It’s been a stereotype for at least the last 50 years. Why has this never changed? Why has organized labor not had a substantial effect for such an essential part of the workforce?
That’s by design
A dumb population is easier to control, which is why Republicans since Reagan have been slashing education whenever possible, trying to inject theocracy on there as much as possible, because religious dumb fucks are even easier to control
That cutting salaries helps them with their greed is just a cherry on top of the vomit cake
L
That cutting salaries helps them with their greed is just a cherry on top of the vomit cake
L
/r/redditsniper OH SHIT THEY’VE HIT LEMMY NOW
The answer is always greed.
Teachers tend to like teaching. It’s a rewarding, “feel good” career. You know that you are helping kids, you get to watch them at their best. And, yes, sometimes at their worst, too, but that’s part of the deal - like watching your puppy chew up your couch and shit on the floor. Still worth it.
Since teachers tend to be passionate, they put up with a lot of bullshit admin/management. Moreso than you might at a soulless corporate job. This isn’t limited to teachers, either. Consider other careers where people put up with bullshit, and you’ll see a lot of parallels.
Art is a great parallel example. Everyone loves great art, artists love making art - but many people don’t want to pay for art. That’s why there’s so many passionate actors and musicians, but so few of them manage to eke out a living as a true professional. The passion is there, they are driven by their love of art, not by the material rewards.
The business world loves to take advantage of passion.
The US government wants people to be stupid so they can be manipulated more easily
Supply and demand, along with historic sexism.
- teaching (up to high school) has historically been predominantly women. And yes women used to be paid much less. That gap has narrowed a lot but “women’s work” still tends to pay less
- there are hundreds of thousands of teachers. There are huge numbers. There’s always another
- while it takes a lot to be a good teacher, it’s not so much to “teach”
So I think we have a history of low pay, the vast number militants against that changing, and to appearance anyone can be a “teacher”
Don’t get me wrong my family has significant history in the field and deep respect for the importance and to the huge impact a good teacher can make on someone’s future. But when my kid wanted to teach, after saying I would be so proud as would the vast array of ancestors, I added that you need to be aware of poor pay. To translate to video game, it’s doing life in hard mode
The GOP is fully to blame.
They sell the American public on the idea that any taxes are bad, no matter what they are meant to fund. When they are in power they cut public services, give tax breaks to corporations, and schedule tax raises to occur when they’re out of power.
When they aren’t in power they yell about taxes nonstop to make sure democrats are too scared to re-fund them, so they don’t get voted out.
Cycle after cycle, and now there’s no money to give the teachers.
One of their main arguments against taxes is that government will always waste tax dollars due to corruption and incompetence… Which is a self fulfilling prophecy, as they’ve proven to be some of the most corrupt and incompetent political leaders in history.
There’s also the feedback loop where they point at the broken underfunded public services and are like “see how shit public services are? They’re a waste of taxes. We could gut them to save you money”
Absolutely intentionally designed to be that way by the GOP and blatantly obvious when you look at their voting records.
They’ve conditioned people to be so against taxes that you have a significant portion of the public saying things like, “why should my taxes fund public schools if my children graduated 20 years ago?”
This country is full of rotten people.
I’ve heard people say this with my own IRL ears. It’s completely indefensible.
It’s a very common sentiment. It comes from people with no kids as well, which is bad enough, but when it’s boomers who had kids go to public school for k-12, it’s just another level.
There are two parts. First, they aren’t as underpaid as most people think in most cases. The union isn’t dumb. When they negotiate they look at the long term. A career teacher (30 to 35 years) can retire at about 55 give or take depending on the district. And they will get something like 80% of thier salary for the rest of thier life. They will also get subsidized health insurance. And in some states, all of that is tax free. That is a ton of money and a ton of security. And for many, they can retire, collect pension, and go get another job at the same time if they want. I make more than double what teachers make best case, and my wife works too for a 6 figure salary. I can’t possibly retire at 55, let alone feel secure doing so. I also have been laid off twice over the last 30 years, where as most teacher don’t have to worry about that after 10 years. Now, I get to take vacation anytime of the year, I can change jobs or move and not mess up my future benefits. I don’t have to deal with parents. Lots of intangible benefits to not being a teacher. But the point is the union ensures those less obvious benefits, which keeps the current salary low. This keeps the optics of drastically underpaid teachers so that the union can still negotiate for more with public sentiment on thier side. So while they are still underpaid, it isn’t as drastic as it would appear.
The other reason is simple. There are a lot of teachers. Like a lot a lot. And schools are generally built to a higher standard of saftey, so they are much more expensive than other building types. All of this adds up to a very high cost. Education is typically one of the largest expenditures for a state budget. Poloticians could dump more money into it, but it isn’t likely to be enough to make a difference that will get them reelected. So they put money other places that will get them votes.
That’s your reasons why.
are they not underpaid everywhere else too? I don’t think this is a USA only issue, all public teachers where I live with the exception of teachers for universities complain about low salary
No, in many Euro countires it’s a good-paying middle-class job with reasonable hours. in rich places in the USA, it’s also a good paying job, but the vast majority of the USA isn’t wealthy, it’s poor.
