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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32657 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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It’s worth noting that republicans everywhere want to raise teacher pay. The challenge is in actually doing that, because if you just give money to schools it’ll get embezzled by administrators who then proceed to cry about the poor underpaid teachers(which they’ll helpfully blame republicans for), no matter how thoroughly it’s earmarked for teacher pay.

Eh, teachers make fine money. My wife is a teacher, and her salary alone is easily enough to pay for a middle-class lifestyle. The issue isn't the money but rather all of the obstacles put in the way of their jobs. I'd guess more than half of the average teacher's time is spent on paperwork and regulation compliance rather than teaching.

Sure, teachers aren't from any objective measure underpaid, the point was it's a bipartisan consensus that teachers should be paid more.

Fair

This isn't what happens - it's just even the increased teacher pay lags behind other white collar professions, so teachers feel underpaid. There are plenty of ways that a person could be upset with education spending, but administrators aren't stealing teachers' raises.

But yeah, many Republican's used the money for states in the American Rescue Plan to raise teacher's pay in many states (fully legally - not saying it was untoward that way), which is why in retrospect, as a partisan Democrat, the Democrat's should've not given largely Republican governors such a giant slush fund so they could look good to low-info swing voters (again, not a shot at low info voters, just a statement of fact), but instead maybe added a 2nd year of the expanded child tax credit, or something else along those lines. But, unfortunately, we overlearned the lessons of the 2009 recession where states and localities really did hit a massive funding crunch, which really didn't happen under COVID, something many people thought would happn.

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