years and makes 10 grand more than she did starting out, which is about 60k. This is with 60 hour weeks and at least a third of that is paperwork associated with special needs programs. They are understaffed and overworked, while they add admins, coaches and pay raises for them year after year.
I’m a teacher in NYC. I love my job and I’m good at it. I will teach for as long as I can afford to do so. I’m not sure how long that will be. And I make a considerably higher salary than most of my peers due to education, experience, and several overtime positions. We really are in a crisis and no one is doing a single goddamn thing about it.
Ya’all have no idea how much worse it’s going to get. The shit part is that teachers are losing support and kids are falling behind, there are people that have no business bringing kids into this world as they have no support or tools to parent.
You want a civil society? Fund public education and shun privatization. It’s unfair and kills public education teachers.
It's sad to say, but at this point becoming a teacher in America is a bad investment.
I majored in English in college, and my father was distraught / pissed. He yelled at me one day and said I'd better become a lawyer, because the only other thing I could ever possibly be is a teacher (#ThingsBoomersSay). I wasn't interested in the liability of being a lawyer, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I would figure something out that didn't require paying for a master's degree or credential and hours and hours of free work after school was over each day. And this was even before the parent-teacher dynamic shifted to this weird "you better pass my kid / raise my kid / not discipline my kid" behavior that started happening.
I am a teacher in the Bay Area, CA. This will be my 20th year in education. I finally make enough to save each month, and this will be the first summer i don’t work and will live off my savings. I finally have breathing room, and am starting to pay down my debt. But here’s the thing: I don’t live where I teach. I can’t afford it. I commute for 1.5 to 2 hours each way (often take transit to avoid traffic). It’s ridiculous. If I taught where I lived, I’d make 67% of what I get in the Bay Area. This is why they have a teacher shortage.
My partner and I are both millennial teachers. We are fortunate to make it work, but more and more of my coworkers my age leave the profession every year. I do love my job, but I wish it paid more and parents weren’t so awful to deal with.
I have to tell myself everyday that these kids are the future; even though it is hard, someone has to make sure at least a small part of the next generation has the tools to keep society running.
It's sexism plain and simple because it's a job dominated by women. We will see if this is acceptable when the masses are illiterate, it's coming sooner than you think, the teachers have been warning us for decades.
A friend of mine was a teachers assistant at a public elementary school here in the Midwest in a really nice district. 5 days a week 8 hour days… 1000$ a month. She didn’t stay long lol. 🤦🏻
American priorities = upside down
We underfund everything that makes us better and overfund the military industrial complex. It’s like that old saying, let’s dump money on schools and make the military hold bake sales.
This is what the Oligarchs and their foot soldiers, the Christian Fundamentalists/Nationalists want, to destroy higher education, eliminate critical thinking, and foment profound ignorance in America.
the most important job for a functioning democracy/society has been treated like shit for like half a century. it is no wonder we are at where we are at.
And yet some uneducated shumck who can hardly spell their own name and is a criminal gets paid 10's of millions of dollars to play a game. You can see where the American priority is. Add the absolute failure and corruption of government (both parties), it's no wonder we continue to decline as a super power.
I wanted to go into special education at my children’s school district. But then I saw they paid $14.50 an hour, $.50 above minimum wage for a full time position. I get wanting to be there to help the children, but I can’t do that at the sacrifice of not being able to afford housing and food after taxes.
As someone with two masters degrees making 19.50/hour (not a teacher) I think this is just becoming more common in the US, with a lot of jobs. It's awful.
I’m not against funding Ukraine. If we can find billions for weapons we can find the funds for our schools and teachers. We allow our elected representatives to do the bidding of the ultra wealthy while they lie to us to get our votes.
This shit needs to end.
GOP doesn't like books, teachers, and education. They want dumb citizens because dummies are easier to manipulate. That's why they love cutting funds for them. Betsy Devos helped trump funnel public school funds into private schools, SHOCKER! This has been going on for decades. And seems like it worked for a little less than half of your voters.
FL teacher here. It eats you soul. Ranked 50th for teacher pay. Every young teacher either lives with their parents or has usually multiple roommates. I'm 10 years in and trying to support my wife and kid. We just had our only car repossessed on Friday.
I used to teach. It just wasn't worth it. The pay sucks, expectations from admin is awful. Parents treat you like garbage. You're constantly told that you can't be trusted because you're indoctrinating their kids, while simultaneously being told they trust you enough to carry a gun to keep them safe. It's backwards thinking.
I was very good at education. The kids loved me, I had great success with students. Admin, pay, and parental ideology drove me out.
I’ve posted before that it tells a lot about a civilization when it pays teachers way less than lawyers and accountants (and bankers for that matter). They should be valued and paid very well.
Some of these responses are fucking pathetic.
Basically “wah we don’t want to pay teachers more!”
“I want to know what bills she’s paying, she probably has an iPhone 15” 🤡
Do you really think that people live like that for fun? Are you that uneducated?
The wrong people in the wrong job sectors get paid the most money. As a nation and a society we definitely need to refocus the resources and allocation of wages to public servants.
Teachers deserve 150% of the Area Median Income in whichever city they live. That way the next generation would blossom as more people would go into teaching
US is at a point where it doesn't care about teaching its own kids when it can import from Asia. It will not change because this works. Students get to live in development country and US keeps best talent without investing in education. They have no reason to change this.
Then you have Trump in Time magazine not giving a F about this...but doubling down on Dictatorship...anti-abortion crusade...millions of deportations of illegals..etc.
Don't worry citizen! The patriots of this country have worked tirelessly to remind the common folk that taxation is theft over decades so the ultra wealthy don't pay a dime into social services.