The underpaid people at uni are all the non-tenture track faculty. tenure track faculty are paid well, usually more than double non-tenure faculty.
In Germany it’s just primary school teachers. For secondary school teachers, I think the wages are solid. The working conditions are still absolutely shit which is why I turned away from the profession (at least for now). But the wages are not the problem there.
Let me tell you a story about a man named Ronald Reagan.
the actor!?
Who’s the president in 1985?!
Please, go on
Not just in the US.
School budgets are tied to property taxes for the district the schools serve.
George Carlin said it best. We want dumb happy obedient workers. Smart enough to runthe machines, but not smart enough to realize how badly they’re getting fucked by the system. So don’t count on the schools to do much more than basic math, and basic skills. Because what helps the elite class screws over the working class. It’s best to start screwing them in kindergarten. Teach them the pledge of allegence, so they feel endebted to our system, and keep them there for their entire lives.
Paraphrasing here, but that’s the jist of a routine he had in the 90s. The important thing to note is that Carlin was NOT a time traveler. He didn’t predict the future. It’s just that we as a society have had the same problems for 100 years, and we never fixed our shit.
Maybe because 98.1% keep voting for either evil or the lesser evil; but almost none of them vote for the good like Nader?
“Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and American universities - and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, […] you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public.” – George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBrbXOmnW70
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
or primariesa spoiler effect happens when a losing candidate affects the results of an election simply by participating
Vote splitting is the most common cause of spoiler effects in FPP. In these systems, the presence of many ideologically-similar candidates causes their vote total to be split between them, placing these candidates at a disadvantage. This is most visible in elections where a minor candidate draws votes away from a major candidate with similar politics, thereby causing a strong opponent of both to win.
That the US voting system lacks the sincere favorite criterion is mathematical fact: lesser-evil voting is necessary to avoid losing the best chance of getting anyone preferable to the worst major candidate. Denying that is like denying laws of physics. You can’t coerce logic & causality to your will. Just because you don’t understand that doesn’t mean others don’t. Primaries exist to select better major party candidates.
Viable 3rd party candidates requires voting reform, which again requires passing those reforms through the current system.
From your point-of-view, the Democrats winning may be good, and the Republicans winning bad. You might see them on a left-right scale of 0-10, where 0 is good, the Ds are at 3, the Rs at 9, and Hitler at 10.
Some other people see a bigger window than that: look at https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 and compare how these people see the distance between Trump +9+9 and Biden +7+6, compared to the distance between both and Hawkins -5-3. These people agree that the Rs are worse than the Ds, but they don’t want to help the Ds win because they don’t want more genocide, a climate cascade causing a mass extinction event, a psychotic economic system, a food system torturing 2-6 trillion animals to death a year and enslaving 2-4 trillion animals in torturous conditions a year, unsustainable pollution, biosphere degradation…
They might instead want to help in the long fight towards an ethical civilization instead. It may be a long defeat, but for those who won’t cross the ethical lines listed above, doing the right thing (even if they lose) is better than being culpable in actively supporting those who are making the system more evil. The difference between +9+9 and +7+6 is real, but for some the ethical lines they won’t cross is below +7+6.
If Stalin is the lesser-evil compared to the greater-evil Hitler, then there’s still the option to vote for unpopular Gandhi and maybe start the process where people realize they don’t have to be culpable in actively supporting Stalin.
Please show me one time in the past 50 years that a third party candidate in the US helped the Left win an election.
The GOP constantly funds and pushes for the Greens and Libertarians because they know those candidates sap the Dems.
The Democrats are not Left wing. They’re left of the Republicans, and less authoritarian, but they’re a right-wing party who crippled banking regulation in favor of oligarchy, bailed out the worst banks, lied about drilling for oil[1] and causing a mass extinction event, and kept giving Israel weapons even after they went from defending themselves to committing genocide.
The goal for ethical people is not to get the Democrats to win, but instead to elect ethical people to government, e.g Hawkins and Nader.
It’s possible, even in FPTP voting systems, for people to reject the 2 parties that usually wins - see the UK where the Tories or Labour have been the only 2 winning parties for more than 90 years (including 2 short coalition governments); but where polling shows the 5th party (the horrible Reform) and 8th party (Greens) are now leading.
“It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed.” - Eugene V. Debs, Appeal to Reason, 1900-10-13
“Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact.” - Eugene V. Debs, The Socialist Party and the Working Class 1904-09-01
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/16/biden-oil-drilling-production/ As he campaigned for president in 2020, Joe Biden made a bold promise at a New Hampshire town hall, adding repetition for emphasis: “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period. Period.” […] The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands, and the United States is producing more oil than any country ever has.
All that effort to show that you can’t tell the difference between ‘bad’ and completely horrible.’
You can babble on and on, but you can’t actually show one time that a strong third party candidate didn’t help the GOP.
From your point-of-view, the Democrats winning is good, and the Republicans winning is bad. You might see them on a left-right scale of 0-10, where 0 is good, the Ds are at 3, the Rs at 9, and Hitler at 10.
