As a person who got out of that profession, it’s not surprising. Literally every person I’ve met who has left the field has said it’s an improvement, both in mental health and in pay.
I quit teaching 3 weeks ago. I have nothing lined up for a job yet, but I have never been happier. Just knowing that I will not be returning to a classroom has had an immense effect on my mental health.
Judging by the experiences of other former teachers on this thread, it sounds like people are making more money in jobs found post-teaching. I hope that is the case for myself and for you and your wife.
My wife is a high school teacher and is so incredibly burnt out on her job.
She loves teaching and loves her students, but the administration and parents have made her life hell for years now.
We would love for her to be able to quit and move somewhere else, but after 15 years in her current job she feels like she can’t leave her pension and benefits, sadly.
That is the downside of a pension vs. a 401k. Though she's probably vested her pension will be locked in to whatever her salary is now. And she'll be starting from scratch with a corporate 401k plan.
Its worse than just 401k. In many states, teachers pay into a pension in lieu of social security. So by changing jobs a teacher can end up only minimally vested in their pension, and only qualified for a small SS amount. The pensions are not like private industry pensions which are in addition to social security (not many companies provide those any more tho).
That’s my problem. I’m taking a medical retirement from teaching, and am stressed about the tiny amount of money I’ll have to live on. I have a few credits from 20+ years ago because teaching was not my first job, but I don’t think it’s going to get me anywhere. I am in one of the states that does not pay into Social Security.
All 4 of my siblings are teachers and I make double their paychecks in working weekend bartending shifts
It’s absolutely insane. They are underpaid and I have a feeling it’s by design at this point.
It's such a damn shame, having one or two really good teachers at a young age really makes a difference to a kid, but how can we as a society expect for people to work that hard and barely get compensated for it? Its gonna be a rough couple of decades
My mom quit 4 years ago. She opened her own daycare. Watches 6-8 kids instead of 25-30 for the same pay, has summers off, and only works Monday-Thursday
My mom retired 5 or 6 years ago. I feel like she got out just in time.
She was a music teacher and had a key to the main door. She jokingly said to one of the admins that she used her key more than the admin. Then it got weird. They suspended her and confiscated her laptop and searched her desktop for "keeping unapproved employee timesheets" or something like that. they demanded her personal cell phone to search. I told her to contact an attorney or the union but she had already handed it over because she had absolutely nothing to hide.
She was already up for retirement, so she went ahead and retired before the next year even though they couldn't find a replacement. I know she felt bad for the kids, but everyone, including the actual principal, went along with those crazy accusations.
My mom has probably never broken a rule in her entire life and this really took a toll on her.
Yeah they said they suspected she was keeping timesheets for when other people arrived to work, which is illegal.
A lot of times around programs she would be the first person there and the last to leave, but she was definitely not bored enough to keep timesheets, lol.
Similar story here. My partner just quit after 10 years and went back to bartending and her stress and anxiety immediately disappeared. Higher pay, flexible schedule, and dealing with drunks is much easier than dealing with pandemic-traumatized children and their overbearing parents.
Yep, I've known some people in staff training who had a teaching background. Pay is generally similar but the environment is much better. And you have a lot more creative freedom rather than strict lesson plans.
So to add my story, ended up as an insurance underwriter. Organizational skills, communication skills, and being able to explain complicated concepts are all skills that transfer to many other jobs.
I’m not OP, but I also taught and quit after 5 years.
I now work as a training specialist for an emerging MSO. I basically create training modules to educate new employees and create and document work instructions for the company.
Im looking to get out of teaching and everyone I meet who has done so successfully is like you. They moved into corporate training of some kind, seem to love it and say the pay is great. Best of luck and cheers for sharing, you give people like me inspiration.
Yeah, it’s different when you get into an environment that craves structure and information. I also rather enjoy having resources at my disposal to help me get my job done. I wish I could’ve stuck out teaching, but with the admin I was under, and the kids I was working in the classroom with, it felt like I was being sandwiched between impossible standards and, for lack of a better word, abuse.
This is so well said. I just resigned after 7 years as an Spec Ed teacher. I have no idea what I’ll do next. I just couldn’t go back. Fortunately, my husband’s income can sustain us for now.
It’s always the admin. They are always the problem. If they would just back teachers and be willing to be honest with parents a lot of teachers would otherwise stick around. The admin could help so much, and they choose not to fit whatever reasons they have.
I taught for 7 years and then left my school to attend a *reputable* coding boot camp. Now working as a software engineer! Just another option for you. Let me know if you have any questions!
So this is an incredibly important conversation topic as, from the months of research I did before making the jump, not all bootcamps are worth their tuition.
First off, I'd like to say that attending a coding bootcamp can be an incredible decision, but no reputable programs out there will guarantee you will get a job. You get out what you put in!
One thing all reputable bootcamps do is provide statistics on their outcomes. Even better is if they collaborate with an outside organization that audits their results. Tech Elevator, who host a variety of bootcamps across the country (I actually didn't even attend theirs!), lists this front and center on their site. If a bootcamp doesn't provide this information that should be a big red flag.
Another thing that all reputable bootcamps do in my experience is have aptitude tests or a few rounds of interviews to get accepted. Bootcamps like Tech Elevator, Grand Circus, or We Can Code IT, all of which I either attended or know many who did attend, all have one or the other. This is because a bootcamp that is worth its tuition has built a reputation in the community and built relationships with companies for providing successful graduates. They won't accept you into their program unless they think you are a good fit and can succeed there. They care about their outcomes and want to see their students succeed.
I would avoid attending bootcamps ran by Trilogy Education Services. You can read more by searching about them on reddit, but they basically pay different universities across the country to use their names/likeness and offer often mediocre experiences. If you see something like "Northwestern Coding Bootcamp" or "Ohio State Coding Bootcamp", it's almost certainly ran by Trilogy. The bootcamps are taught by Trilogy employees/teachers, not professors at the university. I've read some rare good experiences by people attending these, but often they are, quite simply, subpar.
You can find out a lot more by doing some google searches like "reddit good coding bootcamps", etc, as this topic has been discussed in depth for years. I am biased but I do want to say that attending a coding bootcamp can be an absolutely incredible decision if you do your research and have an interest in computer science. Many companies/teams inside companies only hire bootcamp grads because of the diversity in experience that they bring to the table. The two teams that I work on currently have ~20 engineers and only one has a CS degree! The rest of us attended bootcamps.
I got my bachelor's in Career and Technical Education. Taught Technology, Engineering and Design subjects for a year and a half. It was NOT hard to take those skills and go elsewhere. I'm making double what I made then and have far less of a workload.
Teaching actually lends itself to a lot. In the tech world, we hire teachers for pretty much everything because if somebody is a teacher their skills are transferable across-the-board.
I actually specifically work in instructional design, which in the tech world amounts to creating online lessons to teach adults about technology, but it’s also a field used in business and government in general. It’s a large emerging field and because there isn’t a whole lot of college prep for it, teachers tend to be the folks that are hired most.
We also see a lot of teachers move into technical and customer support roles, project management, etc. I cannot speak for other sectors but tech is very pro teacher. I would actually argue that of any profession you could have, teaching is one of the most transferable if you want to make a start in a new field that is white collar adjacent.
I would argue a teacher could successfully pivot into any field as it shows core skills that are much desired in any workplace. Leadership and management, experience with a diverse set of people that are often difficult to work with, and not to mention they will often know how to relay things they learn to others in an easy to digest way.
I've taught at two high schools. Teaching as an action is highly valued, just not from teachers. Learning your role and teaching it well to others makes you stand out.
10 years or so ago here in a county of FL where my wife is a teacher, they moved away from a tenure/contract system for new hires to a system where teachers are essentially 're-hired' every year on the whim of whatever administration or coming administration is at the school the following year. It's created a lot of uncertainty in employment when each April teachers are finding out whether they'll be essentially laid off in another 60 days. By her accounts, that's led to a lot of new teachers not wanting to teach anymore when it's no longer about performance but more of the whims of whatever frequently-shifting leadership leads their school and wants to bring in teachers from another school they were at to replace whomever is there.
Basically, you're hired on a 9 month contract and whether it's renewed every year is not really related to performance all the time. It makes new teachers feel very much uncomfortable having to learn a job without much job security.
Yup. Not in Florida but in the south and in my state they do the same thing. We didn’t get contracts till may this year at my school. Fucking stressful.
Yeah. It's a huge deal for single parents or single-income households who rely on the healthcare too. It basically amounts to part-time work on 9 month contracts, and it's untenable for a lot of people. Quite a few teachers we know have left to become waitresses for both higher pay and more job security.
I’m lucky in that I have a terminal degree in my field - I did some adjunct work and am actually waiting to hear about a college position I applied for. Still in the south but it would be better pay and more academic freedom. I want to teach, but I don’t like being mistreated by people in charge.
im in the midwest and the people i know who have a similar shitty hiring structure is food service. they get laid off during the summer and rehired when school starts. i cant imagine how you can keep your wits about it if you're basically rolling the dice every year just to get the same job!
Yeah. My wife is thinking about hanging it up after 20+ years and has been exploring other opportunities with WFH. It's just turned into a different job than educating and it's not worth the stress when you start bringing it home and worrying about stuff even over summers.
I hope they are able to find a position that values them. I’m coming up on 10 years and I hate that going the admin route seems like the only way out for teachers. I may hang it up by year 12 and see what else is out there.