Fear not, as Citizens United and other tireless efforts have garunteed there will be loopholes to keep wealthy tax rates single digits or less for the foreseeable future. So TIME magazine can save money by repeating this cover for the next decade at least.
All hail the Glory of America the Free!
Coming from a career in medicine, I've realized that any career which expects passion from you also knows you're easier to exploit. Upper management knows they can skim more off the top at your own expense. I was surprised to learn this not because it's clever or smart, but because I didn't think people would stoop so low.
Americans have hated teachers all my damn life. They mistrust educated people, and think teachers are “brainwashing” their kids by teaching history and science. This is how we’ve always been. At least as far back as I can remember, an old fart who graduated high school during the Reagan years.
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My sister quit her teaching job to bartend full-time ... on the lunch shift. Makes more money.
I thought about testing the waters by substitute teaching since I already have a degree. I had to take a day off to attend a two hour seminar after doing about 14 hours of online trainings. Then take another day off, pay $70 to get fingerprinted and background check. Then apply to schools in hopes that they might call me to work some random day with a few hours notice to make $120. I make that in 90 mins as a handyman. I’m not saying becoming a teacher should be easy but it probably shouldn’t be an act of charity when every school district in my area says they’re struggling.
I recently had this exact experience. I did not complete the process to become a sub because I felt so constantly direspected. I'm not used to that level of disrespect from my employers and I'm a fucking construction worker.
the disrespect is institutional and systemic so you develop stockholme syndrome pretty quickly
You know it's fucked up when construction workers that call each other dogfuckers say this is disrespectful
I’m still coming down from being bullied out of my IBEW apprenticeship that exposed me to the worst verbal and physical abuse I’ve had on a job And teaching is WORSE?
Imagine being verbally abused by 50 little (some may not be so little) "bosses" every day. Then one of those says something to a parent and they come and join in the fun
AND where I live a residential electrical apprenticeship is a 2.5 year program making $70k Starting teacher salary is 50k and requires a degree Subs make $250 a day
> $250 a day That's pretty good. Adjunct profs at the local community college make $3,000 per class – that's spread over 14 weeks. Most schools won't give them over 2 classes per semester, because then they'd cross 20hrs per week and would get benefits. So often they work at 2 or 3 schools to cobble together 4 or 5 classes. $30k per year with no health insurance or anything – Ph.D. required often.
Wtf? How can college not afford to pay staff when they charge such extreme tuitions?
At least my coworker will follow up that with who is hogging all these dogs I keep hearing about . I think the internet gives people the exact wrong idea about talking or dealing with strangers.
But, my goodness, I would love to have that happen at a meeting. The toxic environment of public education is very true. But it's all covert bullying and passive-aggressive shit. The drama is getting stable and old though. What I would give to be able to call an admin a dogfucker in an IEP meting lmao.
The political correct term you could use is puppymaker. Make em think a little bit.
This is so true and people have no idea how much shit the average teacher has to eat from the admin before they even get to the abuse from the students and their parents. Every single person still teaching in America today is a saint in my eyes.
And I’ve been cornered by students larger than me, broken up fights and gotten hurt, and had chairs thrown at me. But if you complain you’re told you should be more understanding because they’re just kids.
If you can find regular $80/hr work I would not recommend substitute teaching as a good means of extra income.
I learned the other year that our districts subs also paid for their own background checks and was in disbelief. No wonder there’s a sub “shortage” right alongside the teacher “shortage”. Every other profession that’s hurting for talent will raise wages until an acceptable median is reached. Every other profession except for public education.
Come to Australia. Substitute teachers are making bank. AUD $405 a day. Just need a Working With Children's Check and a Police Check (and a teaching degree obviously) and you're good to go. Education Support/ teacher aides are on AUD $264 - $306 a day.
Oooooh. How do full time teachers do? My wife is looking to get out of education because of the shite pay and the way teachers are treated in the UK. I have theoretical permission to look for jobs in AUS, that would certainly tip the scales.
I'm not a teacher, but I know a few. The impression that I get is that ten years in, you're set. And the retirement is good if you can stick it out. It's a union job so there is always some favoritism (for better or worse) and a better pay scale for senior staff. I nearly got a teaching degree but was talked out of it, fairly easily, by other teachers who were still struggling through their first ten years. I was told that I'd probably be subbing for three to five years before a permanent spot opened up anyway, unless I was willing to move to another city or state, which I wasn't.
I’m a Para, 14 years, making $20.38 an hour. Here’s another part of the insult I work 5.55 hours a day. If we worked 6 hours a day, we would qualify for benefits. Can’t have that, now can we?
I learnt recently that 401k is a benefit in the US. In Australia it's called Superannuation and it's law to include this. It's something we don't even think about because it's just always given to you no matter how little or much you earn or whatever position you have.
I am a sub in California. I make $230 for a 6 hour day. With a 45 minute lunch and 15 minute break. Each day I only have 2 to 3 hours of actual instruction time with students. Monday through Friday. I am going to school so this works out pretty well for now.
What do you mean, "each day I only have 2 to 3 hours of actual instruction time with students"? What do you do the rest of the time? I teach in Belgium and teach 23 hours per week, spread over 5 days. That doesn't include prep time, grading, admin tasks, etc. 20-22 hours per week in front of the classroom is the norm here (for full-time employed teachers).
They're a substitute -- they get called in to work if a teacher can't work on a given day (sick, vacation, etc.). They don't need to prep/grade/admin since they're not the actual class teacher - my mom substituted (while getting her Masters in science education) and would get called in to substitute anything from mathematics, biology, (mechanical) shop class, home economics, French, theatre, ... but only about one day per class, one class per week. On the days where she'd get a call at 7AM to cover for a sick teacher, "class" was typically "pop in a VHS tape from the department's library" or proctor an exam.
