How many of you guys are at home

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Originally Posted by Irving

I've never done either. I figure every single job ever has something to complain about.

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That...isn't the only thing you're right about, Sir. IMO.

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Originally Posted by CavSct1983

I find it hilarious that a ton of people on this thread are all about even more forced income theft (read: taxes) for a pet cause, so long as it really goes to said cause. But I bet they bitched and moaned and blah blah blah when Obamacare passed. There is NO DIFFERENCE in the socialism of public education and public healthcare. Neither are owed to anyone at the gun-to-head expense of another, and neither are necessary in a public capacity, as they do not fall within the actual purview of the Federal, State, or Local government except as usurped by said levels from the family.

What public school ultimately is, is a glorified babysitting service so that people can pursue a lifestyle which is false in its necessity, a la both parents working. And then they go out and get themselves in insane amounts of debt trying to constantly maintain an artificially luxurious lifestyle, because they've been given the time-credit to do so by the lender of the government-at-large; the interest is your child's mind, and you will never be able to pay it off, ever. It's also a method of bringing in an entire generation year after year to poison their minds with progressively dangerous ideas. I see it as no different than a pedophile offering to babysit for $5 a week. Obviously, he's up to something. Do we really believe the government and those who run it is really that magnanimous? Get real.

I grant that there are indeed situations where both parents might need to work, but they are rare.

If people want to send their kids off to the contra-education camps, fine. But why make anyone else pay for it? If it's so damn important, make the sacrifice and pay! Then we'll see how important it is and how unnecessary all the other fluff of life is.

High school graduates today cannot hold an electric candle to the 8th graders of the early 1900's. Why are we paying more for less output? Why are we paying at all? Why is socialism in a form which is accepted by society not recognized as such? Why is it that we only hem, haw, and have hackles raised when it's a merely new-to-us application of it? Why is this form of socialism acceptable, but ensuring someone doesn't die early is wrong?

Here are the thoughts of John Taylor Gatto, in his speech given in 1990 when accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year award. It's scathing...:

http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html

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LIKE

Thank you for sharing the Gatto piece. He is well known within the homeschooling community.

I am happy for my family that we are no longer engaged with government schools, although one of my kids works for a state university. So much of our public taxpayer funding goes toward maintaining the bureaucracy which doesn't help anyone but those at the top of the pyramid and the politicians who get kick backs from the unions.

Everyone is learning and anyone who teaches you something is a teacher. Not everything you learn is useful or good. The day you stop learning is the day you stop breathing.

Be safe.

I think this might be a scared industry throwing a Hail Mary. There is so much real learning to be had for far less money. I've been to trade seminars that are actually taught by people in the business. Many online courses that teach what your interested in, My kids are young and I go back and forth on if I want them to go to college. One could do a lot of non-conventional learning, or get a big head start on life with $120-160,000. I'm not saying teacher are the same as typewriter repair persons. I'm not the right person to teach kids so I do need teachers for now. My experience is the more seasoned teachers seem to be motivated by something less monetary. I think this is going to backfire on them.

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Originally Posted by OneGuy67

The legislature does not determine salary; that is a local school board decision. The protest is about the possibility of them paying an additional 3% into their retirement as part of trying to right the upside down boat of their division of PERA as well as raising the retirement age to 60. Too many retirees and not enough people working and contributing is the main problem. You want to continue with a defined benefit program instead of a 401(k), then you need to have more skin in it. State employees had to, so can the teachers. They also want to raise awareness for Initiative 93 which would tax people who make $150k a year or more and businesses in order to add money to a fund for the schools.

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Totally agree with your statement. I’m in PERA and totally support increasing contributions. I want a retirement when it’s needed.

I just saw a camera shot that indicated that they used taxpayer dollars to take school busses to their strike.....

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Originally Posted by CoGirl303

If a bunch of millionaire asshole sports players can strike for MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL...so can teachers.