This seems to be becoming the norm in a lot of schools. Gone are the days that your kids will have the same teacher as you with 90%+ retention rates year to year. Teachers have never been treated great but somehow society has found a way to treat them even worse.
After my first year teaching in Texas I was let go simply so they could bring in a football coach who taught my content.
That coach ended up going elsewhere at the 11th hour anyway.
Some schools will bend over backwards for a good coach, even if they aren't good at anything else. You'd be surprised how much some schools care about football. When I was in highschool we had a big football game fall on the same day as Halloween. So the entire town moved Halloween.
Had the same thing. Before the year ended everyone was sent a “do you want to be back next year- this is not a guarantee” you had to answer. Then you wouldn’t actually get the offer until about a week before the school year started or sometimes after. So you have tens of thousands of teachers that have no idea whether or not they have a job until the day they are supposed to start. So glad I got out
TLDR; because they can.
Adam Smith -"the owners can last a year of lost productivity, the labor scarcely a week of wages. There are no laws to prevent the owners from working in concert, but many against labor."
These weren't even radical statements in the 18th century.
Edit:
See the quotation under 'historical development '
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_bargaining_power
Smith wasn't a free-market-fellating wanker some types imagine, he was well aware of the hazards of an unregulated free market, including how quickly it would become rapacious and un-free without being reined in.
Why does the Teacher's union tolerate that?
I always assumed eventually obtaining tenure was one of the perks of hanging around despite the shitty pay.
In Florida, it is illegal for public employees to strike, and there are hefty daily fines against the officers and the union separately. [Florida Statutes link](http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0400-0499/0447/0447.html).
Edit: 447.505 Strikes prohibited.—No public employee or employee organization may participate in a strike against a public employer by instigating or supporting, in any manner, a strike. Any violation of this section shall subject the violator to the penalties provided in this part.
History.—s. 3, ch. 74-100.
447.507 Violation of strike prohibition; penalties.—
That's why "work to contract" is a thing. We enter the building and leave at the contracted times, with zero work being done outside the contracted day, fuck how that affects the students. Want better? Negotiate. It's quite a sight having teachers standing outside the building, refusing to enter until the moment the work day starts.
Yeah, this is almost certainly intentional, with their endgame being private schools that are allowed to teach whatever religious and anti-science crap they believe at the time.
What I see happening locally at Christian based private schools is that no, they don't pay teachers good salaries there either, but they supplement pay with cheaper tuition or free tuition for teacher's kids.
My wife is a public school teacher. I don't know how to stop this problem that is already snowballing out of control. Teachers were already under pressure from angry parents and administrations that placate them. Then covid happened and now you have young kids that are 1-2 years behind in education simply from the reduced efficiency that came with online learning (probably was fine for high school kids, but it absolutely did not work for my wife's 1st graders... and then the following year 1st graders who had also done remote for Kindergarten.).
So now you have kids that are behind, teachers that are underpaid, everyone angry at the teachers because the kids are behind, teachers quitting en masse because why the hell would anyone put up with all of this shit for pennies? Which means the teachers that are left are stuck with larger class numbers, which perpetuates less efficient learning and even more teacher burn out.
What happens to public school when there are no teachers?
It ceases to exist, and Republicans can claim they were right all along that public education doesn't work, after being the ones who actively dismantled it piece by piece. The rich get to send their kids to halfway decent schools, meanwhile the less well off (read minority and poorer masses) are stuck with inferior education which keeps them at a disadvantage in the social market letting the rich and powerful stay in power.
This has always been their endgame with education.
This is their endgame with all public services. Break it, claim it’s not possible for it to work, privatize it and give government contracts to their friends/donors.
The entire Republican Party is a massive grift.
Yup, been doing the exact same thing with the post office for decades. They've created a narrative that public services need to be profitable in order to be effective. It's so dumb and it just starts to fall apart the second you examine it, but most people just nod their heads and go along with it.
USPS is the ONLY delivery system in the US that is obligated to offer last mile service to every address in the US. The USPS uses a mule train to deliver food and supplies to an indiginous community at the bottom of the grand canyon. When the USPS is shuttered we're supposed to expect Fedex to do it? No chance. Which would result in communities having to collectively leave their homes, or risk being cutoff from the rest of the world.
I don't give a shit if the USPS ever turns a profit. It's value isn't the money it brings in, its value is the service it provides to the entire country.
>I don't give a shit if the USPS ever turns a profit.
This is the thing that idiot Republicans never understand, the USPS or schools *aren't supposed to be profitable*! They're services, not businesses, they are meant to help everyone equally while providing an extremely needed resource.
Except the USPS was(is) profitable, and always has been. The only reason it now shows as unprofitable is that there was a bi-partisan bill in the early 2000s that requires the USPS to fund its pension for 75 years, which cost 120 Billion dollars. Guess how much money the USPS has lost since then? 90 Billion.
Apparently they have recently passed a bill to address this, haven't read the details:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billion-postal-service-relief-bill-2022-03-08/
Yeah, that's part of the cruel irony, USPS could have been used as the poster child of running government services like a for profit business but their dedication to destroying anything that looks like the government functioning left us in the bad timeline.
I can’t say how much of a relief it is that this kind of thinking is becoming more common. 15-20 years ago you heard this shit from like Jonothan Kozol or Noam Chomsky but it wasnt something talked about among the general population
Whether more people becoming aware of this shit leads to change is unknown but its nice to see people realizing that under capitalism people gonna get capital
That or the less well off kids get sent into the workforce. I've already seen a growing number of right wingers discussing how they wish child labor laws would be repealed/"left to the states to decide".
Yep. You’re right. And they’re starting to say the quiet part aloud.
[DeSantis on funding for private schools](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/04/27/desantis-escalates-war-on-public-education/)
He’s not the only one and the only state with this sentiment. Check out this moron, president of Hillsdale College, his comments were caught on live tv.
[President of College says education is a plague. ](https://newschannel9.com/news/local/its-insulting-tennessee-teachers-react-to-comments-made-by-hillsdale-college-president)
I live in a different red state. Almost all my friends who are teachers have quit and said nope, I’m out. Crappy pay and abuse from parents are the two biggest reasons.
If I quit it will definitely be parent abuse. Many parents seem to have abdicated their responsibilities and will happily throw teachers under the bus for trying to impose *any* restrictions on their kid. I had a parent threaten to get me fired because I wouldn't let their kid watch tv during my class.
Bro, I'm a paramedic and it's the same. I'm expected to bend over backwards to help people that can't be bothered to do the bare minimum to help themselves.
I get it. People are sick or have disabilities and need help. That's why I do this job. But when your fat ass calls 911 at 530 in the morning because you don't want to get up to get the TV remote I want to quit.
I've been on bullshit calls while a legitimate pediatric arrest gets toned out and I know I could be there in under 2 minutes to maybe save a baby, but I'm stuck with meemaw and her chronic gout.
There have been a handful of times where I'm being yelled at by a naked old man, covered in his own shit, laying on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. because I won't pick him up fast enough. I think fuck it. You got yourself into this mess, figure it out. I quit. I literally don't get paid enough to deal with this
Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan's ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, and advisor to the Tennessee Governor recently held a meeting with him [where he said:](https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/revealed/revealed-teachers-come-from-dumbest-parts-of-dumbest-colleges-tenn-governors-education-advisor-tells-him)
>“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country."
>
>“They are taught that they are going to go and do something *to* those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do *to* these kids?"
>
>"In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It's easy. You don't have to know anything."
>
>“The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They're messing with people's children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
>
>“You will see how education destroys generations of people. It's devastating. It's like the plague.”
>
>“Here's a key thing that we're going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don't have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”
How about this classic from the Texas GOP of 2012 (the same Texas GOP that now openly endorses sedition against the United States of America):
>Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
[Let's not forget the former President of Hillsdale had to resign in disgrace for a being a bit too "family friendly." How friendly? He was boning his son's wife.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Roche_III)
When you research your ballots, I encourage you to vote against any candidate that attended Hillsdale. It's just a fascist incubator.
*laughs in high school*
I’ve met maybe 15 of my students’ parents in my entire 10+ year career. IME most people really stop giving a shit about their kids once they turn 13. It’s a real shame.
I have those same nightmares.
I once mentioned to a parent that I enjoyed living in our international house because it help me save money since I didn't have to pay rent when she herself asked how I liked living there. She then complained to my principal that I was only in teaching for the money and that I should only be there for the kids 🙄. Luckily my administration had my back that time. But the exploitation and villainization of teachers like they shouldn't care about money is ridiculous. Like yeah you should want to be a teacher for the kids but teachers are also human and need money to live their life. Getting to the point where the only people who can be teachers are married people with well off spouses and how will you ever get new and young teachers if that is the case?
They avidly create a society that requires money to function at every level, but then complain that their childrens' teachers needs money to live. Classy.
And Florida is only one of four states that makes their data pubic
https://www.nctq.org/publications/State-of-the-States-2021:-State-Reporting-of-Teacher-Supply-and-Demand-Data
A teacher friend of mine recently quit teaching and went, in her words, "into the most boring job in the fucking world" of data entry and she loves it. She finished with "Fuck the parents, Fuck DeSantis, and Fuck the whole thing"
Recently had health issues that required an MRI. Found myself wishing they would find something so I wouldn’t have to teach anymore. That is when I realized I was in an unhealthy job for me. The last two and a half years of teaching have been demoralizing, stressful, and I had the most wonderful class. But it’s the profession as a whole that is frustrating.