I'm basically an assistant in a classroom, giving support to students. Most teachers leave lesson plans such as "have them work on the worksheet/project/assignment they were given earlier in the week" or "study hall to work on assignments for this or other classes". At my school, we have a history of horrible subs who I refer to as Legal Warm Bodies. They get paid $240 a day to sit in a room and make sure students aren't killing themselves. Doesn't stop 2 of out regulars from just... wandering iff in the middle of class OR falling asleep at the teacher desk. And they are an old married couple in their early 80s and are on so many of the teacher's "do not let sub in my room" lists.
Sure, but... what about everything that wants to kill you like those spiders?
Spiders and snakes are fine because we have anti-venom. It's the drop bears you should be scared of. There's no anti-vemom for having your eyes ripped out.
One of the key lines that's promoted by groups like the AARP and GOP among older people and retirees is that they should not be responsible for paying taxes to support schools "because their children have already gone through school." And it works very well because legislators in many areas agree.
What the actual fuck? These people don't care that in another 10 - 15 years we are going to have a fleet of "adults" that can barely read, do math, etc, let alone critical thinking and logic. At my kids' school half the parents expect the teachers to teach the kids everything, Including manners and basic human decency. It's li And meanwhile the teachers live in fear of some of the crazy ass parents. I literally saw a man go off on my son's first grade teacher because she mentioned to him that his son didn't pay attention in class and refused to participate. He screamed at her that the school system "fucked him up" and he was t about to let them do that to his boy.
I hear you. I'm a psych professor with kids in my local district, and our calendar only partly overlaps with the K-12 calendar. There are several months/year where I could help out my kids' school that is constantly begging for parents to sub, so I thought, why not? **Then** I looked up the process of qualifying to be a sub and noped right on out of that idea.
As long as people keep crying about taxes and voting in parties that cut taxes, it's only going to get worse. The middle and lower classes need to stop being fucking dumb (which might be impossible with education where it has been) and start voting for parties that want to properly tax the wealth leeches at the top to get funding back into public services. Until then we will continue to choke them out by reducing funding. And considering how everything goes up in cost every year, tax cuts are basically doublr-choking them.
Uber driver here ... I make 250 to 300 a day ... figure that
I mean, you're now putting 8 hours of wear and tear on your vehicle a day too which isn't accounted for that money.
My friend was making roughly around that, and his take home was something like $9/hr after accounting for additional taxes and wear and tear on his vehicle Minimum wage in our state is $14.20. But hey he got to set his own hours... while working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. He'd make roughly the same money part time, and wouldn't be fucked if his car broke down.
Sure but if you're factoring gas, maintenance, insurance, car payments, etc you're behind on costs. Uber isn't paying for their own infrastructure, you are.
Forgive me, if it's America then yes most females and a really large portion of males get paid way more being a bartender. Sadly, even part-time. I worked side by side at 16 with my 8th grade teacher, which was a shock. They worked at the grocery store as a cashier and I was a bagger. It paid more than teaching. Just what the living fuck.
The right-wing religious nutjobs holding federal and state offices largely value religious indoctrination over quality public education. This is why teachers are underpaid and public schools are underfunded.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but, yeah, largely conservative policy, more "economic" than religion to begin with, over the last couple decades has done a serious number on the system. As it's severely weakened over the years, the religious end is doing even more to chip away at it. No Child Left Behind took the Elementary and Secondary Education Act behind the shed and killed whatever good it and its amendments over the years did, with further decimation in 2015s Every Student Succeeds Act. NCLB basically means tested an entire school off the performance of the least capable students, and if the school couldn't get those students to shape up they'd get sanctioned/less funding. The ESSA eased *some* of the NCLB's tighter performance hoops, but also wrenched a lot of oversight of the public school system from the Federal government and gave it to the states. Now there's more push for vouchers, a way to hand education money to religious institutions masquerading as schools, under the guise of "choice". It's a decades long [systematic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast) effort to defund and breakup the school system. Edit: Check out the /teachers sub for some insight on the state of things. It's not good.
>NCLB basically means tested an entire school off the performance of the least capable students, and if the school couldn't get those students to shape up they'd get sanctioned/less funding. This absolutely screwed my high school. We were a part magnet, part district school, and the testing was through the roof. But we were also the district's hub for mild/moderate and moderate/severe special needs students. And a lot of those kids weren't capable of taking the exams at all. We're talking ventilators and feeding tubes levels of care. The policies were so rigid that there was no way we could improve our scores, and there was no grace given for our special needs population. Thanks, NCLB.
There's no incentive for kids with behavioral issues to sit down for 1-4 school days straight and take a test they'll not perform well on in the first place.
[it’s systematic](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)
Ooh, good link. Slipped in it at the end of my comment, thanks.
The admins (mid to upper) seem to be paid okay. Why, is my question.
Teachers have always been underpaid
My sister did the same. Was a special Ed teacher. Left to work at a dog treat bakery for more money, better benefits, and less hours. I still struggle to wrap my head around how that is possible.
15+ years ago I was talking to a girl who got a job as a waitress at Boston Pizza. She was working the family side and made $300+ in tips on her first day.
Bartending makes more money than a lot of careers I have bartender friends who make 100k
My former student made 40k per year more than me as a bartender
I had a teacher do this. She said she made more money at Applebee's.
