Red for ed, no not that Red

[dryheat]

Poor kids. If they aren't being shot up they are held hostage by their teachers. Surprisingly to me, the overwhelming majority of people polled think it a good idea to have ten thousand teachers just shut down schools until they get what they want.

[Vern Humphrey]

The way I see it, you come to work when you're scheduled to work. You don't, you're fired.

[Former Cav]

they knew how much they were going to get paid when they accepted the job!!
at the rate we are going they will TAX me out of our home.
I'm paying $4200 a year and about $3600 of it is school bonds. when does this chit end.
They should have seen the school I went to. We had classes in the gymnasium balcony and a math class under a stage in the auditorium.
We had 3 lunch shifts, and 2 different starting times 7 to 2:30 and 8 to 3:30 for the juniors and seniors. Freshmen & sophomores had one hour more.
NO swimming pool.
NO carpeted rooms.
too bad so sad. It was in the INNER city in St. Paul, MN. I ended up being a designer and mechanical engineer for a living so they didn't do too bad of a job.
OH, and if you acted up, they would open a can of WHOOPASS on you too and then call you parents so you would get MORE of the SAME when you came home.
Bunch of candy a$$ed snow flakes nowadays.
We need to bring back the DRAFT and allow the DI's to count cadence on your helmet with their clipboard again. And cuss and swear in your face!!
and put their 10 Wide combat boot up your a$$ !!

[barretcreek]

The county where my cabin is has a 2010 census population of just over 6,000. My taxes have gone up almost 600% in the last three years (gotta see if I can drop by the assessor's office without getting arrested). Why? Because the school board decided to build a new school. The 'old' one is from the '80's, which is a lot newer than the one I attended.

When I attended school during the Jurassic, there were two school systems in most urban and suburban regions, plus private schools. One was run by the local board of education which you supported whether or not you had kids in it. The other was run by the church. It was funded by the parents of the students, the local parishioners and no doubt by some of the wealthier parishes in the locale.

What this resulted in was an alternative to the public schools if they didn't measure up. Not all the students in the church system were from wealthy homes but I didn't know of any kid who was denied because of the inability to pay.

This church run system fell apart in the '80s(?). There was a Jesuit in Chicago (Fr. Bruce Clements?) who made a big splash by convincing the Archdiocese to continue funding the system to educate 'Protestant' students (code word for black kids) because it was in best interest of society to do so. True.

The result of this collapse was the teacher's unions gained a no competition monopoly over the mis-education of children, which they have exploited into a cash cow for administrators. And even here in Cowtown they went all out to shut down a fifty student charter type school because......it was succeeding at educating kids who were floundering in a well funded, no gangs no big city problems system. A friend's wife home schooled their six kids. The eldest was on the honor roll every semester at the Naval Academy, another graduated from WP, and a third went to Hillsdale. That's how much faith my neighbors have in our gold plated school system.

[Allen]

they knew how much they were going to get paid when they accepted the job!!
at the rate we are going they will TAX me out of our home.
I'm paying $4200 a year and about $3600 of it is school bonds. when does this chit end.
They should have seen the school I went to. We had classes in the gymnasium balcony and a math class under a stage in the auditorium.
We had 3 lunch shifts, and 2 different starting times 7 to 2:30 and 8 to 3:30 for the juniors and seniors. Freshmen & sophomores had one hour more.
NO swimming pool.
NO carpeted rooms.
too bad so sad. It was in the INNER city in St. Paul, MN. I ended up being a designer and mechanical engineer for a living so they didn't do too bad of a job.
OH, and if you acted up, they would open a can of WHOOPASS on you too and then call you parents so you would get MORE of the SAME when you came home.
Bunch of candy a$$ed snow flakes nowadays.
We need to bring back the DRAFT and allow the DI's to count cadence on your helmet with their clipboard again. And cuss and swear in your face!!
and put their 10 Wide combat boot up your a$$ !!

They knew what the job paid before attending college to get a career in teaching. Also, this pay is only for 9 months of "work" vs the 12 everyone else puts in.