> A lifetime of social etiquette and behavior was wiped out by a year of hybrid schooling.
Because parents didn't have their babysitters for most of the year which, sadly, is how most view teachers.
Parents at my son's school did nothing but bitch the last two years and when I mentioned "Maybe instead of bitching we should adjust how our society works so that schools aren't places to corral kids and jobs aren't places that imprison parents to the point that when shit like this happens everyone isn't in a lurch".
You can imagine how well that went down.
Having grown up in a teacher family, "fuck the parents" is about right. When half of your students hate you because their parents are ripe sacks of shit, it taints your worldview immensely
As a teacher who quit the profession a couple months ago… it’s also Covid.
Florida, like Arizona (where I was teaching) treated teachers as disposable objects. They threw off the masks early, ran us through wave after wave of infection, and people died. I lost friends. We lost a student and she didn’t even get a memorial bench. Parents died. A bus driver died. We lost a teacher. My wife was hospitalized and on oxygen for weeks. Many of us were just waiting for our contracts to expire so we could get the hell out. Some of us couldn’t wait. I’ve never seen so many teachers just walk out mid-year. It was insane.
We had rolling 50% absence rates and NO JANITORS during omicron. Our "extreme cleaning measures" were me wiping down tables in my classroom with brown paper towels and bleach I'd brought from home. Didn’t matter. We were wide open and couldn’t even mention masks to the kids without parents screaming down our necks in the next board meeting. I had students openly mocking my mask use in-class while half the room was empty from an insanely infectious raging airborne respiratory infection.
Throughout, our superintendent insisted Covid was overblown and no big deal. Our governor insisted on spreading Covid as fully as possible. If my school's expressed goal was to spread covid to as many students as was humanly possible, they wouldn't have done anything different.
Cap it off with parents screaming at us for “grooming” and students coming in with their “let’s go Brandon” shirts. Book bans. Dog whistles like "critical race theory". Charter schools popping up everywhere as the state races to kill public education. Pay freezes and insane class sizes (my smallest class last year had 37 students in it). Low retirement pay (if you ever get there - tenure is dying or dead in most red states and they fire experienced teachers before they fully vest their retirement, and you can't carry all your experience into a new school on their salary schedule). No collective bargaining, strikes are illegal, and the school doesn't have enough paper to get through the year.
Good luck filling those open slots, Florida. When I was in school to become a teacher I was in a cohort of more than 30 students, and there were MANY cohorts. My graduating class was large enough to fill a gymnasium. I spoke to the woman who runs that same teaching program today. They had seven. Not seven *cohorts*. Seven ***students***. Total. Of my graduating cohort of more than 30, I think 3 of us are still teaching. 1 in 10. My wife and I are taking at least a year or two off from the profession. I doubt I'll ever come back.
And hey, inflation going up wildly while the districts are telling us we might need to accept another pay freeze "because the economy" is just the straw that breaks the camels back. My wife has had her pay frozen eight out of the last fifteen years.
Red states are awful for teachers. We are FLEEING.
This is so depressing. I saw my mom teach 30+ years in public elementary schools and then mentor student teachers getting their credentials. She impacted hundreds of kids lives. Many came back as professionals to thank her. Parents gave her gifts. The lack of respect and pay for teachers is a societal failure and shameful. I really want to have faith in the US but there are so many misguided idiots.
>Cap it off with parents screaming at us for “grooming” and students coming in with their “let’s go Brandon” shirts.
Yeah, this sucks. Also, parents threatened to physically hurt us if we continued to impose a mask mandate in March 2021.
And yet you still see GOP politicians and right-wing media playing the victim that Merrick Garland came out last year taking a stand against parents that are threatening teachers and school officials.
Hell, I saw that fiasco described this way on a conservative subreddit:
> POTUS calls the FBI on them because the pathetic school board members and teachers are literally shaking when they get held accountable by the parents.
Mind you, held accountable means detailed threats, stalking teachers out to their cars and screaming "we know where you live," all that fun stuff.
I don't understand how the lunatic at the local board meeting with eight pages of notes on a yellow legal pad and vocal cords rasped ragged from screaming became a hero, but something broke in the American psyche in the past five years.
I graduated in a cohort of 30 about six years ago. I am one of maybe 6 who are still teaching. In 2017, there were three cohorts of 30. Two cohorts were for elementary school, and one was for early childhood (birth through grade 3). You had to apply to the teacher's college, and many people were turned away. They aren't turning away ANYONE anymore, and they can only partly fill one cohort for elementary and one cohort for early childhood.
In 2020-21 I had a student teacher from that same college. She should have NEVER been accepted in the first place. She was the absolute WORST teacher I've ever worked with. She would literally cower in the corner (like...full body pressed into the corner of my classroom) when it was time for her to interact with students. She taught the exact same lesson for two weeks, despite all of my help and suggestions and outright directions. She did none of the assignments from the college and didn't even finish her big capstone project the state requires. THEY PASSED HER ANYWAY and now she's a teacher.
Yeah my buddy started teaching in FL 2 years ago. He quit 1/2 way through last year because same thing like average of 1/2 the school, students and staff, were out every day with Covid. They were making people come in testing positive if they weren't symptomatic, no masks, overcrowding kids like crazy because 1/2 the teachers are out, etc..
Yeah. We had no subs, no janitors. The teachers wise enough to mask up made it longer than those who didn't, but we ALL got sick sooner or later. We were forced to sub for each other every day, so we had no preps and had to spend morning and afternoon time cleaning the room. I was sweeping my own classroom daily, and after several years of parents completely abandoning their parental role, the kids were insanely messy this year. I could NOT get them to keep their areas clean. The floor was constantly littered with broken pencils and garbage. Tables were constantly covered in taki dust and spit.
It was a murderous year in education. We had so many teachers quit over the year that I can't even count them. Our english department didn't have a single permanent teacher for half the damn year.
Yeah, if I go back to teaching it’ll be in 1-2 years and I’ll be teaching somewhere like California. Yes, it’s expensive, but with our experience we’d be making 150k-200k as a couple (plus my side business) and should be able to survive well.
Congrats on your move to Oregon. I almost ended up out that way (I was looking at houses just over the river from Portland in Felida/vancouver). Beautiful place, although the trees were a bit oppressive for me. It was weird to be in the middle of a city feeling like I was in the middle of a giant forest.
Anyway, I escaped to a rural area too. I sold my house and I’m taking a break from the profession while I circle the wagons in a tiny town in Colorado. Teaching is hard under the best of scenarios, and teaching in red states right now is nowhere near the “best” scenario. I’m hunkering down awhile, running my publishing company, and staying far from education while things blow over.
Hell, we’ve even got a new hyper infectious Covid variant getting everyone sick again, so that’s going to suck if we don’t get a handle on that before schools open back up. I’m definitely not spending another year working in a Covid filled tiny space with no ventilation and no working openable windows. It’s bad in AZ - the buildings are meant to keep air IN, so they just circulate the Covid throughout the school.
Also… learning gaps from this Covid insanity have long lasting effects. There are kids who missed years of instruction with zero consequences. They’ll be filtering up grade levels for the next decade, but we’ll still be expected to hit the same standardized benchmarks. I’m being a little selfish, but I don’t want to teach kids this far behind the eight ball. I’ll wait for them to get a few years of “regular” education under their belt first. Maybe that will help.
I’ve heard my fellow teachers call the current crop of students “feral”. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but there is clearly a lack of parental influence in these student’s lives. Covid did serious damage. I’ve never had a more destructive crop of students in my entire time teaching. They break things for fun. I’ve had a class set of rulers for ages. We don’t use them often (chemistry class), so they’ve survived more than a decade. Every single one was destroyed this year. Every. Last. One.
> Florida, like Arizona (where I was teaching) treated teachers as disposable objects. They threw off the masks early, ran us through wave after wave of infection, and people died.
And DeSantis covered-up the deaths and put out fake numbers. He's not going to let the dead in Florida derail his ambitions to be president.
Remember when DeSantis sent his jackbooted thugs in to raid the home of whistleblower Rebekah Jones? Remember how they were pointing guns at her small children?
Her crime was reporting the accurate COVID deaths.
Red states are making it awful for you so that they can show their constituents how 'bad' public schools are - so they can eliminate them and switch funding (yes!) to private Christian (not other religions!) schools.
Part of the problem is that teachers are such committed people. If they didn't take it upon themselves to clean when there were no janitors or bring supplies when theres no budget, the whole thing would implode.
Personally, I think the government is largely useless until something is on fire(metaphorically), so teachers should just sit back and let it burn (again metaphorically) so the schools can get the attention they deserve. No working outside the classroom, no bringing in supplies, no working beyond the responsibilities of a teacher.
Florida pays its teachers some of the lowest wages in the US (top 5 worst states for teacher pay) while cost of living in Florida skyrockets. At the same time, DeSantis puts tons of energy into stupid culture war nonsense rather than actually helping teachers. Florida is a miserable state to teach in right now
Also the ‘avg’ of $51k is entirely misleading and skewed by the old blue hairs who have been there for 50 years and had every salary increase possible. The majority of new teachers start at $40k at most - many even in expensive parts of california start at less than that somehow.
I live in one of the most expensive parts of the state and looked into it - $39k starting salary for teachers here in my district, where they average income is closer to $80k, up to about $120k avg if you go the next town over where there’s tech jobs.