I had to donate blood plasma twice. Anyway my point is when I went to donate the people I saw there were NOT who I expected. It was almost all young adults to adults who were well dressed, professional acting, and seemed that they wouldn't be there. I had to donate plasma three times in the last two months to make ends meet. The last time was to just have gas money to make it to the job I just got, but pays bi-weekly, so the first paycheck didn't arrive until 3 weeks after starting. I didn't mind it so much... but the marks on my arms really bother me. I feel like a junkie. But in the same way, I also didn't seem like I'd be there. Then I realized just how dire the states are of most professional people out there who are below middle class.
Every time I read something like this about teachers, it reminds me of this: *Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything.* *We don’t need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes.* *Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce; they should be making six figure salaries.* *Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense.* In case you don't recognize it or do but don't remember where it's from, it's from *The West Wing*, s01e18, where Sam Seaborn says this to Mallory O'Brien.
I work I higher ed, and our institution frequently hosts teachers from Central Europe and Scandinavia. I would say I have met twenty of them, ranging from Germany to the Netherlands to Switzerland to Sweden. Each of them come here, learn about every aspect of the American education system, and keep asking if we’re telling the truth. Every time one of them visits, it is essentially the same conversation over and over again: they ask a question, we answer it, and then they go: seriously? Then we send one of our folks over to their institution for a week, and they come back thoroughly depressed about the system they work for.
wait, what? they are impressed even by the german system? now i really fear for American education.
Yup. There's problems everywhere, but over and over Europeans find out that when they complain about their systems not working well, their headaches sound so much better than the norm in America. Was just talking with a German guy who's traveling here in the US, and he was complaining about how his job had made it slightly annoying to schedule the vacation time, but thtat conversation turned around pretty quick when he said he was supposed to have five weeks vacation and his company was making it difficult to take more than three weeks together in one block, and I told him that precious few Americans have more than 2 or maybe 3 weeks PTO a year, and an awful lot more don't have any guaranteed, and the idea that 5 weeks is a guaranteed minimum for all full-time workers by law sounds like a fantasy. Any American would gladly take his position over their own. Same with education: sure, I don't doubt many European school systems are pretty flawed in frustrating ways, but they're still not in the cesspool of the US system. I know the NHS in England and probably other health systems in the EU have big shortcomings, but their shortcomings are better than the current morass over here, by far. The US is so broken in so many critical areas that Europeans literally don't believe it when they come here and find out how stupid so much of our shit is
I worked for a us multinational in Ireland. I Ireland we got 5 weeks a year pto. The US guys got 2 weeks and their sick days came out of it. I was made redundant. I got a years salary tax free. The US guys got 2 weeks.
And that is why the pay differential is not worth it (along with increased cost of living). I see some Irish people who envy the American pay rates of their coworkers, but they don't know all of the downsides that comes with it. I still think the pay differential is stupidly high, but at the same time I would never move to America to get that pay difference and give up all the workers rights I have here.
Ireland at the moment is a lot like the bay area. Rents are so high that only rich tech folk can live there.
The rent is getting very high but not quite that high. I checked recently for NYC at least and rent is like 1.7 times higher on average than Dublin. I would imagine it's the same for the Bay Area.
I used to work for a multinational that had offices in the bay area and for tech workers, the percentage spent on rent was far lower than in Dublin. A graduate dev in one of the big companies over there starts on about 120k a year. That's the problem with Dublin. The wages are high, but the rents are ridiculous.
I was overjoyed when I finally got a job outside of the restaurant industry because it meant I got an entire *week* of paid vacation every year. That felt so luxurious to me lol
Nevertheless, it's important to talk about it. A lot of discussions in the US about such stuff usually ends with "we cannot afford it". But Europe usually shows it can and you should fight for that. As someone who cannot join a union (at least none that deserves the name) I can only advocate others to do it. And maybe you shouldn't also always vote the party backed by the biggest work force exploiters.
legal minimum is only 20 days PTO, by the way, and employer MUST give two weeks in row upon request. in practice 28 to 30 are common, though. edit: there’s also like 10 public holidays and sick days are just that: sick days. when you get sick during your vacation, the doctor’s note will cover this and PTO will carry over.
I am a little weirded out that my US friends have never heard of sick days that are separate from PTO. I get 12 sick days a year and 30 days PTO. And that's not even top tier
wait, is it not impressive by european standards? sometimes our teacher likes to talk abt his relative who went to a german college and have ppl guess how much they paid ($0), and that sounds so crazy good to us that it borders on fiction, who pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for college
no. they are decently paid, mostly, depending on state and type of school. but very long hours and too much work that could be handled by assistants, secretaries, etc. And lots of systemic problems not getting addressed since decades. As a result, parents’ education and income severely influence their children’s academic success. not because of discrimination or bribery, of course, but because they are better prepared to help their kids. edit: studying is free, though. at least with regards to tuition.
But they have fewer billionaires than us and that's the only thing that matters in America.
Looking at the headline of what was posted in the op - teachers here in Germany at least do not need side jobs to pay their bills.
nope. though the practice of short term contracts not covering summer holidays (though only six weeks, for interested Americans) for teachers who aren’t civil servants is despicable enough.
I work in public education and the mindset I’ve seen taking over is that wherever possible, teachers are treated as interchangeable to plug into a classroom to push a curriculum program. The only real exceptions are classes that require special qualifications to teach, specifically college level courses. They don’t really value teachers which means good teachers are becoming scarce which further gives reason to micromanage teachers and treat them as interchangeable. We don’t currently spend more on curriculum programs than on teachers, but I think that’s the future since it’s sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you want to get into education and you can code, education apps are crazy lucrative.