Some other people see a bigger window than that: look at https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 and compare how these people see the distance between Trump +9+9 and Biden +7+6, compared to the distance between both and Hawkins -5-3. These people agree that the Rs are worse than the Ds, but they don’t want to help the Ds win because the Ds are mass-extinction causing capitalists. To convince these people to vote for the Ds instead of Greens/socialists/not-voting at all, you have to convince them that the Ds actions of:
- making anthropogenic climate change worse and so causing a mass extinction,
- helping genocides, and
- propping up an economic system that rewards narcissistic psychopaths and punishes ethical people;
are good, and worth voting for.
Again, you ignore the actual facts.
Maybe you live in a world of privilege where things like schools, roads, hospitals, and wars are merely theoretical. We who actually have to deal with those things know differently.
Nowhere do you link to a 3rd Party that has any realistic chance of making any change anytime soon.
Quick historical note. Look up a fellow named Frederick Douglas. He was a former slave. In 1860 he had the choice of supporting a full on pro-Abolition candidate who had almost no chance of winning or supporting a candidate who had stated he wasn’t prepared to end slavery.
Douglas figured it made more sense to support a winner and have a foot in the door. He abandoned the Abolition candidate and backed the winner instead.
So, when you reply, please explain why people shouldn’t follow Douglas’s lead and back the imperfect candidate who might win over the ‘pure’ candidate who is sure to lose.
If people want to follow Douglas’ example of supporting the lesser evil, they can - as about a third do. But I’m mostly not writing for them, because they don’t care enough that their actions are actively helping and giving legitimacy to genocide, a climate cascade causing a mass extinction event, a psychotic economic system, a food system torturing 2-6 trillion animals to death a year and enslaving 2-4 trillion animals in torturous conditions a year, unsustainable pollution, biosphere degradation… They don’t care enough that by voting for the lesser evil, they’re actively culpable of the system getting more evil after every election.
Instead, for the plurality that don’t vote at all, I’m pointing out there are other options: like voting for ethical people instead, and starting the long fight towards an ethical civilization. It may be a long defeat, but for those who won’t cross the ethical lines listed above, doing the right thing (even if you lose) is better than actively supporting those who are making the system more evil. The difference between +9+9 and +7+6 is real, but for some the ethical lines they won’t cross is between +7+6 and -5-3.
If you want to fight, you have to be prepared to lose.
It was no accident that Rosa Parks chose that particular seat on that particular day. Everyone that came before her had lost that same battle. Black folks (and the white folks who supported them) were thrown in jail for violating segregationist laws. But with each battle, knowledge and support was gained.
There’s a line in the recent Fallout series that really sticks out to me. A “do good” congresswoman is trying to get an audience with the president. She is roughly shoved aside by security. Our hero helps her up and she says to him, “Fighting the good fight is mostly a series of humiliations”.
I think about that a lot. It’s exactly like that, because fighting the good fight mostly happens when you are alone and outnumbered. Otherwise, you’re just in an echo chamber.
The want us just smart enough to do our taxes and not think too much about anything important.
Forget what it says on the tin. To truly understand a society, look at its institutions.
Education isn’t valued by the sociopaths that run the US.
Clarification: Education is so dangerous to the ruling class that they are attempting to remove it.
It hasn’t been for some time.
“Education” is indoctrination. That’s why kids are forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s why I was taught about Columbus. It’s why I believed that “Honest Abe” fought for the rights of slaves.
All bullshit, but each was a small building block to believing that somehow the US was a special place, a blessed nation, where personal expression and equality and opportunity were valued and hard work meant success.
And the sad thing - even at its worst, the US is still a better place to live than 80% of the world.
And the sad thing - even at its worst, the US is still a better place to live than 80% of the world.
I’d say it depends on what you value. If one is born of a certain caste (or above) and wants to accumulate stuff, I’d say you’re right.
We don’t really have castes in the US. But yes, being poor sucks anywhere in the world.
I was speaking more in terms of infrastructure and public assistance. For example, I was able to get a student loan and an education in the States. I have clean, potable tap water. Dependable utilities. Those sorts of things.
We don’t really have castes in the US. But yes
I’d argue the US does. Things such as zipcode and skin color determine outcomes and are inescapable. Economic mobility doesn’t exist as it does in the myth of the American dream. Sure if one is really lucky and works very hard, one can move from living in or on the edge of disaster to being a few paychecks away from disaster.
I was speaking more in terms of infrastructure and public assistance. For example, I was able to get a student loan and an education in the States. I have clean, potable tap water. Dependable utilities. Those sorts of things.
I’d argue that’s not true either. Again, it depends on your zipcode. So many places don’t have potable water, reliable services, or functional infrastructure. One’s ability to get student loans depends on what zipcode they’re born into.
There’s a wild spread on both pay and the requirements to work as a teacher. Some places require barely more than a pulse. Some places require years of schooling. Some places pay teachers no better than shelf-stockers. Some pay a decent wage and/or have a decent pension/benefits system. It’s definitely not a monoculture.