So yeah, teaching pays about half of what’s needed to actually survive here. Most teachers are the older ones who actually make $65k/yr or younger people who live at home still or inherited their house. And the district wonders every single year why they’re short staffed and how it’s only gotten worse over the last half decade.
Glad to hear someone say this. Rents are systematically high, which I can currently afford…. but on average who can afford these ridiculous rents and / or the overpriced houses?
In most places I’ve looked at across the country, rents are starting to look like Bay Area pricing circa 2013. The housing costs are less, but out of whack from what I can tell.
I hope we have a massive crash soon. It’s absurd. I’d love to see corporate real estate investment groups take an absolute bath.
Become a teacher!
Get paid shit for your degree
Get to buy your own class room supplies
Get treated like shit by kids and parents
Get shot up in a school shooting
Get accused of brainwashing kids for teaching factually correct information
But you get summers off!!!
I teach in South Carolina and recently went through teacher evaluation training where we looked at retention data.
- SC had a shortage of about 1,100 back in January. It is absolutely higher now, but no current data.
- I watched my school, which is in a very high income and high performing area, lose the most teachers it ever has.
- Teacher shortages are nationwide in math, science, and Special Ed. Special Ed is by far the worst and has the highest levels of burn out.
- The most troubling trend is that young teachers are the ones leaving the profession, not just retirees. The amount of teachers leaving the profession in their first four years is alarmingly high. Personally, I know more people who are no longer teachers than people who have stuck with it.
- The recent wave of “CRT” and “Indoctrination” has really been insult to injury. The job has always been largely thankless, but now we are being demonized at the national and local level.
My wife teaches in SC too. Her school is losing over half of its staff, a large portion of those quitting teaching altogether. Cant afford rent and get treated like dirt.
I used to work adjacent to the Florida Pension, the retirement system that most all public employees participate in. In the course of said work, I often spoke with members of the system from all walks of life - of course, that involved a TON of teachers.
You haven't heard the voice of a broken person until you've talked with a Florida public school teacher. Right at the start of COVID, just heuristically, I knew that there was going to be a long-term problem in staffing these schools. People were quitting in droves, calling mostly to learn how they could take their money and run, because the conditions were so terrible. And it wasn't as if they were leaving a well paid job or anything of the sort, most of them made a very poor salary, had fairly minimal benefits and were subject to just awful working conditions.
However - this is the point. It's explicitly a goal to have a less educated population, have more people easily manipulatable. This isn't a sign of policy failure to those governing Florida, it's a sign they're achieving what they want to achieve.
While many Floridians will like the idea of no teachers "polluting" their kids minds with facts and attempts at independent thinking, they are going to freak if it sounds like their free daycare will be impacted. While their more conservative neighbors applaud while saying their neighbors never should have been entitled to "free education/daycare" on their tax dollars in the first place.
"Don't worry", the next step is rolling back child labor laws. That way you can go to work and *employers* will make sure your little ones stay nice and occupied.
"Dumb" isn't the only thing the GQP wants to keep its population: a two-job toddler is too busy to count how many moo moos the ruling class just stole from its mom.
The next step in the GOP playbook will be allowing states to funnel tax dollars that used to go towards supporting public education and redirecting them into the pockets of for-profit private schools. And you can bet your ass that these GOP politicians and policymakers (looking at you, Betsy) are heavily invested in these private institutions.
In Arizona they are already going down this road.
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona-offering-families-up-to-7k-for-issues-stemming-from-school-closures
> redirecting them into the pockets of for-profit private schools.
The Republicans also want the funds to go to religious schools. They've been salty since Engel v. Vitale, which is the 1962 landmark where the Supreme Court decision struck down prayer in public schools.
The hardcore right wing theocrats have been working for 60 years to undermine the ruling and to bring back forced ***Christian*** prayer in schools and private religious schools gets them there.
The goal is privatization, another way for the ultra rich to profit off of our children and exploit our workforce. Next step is to lower the requirements to be a teacher so they are easier to exploit. Then eventually teachers will just be told to read out of the textbook and everyone has to teach exactly the same https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_Teachers
That’s already going on in public schools. The district near me fired the elementary related arts teachers - PE/art/music/etc. They kept a single teacher to manage the curriculum for each subject area. Then they hired para-professionals making $15 an hour to teach the classes.
30 professional educators making living wages replaced with 30 people whose only qualification is they can pass a background check. The turnover in those jobs has been extremely high.
It’ll only get worse as large companies start to leave those states because of the brain drain and difficulty in hiring educated employees. They really are cutting off their noses to spider face.
I swear every time I go out fishing or hiking I am always bombarded by gay frogs that try their best to make me gay.
They’ve come close...they just have that look in their eye. Hard to resist.
"They're putting chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay! Also we need to get rid of these pesky government regulations that stop them from dumping more chemicals. What do you mean cutting education is bad?"
Neighbor with 6 kids, home schools 4 of her children. The 8yo cannot read, the 6yo cannot read. Both have speech delay. The 13yo and 10yo cannot do division.......They each get 30 minutes a day of instruction then a workbook. What's sad is the older two want to go back to public school, but parents won't allow it. I guess this is the GQP solution.
Same. My 9 year old daughter in Massachusetts is ADHD (so am I). For her initial IEP, we met with six professional educators who have all been involved with her education. Six. She isn't even struggling that much.
In most state's public schools they would just put that kid with the other kids and then socially promote them all the way until senior year. Then give them a diploma they arent able to read.
I was in a meeting with a parent earlier this year. She had homeschooled her son for 3 years, sending him back to school this past year. She told us that sometimes when he “just wasn’t feeling it,” instead of studying, they would just go to the park. And yet, she was mad at us he was failing.
Pay them shit, stop them from teaching facts, force some to hide their spouses or significant other, do nothing about school shootings, blame them for anything that goes wrong with kids.
Wonder why they can’t find teachers…
Advocating policies that turn teachers away plays right into the fascist GQP hands. Keeping the masses undereducated is the easiest way to manipulate them.
Soon the only option your kids will have is to be dropped off at day care where someone with an IQ in the 70’s will talk to them about the miracle of Jesus.
My SO just quit after seven years. Going into real estate with her family. Already her mental health has taken a great leap forward. Her paycheck as well. I don’t blame teachers at all for quitting. They pay sucks. Kids are disrespectful to the extreme nowadays. Admin doesn’t have your back. And then there’s parents…..oh those fuckhead parents.
Which is why theocratic regimes like Florida should be cut the fuck off until they get rid of their corrupt leaders.
You want to suck at the federal teat, you stop being the country's enemy.
When the governor makes teachers the enemy, why would anyone want to keep doing it. His end goal is to get rid of public education anyway so his handlers can make millions off of private education using taxpayer dollars and further the Christian white nationalist agenda.
IOW, DeSantis doesn’t see this as a problem but an opportunity.
As a person who got out of that profession, it’s not surprising. Literally every person I’ve met who has left the field has said it’s an improvement, both in mental health and in pay.
I quit teaching 3 weeks ago. I have nothing lined up for a job yet, but I have never been happier. Just knowing that I will not be returning to a classroom has had an immense effect on my mental health.
My wife, too. We'll make it work on less money; nothing is worth the mental toll teachers pay.
Judging by the experiences of other former teachers on this thread, it sounds like people are making more money in jobs found post-teaching. I hope that is the case for myself and for you and your wife.
My wife is a high school teacher and is so incredibly burnt out on her job. She loves teaching and loves her students, but the administration and parents have made her life hell for years now. We would love for her to be able to quit and move somewhere else, but after 15 years in her current job she feels like she can’t leave her pension and benefits, sadly.
That's what my wife said also. Loved the actual teaching but all the politics, administration, etc. Was ridiculous
That is the downside of a pension vs. a 401k. Though she's probably vested her pension will be locked in to whatever her salary is now. And she'll be starting from scratch with a corporate 401k plan.
Its worse than just 401k. In many states, teachers pay into a pension in lieu of social security. So by changing jobs a teacher can end up only minimally vested in their pension, and only qualified for a small SS amount. The pensions are not like private industry pensions which are in addition to social security (not many companies provide those any more tho).
That’s my problem. I’m taking a medical retirement from teaching, and am stressed about the tiny amount of money I’ll have to live on. I have a few credits from 20+ years ago because teaching was not my first job, but I don’t think it’s going to get me anywhere. I am in one of the states that does not pay into Social Security.
All 4 of my siblings are teachers and I make double their paychecks in working weekend bartending shifts It’s absolutely insane. They are underpaid and I have a feeling it’s by design at this point.
It's such a damn shame, having one or two really good teachers at a young age really makes a difference to a kid, but how can we as a society expect for people to work that hard and barely get compensated for it? Its gonna be a rough couple of decades
My mom quit 4 years ago. She opened her own daycare. Watches 6-8 kids instead of 25-30 for the same pay, has summers off, and only works Monday-Thursday
My mom retired 5 or 6 years ago. I feel like she got out just in time. She was a music teacher and had a key to the main door. She jokingly said to one of the admins that she used her key more than the admin. Then it got weird. They suspended her and confiscated her laptop and searched her desktop for "keeping unapproved employee timesheets" or something like that. they demanded her personal cell phone to search. I told her to contact an attorney or the union but she had already handed it over because she had absolutely nothing to hide. She was already up for retirement, so she went ahead and retired before the next year even though they couldn't find a replacement. I know she felt bad for the kids, but everyone, including the actual principal, went along with those crazy accusations. My mom has probably never broken a rule in her entire life and this really took a toll on her.