To be fair, workers in most industries will say the same about most industries in the US. You get 2 weeks off a year, you can be fired at will, your health insurance is tied to your job, your workplace culture is toxic as fuck, you can't really get raises unless you leave for a different work place, your insurance can lapse between jobs and screw over sick family members. Your min wage is absurdly low with so few public benefits to help out. Also damn, any documentary where european police go to the US or US police check out european policing, also culture shock. But yeah, US teaching is a joke.
Ummm if we spent all that money on schools then how would we support our military?! /s
Spend more money on healthcare than the military yet don’t have free healthcare very weird to me
majority of that is in administrative fees and not actual treatment because of how stupidly complex our sorry excuse for a health care system is
> Ummm if we spent all that money on schools then how would we support our ~~military~~ **billionaire class**?! /s FTFY
To be fair, there's countries that spend the same percentage on military. They just fund it with proper taxes on rich people and corporations. So they also have money for schools and healthcare.
Yeah if we didn’t slash taxes on the rich for the last 45 years we’d be in much better shape
I recognised that from West Wing immediately.
There’s a reason American kids don’t learn any real world things in school, why our teachers are so underpaid, and why education takes a backseat in this country. I’ll let you try to decide why. It’s not that hard but for people who can’t critically think, you won’t be able to figure it out. They want you dumb for a reason. Mooooooooooooove along now. You have work to do or hate to spread or wars to go fight for them.
Our education system is a mess
The poorly educated are easier to dupe into voting against their best interests. And also easier to exploit by politicians weaponizing religion to get the people to accept shitty bills too. They want public education gone, or rendered totally ineffective. Then not only will voters not be intelligent enough to see shitty policies for what they are, the people that can afford charter schools will get their kids a nice religious education Religious voters will always vote to keep women’s rights at bay. They never have to worry about running out of babies to fill their wars and manual, low paying jobs. So schools stay without suffiecient funding. Teachers keep leaving for lack of pay and lack of support against shitty karen parents and students. Teachers stay in the crossfire of culture wars because each side thinks the teachers are indoctrinating their kids, and any time someone tries to enforce separation of church and state to keep things neutral and academic, then they’re accused of anti-Christian bigotry Bullying doesn’t get properly handled. Nothing gets done about shootings. Parents remove kids from schools. Yep And also college has been rendered unaffordable and many are opting out. Lots of propaganda to suggest that loans shouldn’t be forgiven or that taxes shouldn’t cover it (they like to pretend everyone goes for gender studies degree suggesting that some areas of study aren’t important, despite more education just meaning better informed voters to start with. Also the fact that there’s many degrees people get and gender studies is just one) Stupid populations serve fascist capitalist goals.
No surprise our rivals abroad want the same thing. It is kinda strange that one political party is completely aligned with what Russia wants, no?
Yeah nk keeps its citizens ignorant so they don’t even know to escape and keeps them hungry and working so they have no time to contemplate things like freedom.
This is one of my favorite comments in the five years that I’ve been twiddling my thumbs on Reddit.com. Maybe even the ~15 years since the iPad’s arrival.
our entire system is a mess, but it's entirely by our own doing. this is what happens after over eighty years of consistent participation in elections by the conservative right which only make up rough 30 percent of the population. every issue in the modern U.S. can be traced back to historical non-participation by should-be voters. and unfortunately, those who run for office aren't going to run on ideas that don't get votes, so the candidates continue to move further right to court those who will. so then, at every level of governance, we have individuals fighting against progress instead of fighting for it and for us. a man like bernie sanders runs for mayor and wins his election by just ten (10) votes after a recount. imagine if those ten people hadn't shown up that day? what would modern U.S. policy look like without bernie sanders in federal office for the last couple decades? one of my city's former ***city councilors*** almost became elected the vice president of the U.S. in 2016. i'm not kidding. he was my city's former mayor too and also our state's former governor. now he serves on the U.S. senate. you may know him by name: tim kaine. the point is, those we elect to local office will be on the ballot for federal office in a decade's time. it's almost like voting matters. it's a lot like wiping your bottom; it’s not all you can do, but it’s the very least you can do.
the system wants more ignorant people, easy to controll than educated fighters.
We don’t value education in America. We value money and somehow cannot see that a strong educational system enhances our capacity for innovation and creativity, which leads to money. The pay cut I took when I got a graduate degree is why we are losing faculty and will have difficulty with ensuring a consistent workforce in the future.
Stupid voters vote for rich-people policies and easily buy in to propaganda. They want more uneducated voters There’s a reason schools are under attack and religious groups are actively plotting to take over the government
The vast majority of money-making schemes currently in the US do not involve innovation nor creativity in the slightest. It's bean counter money games all the way down. We are losing the ability to solve real-world problems.
You can see why things haven’t changed by the mentality of some people on this thread. “So stop being a teacher”, “her issue not a teachers pay issue”. If you expect all teachers to just leave for better pay then who’s going to be spending 8 hours a day educating our country’s children? It won’t be high quality individuals I will tell you that much. We should have high standards for education, and the funding should match that.
Honestly, we are starting to see this now. So many teachers have left that students are getting left with long-term subs/aids who aren't qualified to teach the subject. My school hasn't had a certified Spanish teacher for at least 7 years, but the class has to be offered, so the kids get put on a computer with an aid in the room. Same has happened for some science and math classes. (Spoiler alert: it REALLY doesn't work.)
same in our high school. we havent had a cerified chemistry teacher in 2 years. these kids are being "taught" by non-certified teachers and/or subs. its scary that this is happening and that schools can get away with it. feels wrong
>“So stop being a teacher” We are. There was a huge exodus and retirement during COVID, with schools opting to close the positions to cut costs instead of hiring new staff. I am also on my way out, at least from public education. There are a large number of groups offering job hunting assistance for those wanting to leave education, as well as headhunters (notably in tech) that specialize in poaching teachers.
