Where Your Children Are california

Teachers strike in Los Angeles, citing low pay

 

Los Angeles students are still coming to school today, but they’re being met with unfamiliar faces as substitute teachers step in to fill the gap left by 28,000 striking teachers, who are of course “doing it for the students.”

The dispute is over (what else?) a demanded 6.5% pay raise – teachers insist the district has the money to burn, and want the raise immediately (Friday they rejected an offer from the school district giving them a 6% raise over 2 years). They’re also wanting smaller class sizes and “fully staffed” schools, which include more nurses, librarians, and counselors. The district said meeting every demand would put them more than half a billion dollars in the red.

So in essence, teachers (or, rather, their union bosses, who of course “only have the interests of them and their children at heart) are wanting greater compensation (which means greater union dues) for less work.

Never mind that teaching degrees constitute some of the easiest-earned degrees in the nation, and education students collectively have the lowest SAT scores among matriculating freshmen. GPAs for education majors are nearly a full point higher than those studying math or science. Countless undergraduates joke that if they can’t cut in their challenging classes, they “could always just major in education.”

Don’t tell me teachers weren’t aware they may not receive astronomical salaries, when they were back in college. Don’t tell me they “did it for the children;” how many of us had teachers that “just didn’t care” and were literally counting the minutes until school let out for the day, or the year (or until retirement)? If they really had children’s interests in mind, would they be refusing to come into work, forcing their charges to spend the days on the streets, in front of the television, or in a classroom with a clueless substitute?

The average teacher salary in Los Angeles Unified School District is $75,000. This doesn’t take into account the 3 months’ vacation they get every year, or the excellent benefits package, including retirement benefits that put most other jobs to shame.

The school district serves approximately 640,000 students.

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Where Your Children Are colorado, oklahoma

Surprise, surprise: Less school improves morale and performance

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Photo by Victoria Borodinova from Pexels

This may seem like common sense to many of us, but school districts in rural Oklahoma and Colorado are just now jumping on the bandwagon: less school apparently leads to greater student success.

Four-day weeks have been implemented in many small schools, undoubtedly eliminating the time spent on needless political and ideological indoctrination and placing the focus back on academics, forcing parents to spend an extra day with their children and fostering better relationships that, of course, result in happier, brighter, more receptive children.

This doesn’t take into account the benefit to teachers of having a four-day work week. Good teachers (you know, the ones that aren’t degenerates or pedophiles) often experience burnout after very little time within public schools, due to the long hours, unnecessary busywork, “character education” (i.e., brainwashing under the guise of “acceptance,” and of course, teachers’ unions, which do little to actually help teachers and a whole lot to help the Democratic Party.

Of course, as the push for four-day school weeks moves toward urban centers, there will be backlash, as parents who work will have to coordinate child care, or leave children unattended. Of course, teachers’ unions lobby for more money in spite of the shorter weeks (higher salaries for teachers equate with higher union dues paid to them).

Shorter weeks? Longer hours? “Better teachers” through higher pay? Year-round school? Distance education? There are many questions related to improving public schools and increasing student performance, but after the research, the debate, and the experimentation, the conclusion often arrived at is this: the public school system is inherently flawed, and no amount of corrective measures will make it adequate.

Four-day weeks bring smiles in rural schools. But will they work in big cities?