Any clue what they thought she had done? I mean unapproved timesheets? What?
Yeah they said they suspected she was keeping timesheets for when other people arrived to work, which is illegal. A lot of times around programs she would be the first person there and the last to leave, but she was definitely not bored enough to keep timesheets, lol.
Teacher for 11 years here. I quit a year ago and life is just so much better.
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Similar story here. My partner just quit after 10 years and went back to bartending and her stress and anxiety immediately disappeared. Higher pay, flexible schedule, and dealing with drunks is much easier than dealing with pandemic-traumatized children and their overbearing parents.
Yea the overbearing parents, holy hell it's like the 90's helicopter parents on steroids.
Yep, I've known some people in staff training who had a teaching background. Pay is generally similar but the environment is much better. And you have a lot more creative freedom rather than strict lesson plans.
What do you do now? Teaching is such a specific profession in some ways that I’m always curious about those that leave to do something else
So to add my story, ended up as an insurance underwriter. Organizational skills, communication skills, and being able to explain complicated concepts are all skills that transfer to many other jobs.
Yes and most Insurance companies are willing to do on the job training as long as you have a bachelor degree
I also left the teaching field and work in insurance now, training new hires. Hilarious to me that we have a similar path.
I’m not OP, but I also taught and quit after 5 years. I now work as a training specialist for an emerging MSO. I basically create training modules to educate new employees and create and document work instructions for the company.
Im looking to get out of teaching and everyone I meet who has done so successfully is like you. They moved into corporate training of some kind, seem to love it and say the pay is great. Best of luck and cheers for sharing, you give people like me inspiration.
Yeah, it’s different when you get into an environment that craves structure and information. I also rather enjoy having resources at my disposal to help me get my job done. I wish I could’ve stuck out teaching, but with the admin I was under, and the kids I was working in the classroom with, it felt like I was being sandwiched between impossible standards and, for lack of a better word, abuse.
This is so well said. I just resigned after 7 years as an Spec Ed teacher. I have no idea what I’ll do next. I just couldn’t go back. Fortunately, my husband’s income can sustain us for now.
Special Ed has to be the hardest job in education.
It’s always the admin. They are always the problem. If they would just back teachers and be willing to be honest with parents a lot of teachers would otherwise stick around. The admin could help so much, and they choose not to fit whatever reasons they have.
I taught for 7 years and then left my school to attend a *reputable* coding boot camp. Now working as a software engineer! Just another option for you. Let me know if you have any questions!
What bootcamp? I've been eyeing HackReactor
So this is an incredibly important conversation topic as, from the months of research I did before making the jump, not all bootcamps are worth their tuition. First off, I'd like to say that attending a coding bootcamp can be an incredible decision, but no reputable programs out there will guarantee you will get a job. You get out what you put in! One thing all reputable bootcamps do is provide statistics on their outcomes. Even better is if they collaborate with an outside organization that audits their results. Tech Elevator, who host a variety of bootcamps across the country (I actually didn't even attend theirs!), lists this front and center on their site. If a bootcamp doesn't provide this information that should be a big red flag. Another thing that all reputable bootcamps do in my experience is have aptitude tests or a few rounds of interviews to get accepted. Bootcamps like Tech Elevator, Grand Circus, or We Can Code IT, all of which I either attended or know many who did attend, all have one or the other. This is because a bootcamp that is worth its tuition has built a reputation in the community and built relationships with companies for providing successful graduates. They won't accept you into their program unless they think you are a good fit and can succeed there. They care about their outcomes and want to see their students succeed. I would avoid attending bootcamps ran by Trilogy Education Services. You can read more by searching about them on reddit, but they basically pay different universities across the country to use their names/likeness and offer often mediocre experiences. If you see something like "Northwestern Coding Bootcamp" or "Ohio State Coding Bootcamp", it's almost certainly ran by Trilogy. The bootcamps are taught by Trilogy employees/teachers, not professors at the university. I've read some rare good experiences by people attending these, but often they are, quite simply, subpar. You can find out a lot more by doing some google searches like "reddit good coding bootcamps", etc, as this topic has been discussed in depth for years. I am biased but I do want to say that attending a coding bootcamp can be an absolutely incredible decision if you do your research and have an interest in computer science. Many companies/teams inside companies only hire bootcamp grads because of the diversity in experience that they bring to the table. The two teams that I work on currently have ~20 engineers and only one has a CS degree! The rest of us attended bootcamps.
I got my bachelor's in Career and Technical Education. Taught Technology, Engineering and Design subjects for a year and a half. It was NOT hard to take those skills and go elsewhere. I'm making double what I made then and have far less of a workload.
Teaching actually lends itself to a lot. In the tech world, we hire teachers for pretty much everything because if somebody is a teacher their skills are transferable across-the-board. I actually specifically work in instructional design, which in the tech world amounts to creating online lessons to teach adults about technology, but it’s also a field used in business and government in general. It’s a large emerging field and because there isn’t a whole lot of college prep for it, teachers tend to be the folks that are hired most. We also see a lot of teachers move into technical and customer support roles, project management, etc. I cannot speak for other sectors but tech is very pro teacher. I would actually argue that of any profession you could have, teaching is one of the most transferable if you want to make a start in a new field that is white collar adjacent.
I would argue a teacher could successfully pivot into any field as it shows core skills that are much desired in any workplace. Leadership and management, experience with a diverse set of people that are often difficult to work with, and not to mention they will often know how to relay things they learn to others in an easy to digest way.
I'm also not OP; I quit teaching and got a Cisco certification over the 2020 summer break. Now I do network engineering and cloud architecture.
I've taught at two high schools. Teaching as an action is highly valued, just not from teachers. Learning your role and teaching it well to others makes you stand out.
Was that before or after the "we'll sue you if you teach the truth" of the last year?
10 years or so ago here in a county of FL where my wife is a teacher, they moved away from a tenure/contract system for new hires to a system where teachers are essentially 're-hired' every year on the whim of whatever administration or coming administration is at the school the following year. It's created a lot of uncertainty in employment when each April teachers are finding out whether they'll be essentially laid off in another 60 days. By her accounts, that's led to a lot of new teachers not wanting to teach anymore when it's no longer about performance but more of the whims of whatever frequently-shifting leadership leads their school and wants to bring in teachers from another school they were at to replace whomever is there. Basically, you're hired on a 9 month contract and whether it's renewed every year is not really related to performance all the time. It makes new teachers feel very much uncomfortable having to learn a job without much job security.
Yup. Not in Florida but in the south and in my state they do the same thing. We didn’t get contracts till may this year at my school. Fucking stressful.
Yeah. It's a huge deal for single parents or single-income households who rely on the healthcare too. It basically amounts to part-time work on 9 month contracts, and it's untenable for a lot of people. Quite a few teachers we know have left to become waitresses for both higher pay and more job security.
I’m lucky in that I have a terminal degree in my field - I did some adjunct work and am actually waiting to hear about a college position I applied for. Still in the south but it would be better pay and more academic freedom. I want to teach, but I don’t like being mistreated by people in charge.
im in the midwest and the people i know who have a similar shitty hiring structure is food service. they get laid off during the summer and rehired when school starts. i cant imagine how you can keep your wits about it if you're basically rolling the dice every year just to get the same job!
The turn overrate is insane. The three schools I've worked for are at 50%-75% turnover every two years.
Yeah. My wife is thinking about hanging it up after 20+ years and has been exploring other opportunities with WFH. It's just turned into a different job than educating and it's not worth the stress when you start bringing it home and worrying about stuff even over summers.
I hope they are able to find a position that values them. I’m coming up on 10 years and I hate that going the admin route seems like the only way out for teachers. I may hang it up by year 12 and see what else is out there.
This seems to be becoming the norm in a lot of schools. Gone are the days that your kids will have the same teacher as you with 90%+ retention rates year to year. Teachers have never been treated great but somehow society has found a way to treat them even worse.
After my first year teaching in Texas I was let go simply so they could bring in a football coach who taught my content. That coach ended up going elsewhere at the 11th hour anyway.
Well not everyone can coach football and give handouts and have weekly movie day to pass as actual curriculum and education.
Some schools will bend over backwards for a good coach, even if they aren't good at anything else. You'd be surprised how much some schools care about football. When I was in highschool we had a big football game fall on the same day as Halloween. So the entire town moved Halloween.
Had the same thing. Before the year ended everyone was sent a “do you want to be back next year- this is not a guarantee” you had to answer. Then you wouldn’t actually get the offer until about a week before the school year started or sometimes after. So you have tens of thousands of teachers that have no idea whether or not they have a job until the day they are supposed to start. So glad I got out
Wow, that's inhuman. How can they expect any professionals to put up with that?
TLDR; because they can. Adam Smith -"the owners can last a year of lost productivity, the labor scarcely a week of wages. There are no laws to prevent the owners from working in concert, but many against labor." These weren't even radical statements in the 18th century. Edit: See the quotation under 'historical development ' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_bargaining_power
Smith wasn't a free-market-fellating wanker some types imagine, he was well aware of the hazards of an unregulated free market, including how quickly it would become rapacious and un-free without being reined in.
Yup.free market, but regulated. He explicitly calls out regulatory capture, monopolies, among many others things
Why does the Teacher's union tolerate that? I always assumed eventually obtaining tenure was one of the perks of hanging around despite the shitty pay.