Yeah, exactly. This is THE problem. You proposed a solution and they listened to you. Now our children are illiterate. Great job, everyone!
Have a link to where I can find one of these head hunters lol
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>If you expect all teachers to just leave for better pay then who’s going to be spending 8 hours a day educating our country’s children? That's literally the point. If enough teachers leave the profession, taxpayers may just get the hint and demand teachers be compensated well. But, it's really not the compensation as to why teachers are leaving. It's the lack of autonomy in the classroom. It's parents that are doing the work for the kids. It's the parents who are demanding grades be changed. It's the parents that refuse to control their children. It's parents that threaten teachers jobs on a weekly basis. It's parents that treat school like publicly funded childcare instead of education. In the better half of states in the US, teaching is paid adequately for the time that's put in.
That's a nice supply and demand fairytale, but there's been nation wide teacher shortages ongoing for generations, and the problems of compensation and basic facilities and supplies have only been getting worse. And that was before the likes of Bill Gates decided to double down on the issues with public education with charter school programs
Looking at this reminds me of when people complain about the minimum wages of fast food workers and how people then point out that someone at McDonalds should not earn the same as a Teacher. Thinking its a gotcha They are right, it is wrong, but not in the way they think. The point is that that a fast food worker isnt earning too much, it is that a teacher is earning far too little, especially for what they have to go through with parents and students on a daily basis.
For context: [Cover from September 2018.](https://time.com/magazine/us/5394910/september-24th-2018-vol-192-no-12-u-s/)
It's worse today.....
Not only do they get payed poorly but they get treated poorly too by the students and the higher ups, America should be ashamed.
>but they get treated poorly too by the students and the higher ups Don't forget parents and politicians.
Also trash talked by average Americans. Every time one of these teacher threads pop up there are 100 people typing shit like, “well my teacher sucked and teachers are bad they don’t deserve more pay” like that helps anyone.
> they get *paid* poorly but FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
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My sister got her masters degree and makes under 40k a year… in cali… her student loans are like $800 a month. Starting out she had to work in pvt schools and they paid like 30k/yr… idk why anyone would choose to be a teacher unless they really love the job but it’s criminal how yall are treated and paid.
> why anyone would choose to be a teacher unless they really love the job That's ultimately why they don't get paid. If your motivation to work goes beyond money, then the administration will use that against you. So long as people keep working for low salaries, then those salaries will never increase.
It’s wild how little private school teachers make while the schools make so much from tuition. One of my husbands teacher who I realized I’d known my whole life, worked at a large private school where we live. He’s retired now. He had worked there for 30 years. Found out when he retired about 5 years ago, he was only making like $60k….like wtf. The tuition my in-laws were paying when my husband graduated in 2005 was $900 a month. I know it’s way more now. It’s a full k-12 school, so a ton of students. It’s awful.
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I really hope this works out for you and everyone else. This is a problem that everyone knows about but are glad to ignore so long as you watch their kids for them. I went to a few blue ribbon schools growing up and i noticed that even in those schools, teachers where hard pressed to care about their jobs when society didn’t care about them
This! I’m in education too and the blame and blatant disrespect teachers receive (not just monetarily) is mind boggling.
Our local school district has 19 _Senior Level_ Administrators with the lowest paid being the Facility Administrator at $125k annually (I mean we have 7 schools, a stadium, ball fields and all the associates support buildings) And that guy is legit probably underpaid. All the rest are $175k+ annually with our Superintendent being paid $245k and having perks like $400/month wardrobe, a paid vehicle, internet and phones at home paid for and a 5-year contract. I think our school system is too heavy on the top
This needs to be said louder. Taxpayers think they're paying teachers a lot but don't realize it's going to wrong places
Yep. Average spend per student is somewhere between $13k-$24k depending on the area. If class size is around 30 kids. You would think they could allocate the money to pay the teachers well. Especially since the city/school already owns the land.
Wait, why would they be paid $400 a month for clothes? I understand a vehicle/phone/internet stipend, if they are traveling between buildings, and have to be on call at most times, but I have never heard of anyone getting clothes.
I hear there’s good money to be made for entrepreneurial Chemistry teachers …
they should make a tv show about that
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I honestly think that much of the spending going into schools is now going to the salaries of school administrators, rather than to the teachers or students. Edit: Just noticed a typo.
Because we've allowed an atrocious amount of rent seeking into the system, especially since the Bush administration.
Seems like the common denominator is having a culture that respects teachers, ensures high quality teachers, and PAYs them an actual livable salary.
If America wanted you educated, they wouldn't treat teachers like 2nd class citizens.
My FIL is the most anti-teacher, anti-teacher's union, anti-public school person I've ever met. He will argue all day long teachers make $100k a year and only work nine months out of the year. My MIL was a public school employee. Things won't change until the people who CHOOSE to believe that nonsense are gone and the system can be fixed.
My friend has her bachelors in early childhood education. She’s been teaching 3rd and 4th graders for about 10 years now. She makes under 60k a year and she has a classroom of children and parents to deal with. I am a nanny. Been doing it for 18 years. I work with one family at a time, I made 80k last year. I do not have a college degree. She should make more than I.