I wish that I had a job when my kids were young that provided I get every weekend and holiday off, never work at nights or be "on call" and get practically free lunches served at the worksite. Not to mention the 3 months they get off every year.

The schools I had to go to didn't even have a/c and this in the deep South. I think that is why the school years originally dismissed during the summer months.

Fire them all. The colleges are producing thousands of grads every semester that would love to have their jobs and not complain, at least for a few months.

[leftyo]

They knew what the job paid before attending college to get a career in teaching. Also, this pay is only for 9 months of "work" vs the 12 everyone else puts in.

I wish that I had a job when my kids were young that provided I get every weekend and holiday off, never work at nights or be "on call" and get practically free lunches served at the worksite. Not to mention the 3 months they get off every year.

The schools I had to go to didn't even have a/c and this in the deep South. I think that is why the school years originally dismissed during the summer months.

Fire them all. The colleges are producing thousands of grads every semester that would love to have their jobs and not complain, at least for a few months.

dont forget to factor in the premium benefits they get with the job also.

[clintonhater]

Also, this pay is only for 9 months of "work" vs the 12 everyone else puts in.

THAT little fact is NEVER mentioned in all the media hand-wringing over their sad situation!

[m1ashooter]

My daughter is a teacher. She doesn't complain about her pay or her off time. Not only do they get the summer off, they get almost to weeks for Christmas and a week for Spring Break. I get two weeks a year.

[free1954]

put the teacher jobs out for bid like every other job in the district. but the thorn in the side of the whole issue is the expanding price of health care.

[Major Tom]

In my State, the legislature pretty much banned all contractual bargaining for teachers. No walk outs here!

[togor]

There are basically two kinds of teachers. The ones who would give an arm for the kids, and the ones who want as easy a job as possible. It's the one type who keep schools going, who are the teachers that kids remember fondly long into their adult life, and who we wish we could get more of into the profession.

In my experience the adults who bash teachers are the same people who as kids thought of school as one big joke. Allen talks about how it was in his day. If ever there was a blueprint for how not to do it, that would be it. Raising no more Allens would be an unalloyed social success.

[Mark in Ottawa]

I think that this is a case of walking a mile in their shoes before you make negative comments. My wife was a high school teacher for 30 years and the two months of vacation did not come anywhere near the unpaid time that she spent at home marking tests and doing lesson plans. On most days she worked at home until about 9:00 pm. In addition over the years the attitude of the administration changed from one of demanding respect by the students to one in which the teacher was blamed if the student acted up; from a situation where an unruly student would be sent to the office to one in which the teacher was criticized for doing so. From a situation where students who missed or failed a test had to accept the consequences to one in which the teachers would get calls from the parent demanding that the student receive a pass mark even if they missed the test. I hated going to social events with my wife because all the teachers could talk about was how stressed out they were from teaching and how soon they could retire and get away from it. Almost all the teachers who did retire then refused to teach again even as temporary "supply" teachers. I do know that it after she retired, it took my wife about 5 years before she stopped getting stressed out in late August in anticipation of the start of the school year.

As for the pay, as I said to my boss who commented on it, "What is the appropriate pay for someone with two university degrees who works till 9:00 o'clock every night and has to deal with mouthy, lazy kids every day with little or no support and who has to pay for her own training to keep up to date?"

[Former Cav]

I know some teachers from chicago who retired and are collecting about 90K a year in a pension
So how can you afford that? I thought chicago was broke? (I spelled it without the Capital LETTER out of "respect" for them.)

[blackhawknj]

When the public schools cease to be "free" and start charging tuition and parents no longer get to use the schools as a daycare center, then we'll see some improvement.
In the liberal town I live in there are complaints-from the erstwhile "liberals"-that "immigrant" children are a drag on the system.
Our former Governor Whitman established an "alternative" program for teachers-i.e. people who majored in subject matter and not education courses.
She insisted on a B average-"C+ is not good enough."
Here in NJ the clout of the NJEA is waning. They've alienated even the Democrats. In the last election they tried to after the Senate President-a Democrat-because he wouldn't give in to their demands.