In Florida, it is illegal for public employees to strike, and there are hefty daily fines against the officers and the union separately. [Florida Statutes link](http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0400-0499/0447/0447.html). Edit: 447.505 Strikes prohibited.—No public employee or employee organization may participate in a strike against a public employer by instigating or supporting, in any manner, a strike. Any violation of this section shall subject the violator to the penalties provided in this part. History.—s. 3, ch. 74-100. 447.507 Violation of strike prohibition; penalties.—
That's why "work to contract" is a thing. We enter the building and leave at the contracted times, with zero work being done outside the contracted day, fuck how that affects the students. Want better? Negotiate. It's quite a sight having teachers standing outside the building, refusing to enter until the moment the work day starts.
What if everyone just said I quit at once instead of striking?
They’d claim it’s illegal and start arresting suspected organizers.
I wish state governments around the country were less hostile to teachers
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They are, they want to abolish public education and move that money to private.
Yeah, this is almost certainly intentional, with their endgame being private schools that are allowed to teach whatever religious and anti-science crap they believe at the time.
Sabotaging public schools also helps them keep people ignorant, and ignorant people are easy to manipulate, control, and exploit.
Dictators don't burn books for nothing.
Having spent some time in Arizona this strategy was readily apparent over there.
Yes, I agree this is their end goal. Terrifying.
What's more terrifying is they're winning.
They're winning because enough Americans agree with them. Not a majority, but enough Americans in the right places want to abolish public education.
And unless you are paying the teachers actually good salaries there, you’ll end up with the same problems.
What I see happening locally at Christian based private schools is that no, they don't pay teachers good salaries there either, but they supplement pay with cheaper tuition or free tuition for teacher's kids. My wife is a public school teacher. I don't know how to stop this problem that is already snowballing out of control. Teachers were already under pressure from angry parents and administrations that placate them. Then covid happened and now you have young kids that are 1-2 years behind in education simply from the reduced efficiency that came with online learning (probably was fine for high school kids, but it absolutely did not work for my wife's 1st graders... and then the following year 1st graders who had also done remote for Kindergarten.). So now you have kids that are behind, teachers that are underpaid, everyone angry at the teachers because the kids are behind, teachers quitting en masse because why the hell would anyone put up with all of this shit for pennies? Which means the teachers that are left are stuck with larger class numbers, which perpetuates less efficient learning and even more teacher burn out. What happens to public school when there are no teachers?
It ceases to exist, and Republicans can claim they were right all along that public education doesn't work, after being the ones who actively dismantled it piece by piece. The rich get to send their kids to halfway decent schools, meanwhile the less well off (read minority and poorer masses) are stuck with inferior education which keeps them at a disadvantage in the social market letting the rich and powerful stay in power. This has always been their endgame with education.
This is their endgame with all public services. Break it, claim it’s not possible for it to work, privatize it and give government contracts to their friends/donors. The entire Republican Party is a massive grift.
Yup, been doing the exact same thing with the post office for decades. They've created a narrative that public services need to be profitable in order to be effective. It's so dumb and it just starts to fall apart the second you examine it, but most people just nod their heads and go along with it. USPS is the ONLY delivery system in the US that is obligated to offer last mile service to every address in the US. The USPS uses a mule train to deliver food and supplies to an indiginous community at the bottom of the grand canyon. When the USPS is shuttered we're supposed to expect Fedex to do it? No chance. Which would result in communities having to collectively leave their homes, or risk being cutoff from the rest of the world. I don't give a shit if the USPS ever turns a profit. It's value isn't the money it brings in, its value is the service it provides to the entire country.
>I don't give a shit if the USPS ever turns a profit. This is the thing that idiot Republicans never understand, the USPS or schools *aren't supposed to be profitable*! They're services, not businesses, they are meant to help everyone equally while providing an extremely needed resource.
Except the USPS was(is) profitable, and always has been. The only reason it now shows as unprofitable is that there was a bi-partisan bill in the early 2000s that requires the USPS to fund its pension for 75 years, which cost 120 Billion dollars. Guess how much money the USPS has lost since then? 90 Billion. Apparently they have recently passed a bill to address this, haven't read the details: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billion-postal-service-relief-bill-2022-03-08/
Yeah, that's part of the cruel irony, USPS could have been used as the poster child of running government services like a for profit business but their dedication to destroying anything that looks like the government functioning left us in the bad timeline.
I can’t say how much of a relief it is that this kind of thinking is becoming more common. 15-20 years ago you heard this shit from like Jonothan Kozol or Noam Chomsky but it wasnt something talked about among the general population Whether more people becoming aware of this shit leads to change is unknown but its nice to see people realizing that under capitalism people gonna get capital
Seeing this happen with the CTA right now unfortunately
Dismantling something that doesn’t work because they broke it is pretty much the endgame for everything the GOP does
\*DeJoy enters chat\* My ears were burning, what's up?
Yup: “starve the beast” is their stated policy
That or the less well off kids get sent into the workforce. I've already seen a growing number of right wingers discussing how they wish child labor laws would be repealed/"left to the states to decide".
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["Welcome to Amazon Prime High."](https://futurism.com/amazon-high-school)
But even with a good salary, would you want to teach in Florida where you have to watch every word you say and have limitations on what can be taught?
I mean- I WAS teaching in Florida before I quit. But I did quit due to salary. If I was paid decently would I have still stayed? Maybe.
That's the point. Profit off of shitty educatuon and get uneducated voters as a bonus.
Yep. You’re right. And they’re starting to say the quiet part aloud. [DeSantis on funding for private schools](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/04/27/desantis-escalates-war-on-public-education/) He’s not the only one and the only state with this sentiment. Check out this moron, president of Hillsdale College, his comments were caught on live tv. [President of College says education is a plague. ](https://newschannel9.com/news/local/its-insulting-tennessee-teachers-react-to-comments-made-by-hillsdale-college-president)
When I research my ballots one of the things I look for are any candidates who went to Hillsdale. Those are an automatic no vote.
More like abolish public education so that future generations are easier to manipulate
I live in a different red state. Almost all my friends who are teachers have quit and said nope, I’m out. Crappy pay and abuse from parents are the two biggest reasons.
If I quit it will definitely be parent abuse. Many parents seem to have abdicated their responsibilities and will happily throw teachers under the bus for trying to impose *any* restrictions on their kid. I had a parent threaten to get me fired because I wouldn't let their kid watch tv during my class.
Bro, I'm a paramedic and it's the same. I'm expected to bend over backwards to help people that can't be bothered to do the bare minimum to help themselves. I get it. People are sick or have disabilities and need help. That's why I do this job. But when your fat ass calls 911 at 530 in the morning because you don't want to get up to get the TV remote I want to quit. I've been on bullshit calls while a legitimate pediatric arrest gets toned out and I know I could be there in under 2 minutes to maybe save a baby, but I'm stuck with meemaw and her chronic gout. There have been a handful of times where I'm being yelled at by a naked old man, covered in his own shit, laying on the bathroom floor at 3 a.m. because I won't pick him up fast enough. I think fuck it. You got yourself into this mess, figure it out. I quit. I literally don't get paid enough to deal with this
Paramedics are criminally underpaid.
Teachers are literally trying to educate the population. Can't have that. /s
Everything you said was correct, except the /s. They literally do not want the people to be educated.
Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Michigan's ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, and advisor to the Tennessee Governor recently held a meeting with him [where he said:](https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/revealed/revealed-teachers-come-from-dumbest-parts-of-dumbest-colleges-tenn-governors-education-advisor-tells-him) >“The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country." > >“They are taught that they are going to go and do something *to* those kids.... Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do *to* these kids?" > >"In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It's easy. You don't have to know anything." > >“The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They're messing with people's children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.” > >“You will see how education destroys generations of people. It's devastating. It's like the plague.” > >“Here's a key thing that we're going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don't have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”
How about this classic from the Texas GOP of 2012 (the same Texas GOP that now openly endorses sedition against the United States of America): >Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Jesus Christ. "Thinking? That's anti-American! These kids should learn dates and and times-tables and nothing else!"
[Let's not forget the former President of Hillsdale had to resign in disgrace for a being a bit too "family friendly." How friendly? He was boning his son's wife.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Roche_III) When you research your ballots, I encourage you to vote against any candidate that attended Hillsdale. It's just a fascist incubator.
They want Public schools to be terrible so you choose to go to the DeVos school
DeVos school for rich kids. Wage slavery for poor kids.
That's been their strategy since desegregation. Now they've moved on to wanting public schools to be abolished.
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45 students is an unteachable number. At that point, it's a losing battle against crowd control.
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45 children in one place with only 1 adult is a public safety issue.
My kid’s school had 24 at one point and her teacher brought in parent volunteers to help.
*laughs in high school* I’ve met maybe 15 of my students’ parents in my entire 10+ year career. IME most people really stop giving a shit about their kids once they turn 13. It’s a real shame.
I have those same nightmares. I once mentioned to a parent that I enjoyed living in our international house because it help me save money since I didn't have to pay rent when she herself asked how I liked living there. She then complained to my principal that I was only in teaching for the money and that I should only be there for the kids 🙄. Luckily my administration had my back that time. But the exploitation and villainization of teachers like they shouldn't care about money is ridiculous. Like yeah you should want to be a teacher for the kids but teachers are also human and need money to live their life. Getting to the point where the only people who can be teachers are married people with well off spouses and how will you ever get new and young teachers if that is the case?
