Public school teachers belong to unions and have lifetime pensions. Many of them have their educational loans forgiven after a certain number of years of service.
Not in all states. In my state (North Carolina), teachers participate in the public employees retirement/pension fund. However, public employees are prohibited by law from joining/forming a union.
Yes, the get "summers off", but there are also mandatory continuing education requirements that must be completed, so they're still working (unpaid) during those two months.
Teachers also cannot request a vacation day. If you need to call in sick, you're responsible for securing a substitute (school provides the list of approved people, better start calling them frantically).
Neither of those benefits, if they exist in a state, negate the hardships of a low salary. Thinking of paying off the loan which got you the job as some sort of luxury is wild. We could also just pay them more so loans didn't need to be forgiven.
But this and the previous comment is true for all jobs. How can you compare a job where it takes years and years of dedicated study and very special set of skills and aptitude to match the remuneration of a job that is less valuable and only requires certification?
Can we expect school teachers to be paid as much as a project manager or surgeon? It is not an easy job or an unskilled one, but it is not at par with the more you well paid jobs as well.
Cities want to have a mixed housing and diversity and all kinds of income earning citizens. But then the low wage earning populace start complaining that pay isn’t good enough and wages need to be increased. You can’t have the cake and eat it too. We can create subsidized affordable homes in expensive Ca zip codes but we can’t bring down cost of living…because it’s the high cost of living that supports the rest of the pyramid by way of high cost of goods and services. And taxes. From gas to utilities to restaurants, everything costs more. So those on the lower wages who are subsidized will always have a lag in cost of living no matter what.
It’s all relative. The govt should make infrastructure and basic support systems equal to ALL cities with diverse cost of living index. That’s all we can do in terms of equality.
Completely random google search and this about rural schools : https://hechingerreport.org/rural-schools-have-a-teacher-sho.... [..] “People arrive here, and they can’t deal,” said Kohl of the many teachers who come for a few years but don’t stay. “Yeah, the mountains are beautiful, but they’re nine hours away. If you want to fly anywhere, you drive 325 miles to Billings.”[..] For many reasons, including low pay, isolation and scarcity of housing, hanging on to local talent is an especially acute problem in Montana.[…] you can’t fix isolation and lack of housing with higher pay. This is a govt failing.
How much does tutoring cost? It costs 10-12k per student per annum according to most schools budgets. And most school districts have 10-15k students.
Schools are for social reasons as well as educational. So children can learn from their peers..but consider what is happening in schools. There is violence, guns, bullying and drugs in school. They are becoming political and it’s like rounding up all the impressionables for any kind of indoctrination. Education has become secondary to politics in American schools.
Union negotiated working conditions are worse but pay is higher. Something is utterly rotten with American public education and it’s been this way for the past two decades. It has gotten worse in the last ten years. It might be beyond repair at this point and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt.
Yes, the get "summers off", but there are also mandatory continuing education requirements that must be completed, so they're still working (unpaid) during those two months.
Teachers also cannot request a vacation day. If you need to call in sick, you're responsible for securing a substitute (school provides the list of approved people, better start calling them frantically).