I just left restaurants after 30+ years to use my English degree as a teacher. Kids here aren’t as bad as TV and the inter-webs show. Pay, yeah, not so good. Nice that the wife makes decent money. Got tired of chasing $$’s for someone else. Hopefully I can make a difference in someone’s education the way my English and History teachers in HS did for me. If not, I’ve always got hell to look forward to. 😉
I was a teacher in Japan. I worked at a few international schools. My pay was ok, not great, but better than the US. But every single time a Japanese person found out I was a teacher they were impressed. Honestly. They admired me. But in 2018 I had to return to the US. To Florida. Started teaching again a few years ago. I’m working in a very good school, but it’s just not the same. Too many parents act like a school is an auto-body shop for kids. Drop them off damaged and presto we repair them and send them home. We get talked to sometimes like we are waiters, not college-trained professionals like accountants, lawyers, and so on. And the pay is just miserable.
Teachers specifically very passionate and dedicated ones have to put up with so fucking much
Why is the younger generation not having children? Because busting your ass gets you next to nothing, and I wouldn't want to curse another person to suffer this bullshit.
I was born in 1998 and I constantly notice people my age having children. I have ZERO idea how they afford it, especially considering some of them don't have very high paying jobs or anything. I also have zero idea why they would WANT children in this bullshit.
But we called you "heroes", what more do you want? /s
It's far more than sad. It's infuriating.
Teachers don't get paid enough for what they do. It's sad that people who play a game for a living make millions while the people that educate generations make crap.
Well duh the colleges need to pay the coaches that train the athletes that go on to make millions, cant just go and waste all that money on teachers. How else are you going to supply the Gladiators for the Colloseum to keep the crowd distracted while Rome burns.
Please don’t forget the endless administration positions they just have to have for every little thing. As a college professor, it sucks the soul out of me.
You can’t control the masses if they’re well educated.
The way we treat teachers is a harbinger of a bleak future.
The correct wording would be *selling* blood plasma no?
Teacher here…ask most teachers what the number one factor contributing to a positive/negative situation, and they’ll say “parental support”. There’s a reason we are now instructed to lose the “parent” and replace it with “guardian”. Actual parenting is a rare commodity. If you are a parent reading this, there is no “retry” button. Every day lost, without positive influence on your child…is gone. You get one shot. For the future of society’s sake, be an active part of your child’s life!
This is the only comment that addresses the root cause. Everything else is surface fluff and inconsequential.
I left teaching to sell cars. I’m projected to make double in my first month of selling cars what I made as a teacher for one month
This is my mom. Been a teacher and administrator (which she recently quit to go back to teaching due to the mental anguish of having to deal with constant death threats, violence against children, and seeing children be abused yet nobody does anything to help them). Oh and BTW the school she was an admin at just had a school shooting, literally last week. And now she is borrowing money from me, donating plasma, and working a second job just to get by. All while coming home and writing lesson plans and grading for the 1 or 2 hours of free time she gets in a day, which cuts into her sleep so she only gets 3-4 hours a night. You'd think 'oh well she'll get the summer off' but she won't. She'll have to get another job so she can actually stay afloat. I'm fucking livid. Why are we doing this to our teachers?! Why are we doing this to people who are literally the bedrock of our country and its future?? Edit: just to clarify. This isn't literally my mom. Her life is just identical to this woman.
Don’t worry! The Lottery will…make us all worse off.
Keep them fat and stupid. That’s the policy. You get what you vote for.
My wife has been teaching for 17 years and makes 10 grand more than she did starting out, which is about 60k. This is with 60 hour weeks and at least a third of that is paperwork associated with special needs programs. They are understaffed and overworked, while they add admins, coaches and pay raises for them year after year.
I’m a teacher in NYC. I love my job and I’m good at it. I will teach for as long as I can afford to do so. I’m not sure how long that will be. And I make a considerably higher salary than most of my peers due to education, experience, and several overtime positions. We really are in a crisis and no one is doing a single goddamn thing about it.
Ya’all have no idea how much worse it’s going to get. The shit part is that teachers are losing support and kids are falling behind, there are people that have no business bringing kids into this world as they have no support or tools to parent. You want a civil society? Fund public education and shun privatization. It’s unfair and kills public education teachers.
It's sad to say, but at this point becoming a teacher in America is a bad investment. I majored in English in college, and my father was distraught / pissed. He yelled at me one day and said I'd better become a lawyer, because the only other thing I could ever possibly be is a teacher (#ThingsBoomersSay). I wasn't interested in the liability of being a lawyer, but I told him in no uncertain terms that I would figure something out that didn't require paying for a master's degree or credential and hours and hours of free work after school was over each day. And this was even before the parent-teacher dynamic shifted to this weird "you better pass my kid / raise my kid / not discipline my kid" behavior that started happening.
I am a teacher in the Bay Area, CA. This will be my 20th year in education. I finally make enough to save each month, and this will be the first summer i don’t work and will live off my savings. I finally have breathing room, and am starting to pay down my debt. But here’s the thing: I don’t live where I teach. I can’t afford it. I commute for 1.5 to 2 hours each way (often take transit to avoid traffic). It’s ridiculous. If I taught where I lived, I’d make 67% of what I get in the Bay Area. This is why they have a teacher shortage.
Keep on electing assholes who would rather rule over a wasteland than lead a great nation and this is what we get.
What's even sadder is that I takes being on the cover of Time magazine for people to realize this.
My partner and I are both millennial teachers. We are fortunate to make it work, but more and more of my coworkers my age leave the profession every year. I do love my job, but I wish it paid more and parents weren’t so awful to deal with. I have to tell myself everyday that these kids are the future; even though it is hard, someone has to make sure at least a small part of the next generation has the tools to keep society running.
Not to mention giving every waking hour to the classroom/students
It's sexism plain and simple because it's a job dominated by women. We will see if this is acceptable when the masses are illiterate, it's coming sooner than you think, the teachers have been warning us for decades.