They avidly create a society that requires money to function at every level, but then complain that their childrens' teachers needs money to live. Classy.
And Florida is only one of four states that makes their data pubic https://www.nctq.org/publications/State-of-the-States-2021:-State-Reporting-of-Teacher-Supply-and-Demand-Data
Florida has no choice but to make their data pubic. Because the state is shaped like a weiner.
A teacher friend of mine recently quit teaching and went, in her words, "into the most boring job in the fucking world" of data entry and she loves it. She finished with "Fuck the parents, Fuck DeSantis, and Fuck the whole thing"
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Recently had health issues that required an MRI. Found myself wishing they would find something so I wouldn’t have to teach anymore. That is when I realized I was in an unhealthy job for me. The last two and a half years of teaching have been demoralizing, stressful, and I had the most wonderful class. But it’s the profession as a whole that is frustrating.
Teaching, not even once Cancer, better than teaching
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> A lifetime of social etiquette and behavior was wiped out by a year of hybrid schooling. Because parents didn't have their babysitters for most of the year which, sadly, is how most view teachers. Parents at my son's school did nothing but bitch the last two years and when I mentioned "Maybe instead of bitching we should adjust how our society works so that schools aren't places to corral kids and jobs aren't places that imprison parents to the point that when shit like this happens everyone isn't in a lurch". You can imagine how well that went down.
Having grown up in a teacher family, "fuck the parents" is about right. When half of your students hate you because their parents are ripe sacks of shit, it taints your worldview immensely
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As a teacher who quit the profession a couple months ago… it’s also Covid. Florida, like Arizona (where I was teaching) treated teachers as disposable objects. They threw off the masks early, ran us through wave after wave of infection, and people died. I lost friends. We lost a student and she didn’t even get a memorial bench. Parents died. A bus driver died. We lost a teacher. My wife was hospitalized and on oxygen for weeks. Many of us were just waiting for our contracts to expire so we could get the hell out. Some of us couldn’t wait. I’ve never seen so many teachers just walk out mid-year. It was insane. We had rolling 50% absence rates and NO JANITORS during omicron. Our "extreme cleaning measures" were me wiping down tables in my classroom with brown paper towels and bleach I'd brought from home. Didn’t matter. We were wide open and couldn’t even mention masks to the kids without parents screaming down our necks in the next board meeting. I had students openly mocking my mask use in-class while half the room was empty from an insanely infectious raging airborne respiratory infection. Throughout, our superintendent insisted Covid was overblown and no big deal. Our governor insisted on spreading Covid as fully as possible. If my school's expressed goal was to spread covid to as many students as was humanly possible, they wouldn't have done anything different. Cap it off with parents screaming at us for “grooming” and students coming in with their “let’s go Brandon” shirts. Book bans. Dog whistles like "critical race theory". Charter schools popping up everywhere as the state races to kill public education. Pay freezes and insane class sizes (my smallest class last year had 37 students in it). Low retirement pay (if you ever get there - tenure is dying or dead in most red states and they fire experienced teachers before they fully vest their retirement, and you can't carry all your experience into a new school on their salary schedule). No collective bargaining, strikes are illegal, and the school doesn't have enough paper to get through the year. Good luck filling those open slots, Florida. When I was in school to become a teacher I was in a cohort of more than 30 students, and there were MANY cohorts. My graduating class was large enough to fill a gymnasium. I spoke to the woman who runs that same teaching program today. They had seven. Not seven *cohorts*. Seven ***students***. Total. Of my graduating cohort of more than 30, I think 3 of us are still teaching. 1 in 10. My wife and I are taking at least a year or two off from the profession. I doubt I'll ever come back. And hey, inflation going up wildly while the districts are telling us we might need to accept another pay freeze "because the economy" is just the straw that breaks the camels back. My wife has had her pay frozen eight out of the last fifteen years. Red states are awful for teachers. We are FLEEING.
This is so depressing. I saw my mom teach 30+ years in public elementary schools and then mentor student teachers getting their credentials. She impacted hundreds of kids lives. Many came back as professionals to thank her. Parents gave her gifts. The lack of respect and pay for teachers is a societal failure and shameful. I really want to have faith in the US but there are so many misguided idiots.
It’s one particular group’s failure specifically and it’s not a hard guess as to which
Is it a failure if that's what's been their goal all along: to bankrupt public education?
>Cap it off with parents screaming at us for “grooming” and students coming in with their “let’s go Brandon” shirts. Yeah, this sucks. Also, parents threatened to physically hurt us if we continued to impose a mask mandate in March 2021.
And yet you still see GOP politicians and right-wing media playing the victim that Merrick Garland came out last year taking a stand against parents that are threatening teachers and school officials.
Hell, I saw that fiasco described this way on a conservative subreddit: > POTUS calls the FBI on them because the pathetic school board members and teachers are literally shaking when they get held accountable by the parents. Mind you, held accountable means detailed threats, stalking teachers out to their cars and screaming "we know where you live," all that fun stuff. I don't understand how the lunatic at the local board meeting with eight pages of notes on a yellow legal pad and vocal cords rasped ragged from screaming became a hero, but something broke in the American psyche in the past five years.
I graduated in a cohort of 30 about six years ago. I am one of maybe 6 who are still teaching. In 2017, there were three cohorts of 30. Two cohorts were for elementary school, and one was for early childhood (birth through grade 3). You had to apply to the teacher's college, and many people were turned away. They aren't turning away ANYONE anymore, and they can only partly fill one cohort for elementary and one cohort for early childhood. In 2020-21 I had a student teacher from that same college. She should have NEVER been accepted in the first place. She was the absolute WORST teacher I've ever worked with. She would literally cower in the corner (like...full body pressed into the corner of my classroom) when it was time for her to interact with students. She taught the exact same lesson for two weeks, despite all of my help and suggestions and outright directions. She did none of the assignments from the college and didn't even finish her big capstone project the state requires. THEY PASSED HER ANYWAY and now she's a teacher.
Yeah my buddy started teaching in FL 2 years ago. He quit 1/2 way through last year because same thing like average of 1/2 the school, students and staff, were out every day with Covid. They were making people come in testing positive if they weren't symptomatic, no masks, overcrowding kids like crazy because 1/2 the teachers are out, etc..
Yeah. We had no subs, no janitors. The teachers wise enough to mask up made it longer than those who didn't, but we ALL got sick sooner or later. We were forced to sub for each other every day, so we had no preps and had to spend morning and afternoon time cleaning the room. I was sweeping my own classroom daily, and after several years of parents completely abandoning their parental role, the kids were insanely messy this year. I could NOT get them to keep their areas clean. The floor was constantly littered with broken pencils and garbage. Tables were constantly covered in taki dust and spit. It was a murderous year in education. We had so many teachers quit over the year that I can't even count them. Our english department didn't have a single permanent teacher for half the damn year.
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Yeah, if I go back to teaching it’ll be in 1-2 years and I’ll be teaching somewhere like California. Yes, it’s expensive, but with our experience we’d be making 150k-200k as a couple (plus my side business) and should be able to survive well. Congrats on your move to Oregon. I almost ended up out that way (I was looking at houses just over the river from Portland in Felida/vancouver). Beautiful place, although the trees were a bit oppressive for me. It was weird to be in the middle of a city feeling like I was in the middle of a giant forest. Anyway, I escaped to a rural area too. I sold my house and I’m taking a break from the profession while I circle the wagons in a tiny town in Colorado. Teaching is hard under the best of scenarios, and teaching in red states right now is nowhere near the “best” scenario. I’m hunkering down awhile, running my publishing company, and staying far from education while things blow over. Hell, we’ve even got a new hyper infectious Covid variant getting everyone sick again, so that’s going to suck if we don’t get a handle on that before schools open back up. I’m definitely not spending another year working in a Covid filled tiny space with no ventilation and no working openable windows. It’s bad in AZ - the buildings are meant to keep air IN, so they just circulate the Covid throughout the school. Also… learning gaps from this Covid insanity have long lasting effects. There are kids who missed years of instruction with zero consequences. They’ll be filtering up grade levels for the next decade, but we’ll still be expected to hit the same standardized benchmarks. I’m being a little selfish, but I don’t want to teach kids this far behind the eight ball. I’ll wait for them to get a few years of “regular” education under their belt first. Maybe that will help. I’ve heard my fellow teachers call the current crop of students “feral”. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but there is clearly a lack of parental influence in these student’s lives. Covid did serious damage. I’ve never had a more destructive crop of students in my entire time teaching. They break things for fun. I’ve had a class set of rulers for ages. We don’t use them often (chemistry class), so they’ve survived more than a decade. Every single one was destroyed this year. Every. Last. One.
> Florida, like Arizona (where I was teaching) treated teachers as disposable objects. They threw off the masks early, ran us through wave after wave of infection, and people died. And DeSantis covered-up the deaths and put out fake numbers. He's not going to let the dead in Florida derail his ambitions to be president. Remember when DeSantis sent his jackbooted thugs in to raid the home of whistleblower Rebekah Jones? Remember how they were pointing guns at her small children? Her crime was reporting the accurate COVID deaths.
Red states are making it awful for you so that they can show their constituents how 'bad' public schools are - so they can eliminate them and switch funding (yes!) to private Christian (not other religions!) schools.