I'm absolutely disgusted by that Republican Senate asshole here in our legislator who was trying to pass a bill to put teachers who strike in jail. It's a direct violation of their 1st Amendment rights to demonstrate, protest, assemble and their right to redress for griveances against the government.




It's not just about their pay. It's also about their pensions and the school budgets.

Many teachers have to pay for their own supplies for their classes.

When you add in the cost of living here, these teachers are grossly underpaid. Colorado ranks 31st in terms of pay.

Even further adding to the argument, when marijuana was legalized here, Education, schools and teachers were supposed to be seeing a lot of that money...they aren't getting anywhere near what they were promised, but that's no surprise really! So was our infrastructure (roads, road repairs, improved utilities, etc) but that's a topic for another discussion. Just another example of big government promising things and failing to follow through as usual and the teachers are the ones paying the price.

https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...a1781dfd7d.jpg


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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I agree with some of this.

So you would be cool with federal and state prison guards striking and walking off the job? How about working for weeks without pay until the budget is passed?

The next time I’m feeling disgruntled at work, I’m just going to shut down the power grid to my city. That would be cool right?


I personally think teachers are a bit underpaid. Until all of you have volunteered in a classroom for a few days (sure some of you have) and see what conditions they work in, one might change their tune on this topic.

My kids go to the highest performing public school district in Colorado Springs. Oddly enough, they spend the least amount per student. Unfortunately we moved, and after this school year is up, they will be going to the second highest performing public school district since commuting 60 miles to drop kids off every day is just not financially smart.

Mostly, the parents pay for the school supplies, not the teachers. Every year I have a laundry list that adds up to ~100.00 each in supplies for school. That’s about 1800.00 per classroom for supplies. That’s a lot of pencils and paper.

I’m in PERA, and we should pay more for the retirement. It’s not fully funded. Not sure why someone wouldn’t want to ensure they actually have one after 30 years of work.

Is this going to be ongoing thing every week? I try to look for it online, and I could not find any info as of last night.

If it is going to be ongoing, I am going to plan something with my kid.

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Originally Posted by MrPrena

Is this going to be ongoing thing every week? I try to look for it online, and I could not find any info as of last night.

If it is going to be ongoing, I am going to plan something with my kid.

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Wouldn’t doubt it. A lot of school districts are pushing 4 day school weeks.

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=233424

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The Lie Factory On Education and Teacher Salaries

The latest screamfest from the various teacher's groups is that they're "grossly underpaid."

Well, no.

First, let's not forget that teachers are paid for 12 months but work 9. Indeed the "standard" school year is 180 days. The standard man-year of work is 2,000 hours -- 40 hours across 50 weeks.

But 180 days is 1,440 hours, not 2,000, or 72% of a standard work-year.

And before you talk about "overtime" do realize that professionals don't get paid overtime. I never did as a professional writing code or building networks for other people. It's a professional job, and is exempt -- just as is being a teacher.

So that "horrible" $40,000 salary (which, I remind you, typically comes with 100% health care coverage for the entire teacher's family, an expense that is nearly always over $10,000/year) is actually $50,000 / 0.72 or approximately $70,000 in salary.

That's underpaid?

Uh, no. It's grossly overpaid, especially considering this:

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Earlier this month, the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation's Report Card, was released. It's not a pretty story. Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math.

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Leave the racial disparity behind for a minute.

Exactly why would anyone get paid anything if only one quarter of those who were the "product" of that work met the objective requirements to be considered acceptable?

Why is not that the question put to these "teachers"?

Is there some "reject rate" acceptable in any production of anything? Certainly. Some percentage of parts made in a factory fail to pass inspection, some percentage of wafers in a fab don't make it into the final output as a computer chip, etc.

But if your success rate is only 25% on the basic facts that define the ability to function as an adult in society, say much less understand the physical and economic world around you then you have no right to be out pounding the street demanding more money.

You ought to be cleaning toilets with a toothbrush and the taxpayers should be taking up arms at the rank theft you demand from them to produce defective output on an everyday, every year basis -- and have been for decades.