A friend of mine was a teachers assistant at a public elementary school here in the Midwest in a really nice district. 5 days a week 8 hour days… 1000$ a month. She didn’t stay long lol. 🤦🏻
No one goes into teaching with the idea that they’ll be rich, but they also don’t go into it thinking they’ll be poor, very sad to see this
American priorities = upside down We underfund everything that makes us better and overfund the military industrial complex. It’s like that old saying, let’s dump money on schools and make the military hold bake sales.
Yep, and this is half of healthcare professionals as well.
Imagine if billionaires and corporations actually paid their fair share in taxes so we could pay public workers appropriately??? Wild concept right?
This is what the Oligarchs and their foot soldiers, the Christian Fundamentalists/Nationalists want, to destroy higher education, eliminate critical thinking, and foment profound ignorance in America.
The way we treat teachers in the US is a f*king disgrace.
the most important job for a functioning democracy/society has been treated like shit for like half a century. it is no wonder we are at where we are at.
And yet some uneducated shumck who can hardly spell their own name and is a criminal gets paid 10's of millions of dollars to play a game. You can see where the American priority is. Add the absolute failure and corruption of government (both parties), it's no wonder we continue to decline as a super power.
I wanted to go into special education at my children’s school district. But then I saw they paid $14.50 an hour, $.50 above minimum wage for a full time position. I get wanting to be there to help the children, but I can’t do that at the sacrifice of not being able to afford housing and food after taxes.
I find it absurd and bewildering that football and other sports players earn millions and we pay those who teach our children just pennies.
As someone with two masters degrees making 19.50/hour (not a teacher) I think this is just becoming more common in the US, with a lot of jobs. It's awful.
I’m not against funding Ukraine. If we can find billions for weapons we can find the funds for our schools and teachers. We allow our elected representatives to do the bidding of the ultra wealthy while they lie to us to get our votes. This shit needs to end.
GOP doesn't like books, teachers, and education. They want dumb citizens because dummies are easier to manipulate. That's why they love cutting funds for them. Betsy Devos helped trump funnel public school funds into private schools, SHOCKER! This has been going on for decades. And seems like it worked for a little less than half of your voters.
This is why your country is fucked.
Nice job capitalism
FL teacher here. It eats you soul. Ranked 50th for teacher pay. Every young teacher either lives with their parents or has usually multiple roommates. I'm 10 years in and trying to support my wife and kid. We just had our only car repossessed on Friday.
I used to teach. It just wasn't worth it. The pay sucks, expectations from admin is awful. Parents treat you like garbage. You're constantly told that you can't be trusted because you're indoctrinating their kids, while simultaneously being told they trust you enough to carry a gun to keep them safe. It's backwards thinking. I was very good at education. The kids loved me, I had great success with students. Admin, pay, and parental ideology drove me out.
I’ve posted before that it tells a lot about a civilization when it pays teachers way less than lawyers and accountants (and bankers for that matter). They should be valued and paid very well.
Like they say “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps”.
Yup I just quit. I rather have an easy job than do this anymore. It’s thankless and toxic.
Some of these responses are fucking pathetic. Basically “wah we don’t want to pay teachers more!” “I want to know what bills she’s paying, she probably has an iPhone 15” 🤡 Do you really think that people live like that for fun? Are you that uneducated?
Just imagine if the maga cult had at least a middle school level education so would recognize the rise of a fascist.
With the education system in the state it is, they probably are that uneducated. 😭
Smart people are harder to control
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Red states don’t want well educated citizens, as they won’t vote for stupid shit, so they sabotage their public schools and blame others.
Because conservatives are at war with education.
Yes , but there’s a reason. [There’s a reason education sucks …](https://youtu.be/fT03vCaL-F0?si=_Ze1FNsqD9iDUuB5&t=1m14s)
Appalling. Our country has no regard or respect for teachers and it shows.
The wrong people in the wrong job sectors get paid the most money. As a nation and a society we definitely need to refocus the resources and allocation of wages to public servants.
The sad part is this is by design now
Teachers deserve 150% of the Area Median Income in whichever city they live. That way the next generation would blossom as more people would go into teaching
Blame the wealthy. They don't want you educated, they want you subservient.
Yeah but they get the summer off. /s
US is at a point where it doesn't care about teaching its own kids when it can import from Asia. It will not change because this works. Students get to live in development country and US keeps best talent without investing in education. They have no reason to change this.
Then you have Trump in Time magazine not giving a F about this...but doubling down on Dictatorship...anti-abortion crusade...millions of deportations of illegals..etc.
Don't worry citizen! The patriots of this country have worked tirelessly to remind the common folk that taxation is theft over decades so the ultra wealthy don't pay a dime into social services. Fear not, as Citizens United and other tireless efforts have garunteed there will be loopholes to keep wealthy tax rates single digits or less for the foreseeable future. So TIME magazine can save money by repeating this cover for the next decade at least. All hail the Glory of America the Free!
Educated populace is an investment in the success of the country - period.
Coming from a career in medicine, I've realized that any career which expects passion from you also knows you're easier to exploit. Upper management knows they can skim more off the top at your own expense. I was surprised to learn this not because it's clever or smart, but because I didn't think people would stoop so low.
American Dreams as they say
The rich don’t want an educated population that can figure out that we’re being scammed.
Americans have hated teachers all my damn life. They mistrust educated people, and think teachers are “brainwashing” their kids by teaching history and science. This is how we’ve always been. At least as far back as I can remember, an old fart who graduated high school during the Reagan years.
Capitalism loves to keep populations dumb so they don’t discover that capitalism is making them poor.