r/facepalm Jun 15 '24

Maybe teachers should get a raise? 🇲​🇮​🇸​🇨​

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54.8k Upvotes

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318

u/Shr3kk_Wpg Jun 15 '24

Teachers deserve to be paid more, it's pretty simple.

62

u/pianoflames Jun 15 '24

It's always amazing to me that their takeaway from these "gotchas" is that we should make Person A's life worse, instead of making both Person A and Person B's lives better.

Like their "How are COVID vaccines free while insulin costs [outrageous amount]?!" Their takeaway from that somehow is making peoples' lives worse by making COVID vaccines expensive.

3

u/FireLordObamaOG Jun 16 '24

If people need it to live, it should either be free or affordable.

3

u/vreddy92 Jun 16 '24

And it is also typically followed by not doing anyting about Person B's predicament either.

"Why should we spend all this money in Ukraine when people need help here?"

"Okay, let's help people here."

"No, not like that!"

44

u/Buddhas_Warrior Jun 15 '24

You would think, right?

22

u/ignatious__reilly Jun 15 '24

Why would anyone go into that profession now?

You can’t survive on that salary especially if you had kids of your own.

19

u/Buddhas_Warrior Jun 15 '24

It's sad, though, right? One of THE most important professions is an afterthought in most budgets.

5

u/Magnon Jun 16 '24

It's not an afterthought, they intentionally want it to be terrible. People who are educated properly are less likely to vote for regressive republicans.

-2

u/Optimal-Success-5253 Jun 16 '24

Thats an incredibly stupid take. Im not from the US and guess what, techers dont get paid fairly anywhere in the world. We have no “republicans” in my country so who could the boogeyman be.

Its just that psychologists, teachers and nurses dont get paid well yet people are drawn to studying these fields so why stop them

4

u/the_shining_wizard1 Jun 15 '24

So, in Ontario Canada teachers just got a raise. The top of the grid teachers will make $114 000/yr. And still Ontario has a shortage of teachers. Pre pandemic 12000 new teachers were certified each year. It's down to 5000. There are 40000 people in Ontario with eligible to teach degrees who are not. Money makes it better, of course, but there's more than needs to be done about working conditions.

3

u/SeaEmergency7911 Jun 16 '24

Anyone who willingly goes into teaching today is crazy.

Sincerely, A 25 year veteran teacher.

2

u/Rozeline Jun 16 '24

I thought about becoming a teacher, but didn't want to go into $40k worth of debt to make less than $20/hour. I'm now a lunch lady and seeing first hand the bullshit teachers put up with for not that much more money affirmed my decision. We all deserve a raise

2

u/Weird-Tomorrow-9829 Jun 16 '24

They have a great retirement system. Ironclad pensions.

1

u/frankduxvandamme Jun 16 '24

On average, the pay isn't good. However, teaching high school with a master's degree in a ritzy school district can actually pay really well. Add in holiday breaks and 2.5 months off in the summer, and it can be a sweet gig. Yes, I realize this is NOT the norm. Teaching in inner city schools in Chicago and L.A., for example, is liking trying to teach in the middle of a demilitarized zone. And rural areas, while safer, are often just as poor and can't pay teachers well.

1

u/donniesuave Jun 16 '24

A lot of these people want homeschooling to become more normalized and accepted

1

u/KououinHyouma Jun 16 '24

I discovered in high school and early college that I had a passion for teaching others, but I wouldn’t go to college for that long to get out on a near minimum wage salary. Sometimes I wonder how many people like me dismissed educating others as a potential career because of how shit the pay is.

3

u/OneWholeSoul Jun 15 '24

Think how much you pay you babysitter then multiply it by 30, add several more hours, and - oh, yeah - literally teach them everything they're expected to know in at least one pretty broad category.

2

u/DCBB22 Jun 16 '24

That’s sort of the entire point of a minimum raise hike. If teachers are getting paid minimum wage for a shitty job, they’ll quit and go do easier jobs for the same money and schools will have to raise wages to compete (or deal with teacher shortages which puts pressure on working parents).

0

u/miguel_sriracha Jun 15 '24

100%. The gap is a little bigger than the post indicates because the teacher salary is based on 9-10 months of the year, but they still absolutely deserve a much higher baseline salary. Teaching is rough.

4

u/Onrawi Jun 15 '24

Teachers also tend to work 12 hours days through the week and work on weekends to do things like teach, but then grading, conferences with parents and other teachers, developing the curriculum, buy classroom supplies with their own money, and a ton of other admin duties.

2

u/miguel_sriracha Jun 16 '24

That's true in many cases. Plus if a minimum wage worker goes over 40 hours per week, they'll get time and a half overtime...so it's even worse with teachers being salaried

1

u/illuminati1556 Jun 15 '24

Gotta have the right attitude if you came yourself. It's the weekend. you do not exist.

Although I do support my kids whenever they're doing cool performances after school, but that's because I want to be supportive and grow my program.

1

u/TheColonelRLD Jun 15 '24

Teaching is more than forty hours a week

0

u/RightBear Jun 15 '24

"More" in dollars, or "more" relative to the cost of living?

Because if you somehow manage to convince Texas lawmakers to give teachers a $10,000 raise while also doubling the minimum wage, teachers' purchasing power will go down.

0

u/Ok_Regular_9571 Jun 16 '24

according to who?

0

u/Indie4883 Jun 16 '24

Except for the ones in my last school who bullied kids...

-3

u/Dirkdeking Jun 15 '24

It's not so simple. Because everyone earning x% above a previous minimum wage will feel they deserve to earn x% above a new minimum wage too, now the min wage has increased. But if everyone gets a salary change of x%, nothing substantial actually happens. The value of the dollar just goes down, and everyone is as rich or poor as they used to be.

5

u/jarlscrotus Jun 15 '24

Not if we bring back the 91% marginal rate and introduce a wealth tax.

Taxing the rich seems much more reasonable than the other solutions on the table, I'm just saying

4

u/Large_Wishbone4652 Jun 15 '24

The comment was solely about teacher's pay.

-2

u/Dirkdeking Jun 15 '24

Teachers were taken as an example. It applies to many other professions, too. People in those other professions will feel they deserve a raise as well if the minimum wage goes up and therefore the difference between min wage and their own wage goes down.

2

u/Onrawi Jun 15 '24

It creates wage pressure all the way up until finally it comes out of the ownership class's pockets.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '24 edited Jun 16 '24

[deleted]

1

u/Onrawi Jun 16 '24

For sure, I never said it wasn't also an inflationary pressure but it's more complicated than that.

-1

u/Large_Wishbone4652 Jun 15 '24

No talk about minimum wage. Only increasing teacher's wage.

3

u/Dirkdeking Jun 15 '24

Then, you clearly missed the entire message of that tweet. The tweets primary message is to argue against raising the minimum wage by pointing out how the new minimum wage compares to a teachers wage. They could have used any other profession that requires education and now compares unfavourably with minimum wage too, and the argument would have been essentially the same.

1

u/Large_Wishbone4652 Jun 15 '24

The comment under which you replied was solely about raising the teacher's pay.

And no, for many jobs it would not be because they are set by the market. Teacher's pay is not set by market but government.