This is not a new problem. When I ran MCSNet after a series of bad experiences with so-called "graduates" with nice, polished resumes who couldn't make change for a $20 without a computer telling them exactly how much it was it became obvious that (1) they didn't write their own resume and (2) they were functionally illiterate and innumerate.

Yet they had in their hand a credential that said they (1) could read and write and (2) could perform mathematics both at a 12th grade level.

Those credentials were lies.

I instituted two tests before you could get an interview; when you came in and presented a resume you were shown the conference room and given a pencil, piece of paper and the two tests; nothing else was allowed inside. The first was a request to write a basic business letter informing a customer that his account was disabled because he hadn't paid his bill, and to please remit the balance to continue service. The second was a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) mathematics screening with 20 questions on it. You needed a 90% on the math to pass and the letter had to be grammatically correct and formatted as a reasonable business letter.

90% of the applicants failed one or both and more than half failed screamingly, either being completely unable to compose a business letter that could be read and understood as reasonably correct English or failing to get even half of the math correct. More than a few applicants literally walked out leaving behind two blank pieces of paper for "answers", unable to do any of it. A couple actually wrote things like "**** you" on the test before walking out, clearly unable to do any of it.

Most-alarmingly was the fact that more than a third of those who claimed to be currently enrolled in college, including at UofC, applying for a part-time job while in school, were unable to pass these screens.

I kept every single test and associated resume in a large horizontal file for what I expected would eventually be an inevitable allegation that I was "discriminating" in some form or fashion. This was downtown (2 Prudential Plaza) Chicago. Let me point out that of those who were unable to write said business letter not one of them could have possibly also written their own resume and as such they had already lied in the application process (and thus were not going to get hired) before coming in the front door.

The enabling liars who issued these people their diplomas are the same people pounding the streets right now. They were the ones who gave out the "As", "Bs", "Cs" and even "Ds" to these students -- but passed them instead of handing out well-deserved "F"s for years from one class to the next without actual achievement having taken place.

These very same teachers are openly and publicly being paid to commit fraud upon the taxpayer and the US marketplace on a literal daily basis. Three quarters of those who they deem "competent" through a 12 year cycle of fraud are in fact not competent and this number includes high-achieving areas.

In most major cities I assure you that the actual percentage of incompetent "graduates" is at or above 90% because it was in the 1990s and this report's statistics make clear that it still is.

Think about this folks because everyone's excuse is that oh, there are a few bad teachers, but most are good.

What are the odds of someone getting through 12 years of schooling, the first six or so taking place with one or two teachers for the entire year, then in the subsequent six year or so with a half-dozen teachers each, 75% of said students are incompetent when they graduate, and it is not true that basically every single one of them is guilty of fraud?

Let's put some math to it -- if three out of four students are incompetent at graduation then with a single teacher for a single year a minimum of 75% of all teachers must be committing fraud by certifying acceptable performance when it is not true.

That is, only 25% are performing honest work with a single year of experience -- that is, a single trial.

But it's not one year. It's 12 years, and for roughly six of them the student has a half-dozen teachers each year, not one. So we have 6 instances in the first six years and then 36 more over the following six, for a total of 42 instances, any one of which could fail said student and prevent them from going forward.

What are the statistical odds of running that gauntlet where only 25% of the teachers do honest work against 42 trials?

The answer is in scientific notation and has 25 zeros to right of the decimal. To put not-to-fine a point on it you're more likely to be hit by an asteroid while getting your mail this afternoon, then struck by lightning on the walk back to your house by a factor of several orders of magnitude than to encounter a string of honest teachers given these rates.

Bluntly: Essentially all are guilty of fraud upon the taxpayer and the public.

This is one of the largest and longest-running frauds perpetrated against the American population and taxpaying citizen ever and anyone in this profession deserves to be consumed by a rabid coyote.

Not only should every one of these "teachers" be fired they should all be criminally prosecuted and tossed in prison; the United States would be better off if the kids of this nation spent an hour a day in the library doing whatever they wanted instead of attending school.

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