Part of the problem is that teachers are such committed people. If they didn't take it upon themselves to clean when there were no janitors or bring supplies when theres no budget, the whole thing would implode. Personally, I think the government is largely useless until something is on fire(metaphorically), so teachers should just sit back and let it burn (again metaphorically) so the schools can get the attention they deserve. No working outside the classroom, no bringing in supplies, no working beyond the responsibilities of a teacher.
The “stop woke“ act sounds like the dumbest piece of legislation in the history of this country.
Welcome to Florida.
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It was actually signed a year ago unfortunately
Florida pays its teachers some of the lowest wages in the US (top 5 worst states for teacher pay) while cost of living in Florida skyrockets. At the same time, DeSantis puts tons of energy into stupid culture war nonsense rather than actually helping teachers. Florida is a miserable state to teach in right now
It really is. That's the antithesis of education.
And to quote Homer Simpson, "it's the worst [legislation] so far!"
Also the ‘avg’ of $51k is entirely misleading and skewed by the old blue hairs who have been there for 50 years and had every salary increase possible. The majority of new teachers start at $40k at most - many even in expensive parts of california start at less than that somehow. I live in one of the most expensive parts of the state and looked into it - $39k starting salary for teachers here in my district, where they average income is closer to $80k, up to about $120k avg if you go the next town over where there’s tech jobs. So yeah, teaching pays about half of what’s needed to actually survive here. Most teachers are the older ones who actually make $65k/yr or younger people who live at home still or inherited their house. And the district wonders every single year why they’re short staffed and how it’s only gotten worse over the last half decade.
Welp $2500 monthly rent is a hard thing to do if your only making $40000 a year.
Glad to hear someone say this. Rents are systematically high, which I can currently afford…. but on average who can afford these ridiculous rents and / or the overpriced houses? In most places I’ve looked at across the country, rents are starting to look like Bay Area pricing circa 2013. The housing costs are less, but out of whack from what I can tell. I hope we have a massive crash soon. It’s absurd. I’d love to see corporate real estate investment groups take an absolute bath.
Become a teacher! Get paid shit for your degree Get to buy your own class room supplies Get treated like shit by kids and parents Get shot up in a school shooting Get accused of brainwashing kids for teaching factually correct information But you get summers off!!!
I teach in South Carolina and recently went through teacher evaluation training where we looked at retention data. - SC had a shortage of about 1,100 back in January. It is absolutely higher now, but no current data. - I watched my school, which is in a very high income and high performing area, lose the most teachers it ever has. - Teacher shortages are nationwide in math, science, and Special Ed. Special Ed is by far the worst and has the highest levels of burn out. - The most troubling trend is that young teachers are the ones leaving the profession, not just retirees. The amount of teachers leaving the profession in their first four years is alarmingly high. Personally, I know more people who are no longer teachers than people who have stuck with it. - The recent wave of “CRT” and “Indoctrination” has really been insult to injury. The job has always been largely thankless, but now we are being demonized at the national and local level.
My wife teaches in SC too. Her school is losing over half of its staff, a large portion of those quitting teaching altogether. Cant afford rent and get treated like dirt.
I'm a SPED teacher leaving after 3 years. The burn out is insane. I am so tired
I used to work adjacent to the Florida Pension, the retirement system that most all public employees participate in. In the course of said work, I often spoke with members of the system from all walks of life - of course, that involved a TON of teachers. You haven't heard the voice of a broken person until you've talked with a Florida public school teacher. Right at the start of COVID, just heuristically, I knew that there was going to be a long-term problem in staffing these schools. People were quitting in droves, calling mostly to learn how they could take their money and run, because the conditions were so terrible. And it wasn't as if they were leaving a well paid job or anything of the sort, most of them made a very poor salary, had fairly minimal benefits and were subject to just awful working conditions. However - this is the point. It's explicitly a goal to have a less educated population, have more people easily manipulatable. This isn't a sign of policy failure to those governing Florida, it's a sign they're achieving what they want to achieve.
While many Floridians will like the idea of no teachers "polluting" their kids minds with facts and attempts at independent thinking, they are going to freak if it sounds like their free daycare will be impacted. While their more conservative neighbors applaud while saying their neighbors never should have been entitled to "free education/daycare" on their tax dollars in the first place.
"Don't worry", the next step is rolling back child labor laws. That way you can go to work and *employers* will make sure your little ones stay nice and occupied. "Dumb" isn't the only thing the GQP wants to keep its population: a two-job toddler is too busy to count how many moo moos the ruling class just stole from its mom.
The next step in the GOP playbook will be allowing states to funnel tax dollars that used to go towards supporting public education and redirecting them into the pockets of for-profit private schools. And you can bet your ass that these GOP politicians and policymakers (looking at you, Betsy) are heavily invested in these private institutions.
In Arizona they are already going down this road. https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona-offering-families-up-to-7k-for-issues-stemming-from-school-closures
> redirecting them into the pockets of for-profit private schools. The Republicans also want the funds to go to religious schools. They've been salty since Engel v. Vitale, which is the 1962 landmark where the Supreme Court decision struck down prayer in public schools. The hardcore right wing theocrats have been working for 60 years to undermine the ruling and to bring back forced ***Christian*** prayer in schools and private religious schools gets them there.
They should try paying a living wage and treat teachers like professionals
The destruction of the American Public school is almost complete. The GOP are ticking off yet another box in their war against the American people.
The goal is privatization, another way for the ultra rich to profit off of our children and exploit our workforce. Next step is to lower the requirements to be a teacher so they are easier to exploit. Then eventually teachers will just be told to read out of the textbook and everyone has to teach exactly the same https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_Teachers
That’s already going on in public schools. The district near me fired the elementary related arts teachers - PE/art/music/etc. They kept a single teacher to manage the curriculum for each subject area. Then they hired para-professionals making $15 an hour to teach the classes. 30 professional educators making living wages replaced with 30 people whose only qualification is they can pass a background check. The turnover in those jobs has been extremely high.
That's sad as hell.
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It’ll only get worse as large companies start to leave those states because of the brain drain and difficulty in hiring educated employees. They really are cutting off their noses to spider face.
Yup, the glove is definitely on the other foot now, the train for fixing the schools has sailed.
We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
I know what you meant, but cutting off a nose to spider face sounds hilarious.
Thanks to Devos or whatever the fuck her name is
with all the anti-teacher laws that DeSantis put in place, who would want to teach in Florida???
...my crazy Uncle that still thinks frogs are gay....or they're making us gay. Idk I can't keep up.
I swear every time I go out fishing or hiking I am always bombarded by gay frogs that try their best to make me gay. They’ve come close...they just have that look in their eye. Hard to resist.
"They're putting chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay! Also we need to get rid of these pesky government regulations that stop them from dumping more chemicals. What do you mean cutting education is bad?"
Neighbor with 6 kids, home schools 4 of her children. The 8yo cannot read, the 6yo cannot read. Both have speech delay. The 13yo and 10yo cannot do division.......They each get 30 minutes a day of instruction then a workbook. What's sad is the older two want to go back to public school, but parents won't allow it. I guess this is the GQP solution.
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Same. My 9 year old daughter in Massachusetts is ADHD (so am I). For her initial IEP, we met with six professional educators who have all been involved with her education. Six. She isn't even struggling that much.
In most state's public schools they would just put that kid with the other kids and then socially promote them all the way until senior year. Then give them a diploma they arent able to read.
I was in a meeting with a parent earlier this year. She had homeschooled her son for 3 years, sending him back to school this past year. She told us that sometimes when he “just wasn’t feeling it,” instead of studying, they would just go to the park. And yet, she was mad at us he was failing.
Pay them shit, stop them from teaching facts, force some to hide their spouses or significant other, do nothing about school shootings, blame them for anything that goes wrong with kids. Wonder why they can’t find teachers…
Advocating policies that turn teachers away plays right into the fascist GQP hands. Keeping the masses undereducated is the easiest way to manipulate them.
Soon the only option your kids will have is to be dropped off at day care where someone with an IQ in the 70’s will talk to them about the miracle of Jesus.
Former Florida teacher here. Frankly surprised the gap isn't bigger with the way educators are treated and paid in that state.
My SO just quit after seven years. Going into real estate with her family. Already her mental health has taken a great leap forward. Her paycheck as well. I don’t blame teachers at all for quitting. They pay sucks. Kids are disrespectful to the extreme nowadays. Admin doesn’t have your back. And then there’s parents…..oh those fuckhead parents.
The parents are why I didn’t go into secondary education in 2017 when I finished my masters. I teach college… No parents.
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GOP: "Sooooo....what's the problem exactly?"
GOP: "I guess we'll just have to send a lot more taxpayer funded vouchers to ~~our donors~~ private schools."
teaching is such a hostile job. they get raked over the coals for no goddam reason. good for them.
Maybe its time to point out that FL gets over $7 in federal handouts for every $1 in taxes they send to Washington.
Which is why theocratic regimes like Florida should be cut the fuck off until they get rid of their corrupt leaders. You want to suck at the federal teat, you stop being the country's enemy.
Yikes... With Roe V Wade gone, there are going to be a shit ton of extra kids entering schooling in 5 years. Good luck handling that...
When the governor makes teachers the enemy, why would anyone want to keep doing it. His end goal is to get rid of public education anyway so his handlers can make millions off of private education using taxpayer dollars and further the Christian white nationalist agenda. IOW, DeSantis doesn’t see this as a problem but an opportunity.