[jlbooker]

My wife was an elementary school teacher. She worked 7am-4pm, then came home had dinner and time with the family. After our son went to bed, she'd spend 8pm-11pm grading papers and working on lesson plans for the following week. She also spent time on the weekends developing lesson plans. That's a nine hour work day, plus three (or more) hours most evenings. That's easily a 60+hr work week.

Ohh, and there were no breaks during the work day. Most days she was required to be supervising/helping kids in the lunchroom during her "lunch break", so she couldn't really sit down to eat her own food. Good luck finding a time to use the restroom.

There are no vacation days. You can't say, "I'd like Friday off because my son has an event on Saturday and we need to travel there the day before".

If you were sick, you were required to find your own replacement from a list of substitutes that the school provided.

There are no public employee unions in our state (North Carolina). She made low $40k when she quit. Per-hour it was less than minimum wage. I've always made double or triple her salary in Tech, for half the hours.

The summers are "vacation", but they're also unpaid. She was only paid for 10 months out of the year. Ohh, and she had mandatory teacher workdays over the summer (unpaid), which were essentially 3-4 days of all-day training. We couldn't just leave for vacation.

Fast food is really a better gig. You can leave the work at work when the day is done, and it pays better too.

[jlbooker]

Ohh, and yes. We spent plenty ($100's) of our own money on school supplies at Wal-mart and teacher supply stores. The kids also had an extensive supply list that parents were asked to purchase, but it was never enough.

[jelliclesfarm]

this just proves that the public education is broken at management level. china and india sends more immigrants and students to the states. i dont ever remember having 'aids' or 'supplies' to study. all you need is study material. perhaps america would do better if we got rid of the current methods of education. it is unacceptable that parents think that their children whose free education is funded by tax payer money still dont take responsiblity to fill the gaps. the whole 'teachers buying supplies' point has been flogged to death everytime the union negotiates for raises which results in more taxes. spending a couple of hundred dollars in decorating material and side walk chalk is a fair trade for emotional bargaining brownie points and portrayal of teachers as selfless strangled bleeding hearts for the kids.

here is my question: all teachers are represented by a union that negotiates on their behalf. the teachers union in california is the most hard ass and powerful lobby. why isnt the union bargaining for better hours and better spending of literally 40% of california's annual state budget? more than 70% of our school budget goes towards salaries. schools are overcrowded and crumbling. many have cancelled programs and every year, we increase teachers' salaries(noone earns less than 100k) with lifetime pensions(including for dependents after they die). A union that can negotiate all this and coordinate with the ginormous pension management fund cannot bargain better working hours and useful school supplies? its almost as if they advise the teachers to do this so they use the 'sacrificing teachers' as a bargaining chip for more raises and votes. i have been watching this in ca for almost a decade now and it blows my mind.

Schools need security guards in some counties and they have become hotspots for political agitation. In the bay area schools, students walked out of class and demostrated during lunch break in support of teachers union. they are using the kids as their weapons against the tax paying parent who are literally held hostage. the unholy union and melding of political agendas between the UC system and CA public schools is another nail on the coffin of california public education system.

if anything, education costs should be coming down. personal story: the biggest expense when i was a student in school was notebooks because i had a lovely but a somewhat benevolent dictator as a math tutor who would make me to do 100 math sums everyday. it just had to be any kind of math..her method was that i had to sit down and have the discipline to set aside the time for math. i was always scrambling for paper. and it was getting expensive. finally my mother got permission to use her old office ledgers where accounts were only recorded on one side and were meant to be pulped. and every weekend, we'd have to burn them because even though it was 5 plus years old, we couldn't just discard them.

i marvel..MARVEL...at the tablet and the computer now. i rented a computer on a weekly basis to learn programming at home. i am so envious of the kids these days. and education is FREE for all!! i am SO MAD that this dumbass state of california is fighting to remove mathematics from school curriculums amongst other shenanigans and no disrespect to your wife, i dont feel like i can throw my support or show sympathy to the teachers. if there is a mafia and a godfather, the henchmen still dont get my sympathy.

education should be CHEAPER now! education should be more evolved now and tailored to suit individual children according to their aptitude. we had textbooks and one teacher for 40 students. in a country of about close to a billion. why isnt america better in 2022? every child should be able to be the best of what they can be and not some cookie cutter failed method that is unevolved even by developing countries standard.

if i were a conspiracy theorist, i would say that unionised public schools are america's soft underbelly where the poisoned dagger will be thrust to destroy the country. without a doubt, the educational system of this country(i dont know about the rest of the country..but at least speaking for california) is how the children will be weaponised against this nation. maybe ten years ago, there might have been a way to reverse this downfall. It is too late now as a whole generation has been poisoned. it starts with making an entire generation dumber. and teachers have been complicit.

[jlbooker]

> all teachers are represented by a union that negotiates on their behalf

No, this is not true. Some teachers are represented by unions. In our state (North Carolina), public employees are prohibited by law from organizing into unions and cannot strike.

There is a "teacher's association" that lobbies on their behalf, but the republican-controlled legislature pretty much ignores the association. Without the option the strike, the association is pretty much powerless. They publish opinions and give feedback about what they'd prefer to have happen, but they have no leverage to actually make any changes.

The money spent out-of-pocket is not just decorations and sidewalk chalk. It's pencils, paper, erasers, folders, name tags, cleaning supplies, sticky notes, pencil sharpeners, "prize box" rewards (because you have to have a behavior reward system, it works wonders at practical level for elementary students). It's all of the practical things that make a classroom function on a day-to-day basis. Heck, sometimes they'd run out of paper for the copy machine and we'd buy a few reems just so she could have a particular activity the next day.