On Teachers & Teacher Bashing – School Finance 101

On Teachers & Teacher Bashing – School Finance 101

On Teachers & Teacher Bashing

Over a year after the teacher uprisings, with the start of this school year, we are finally seeing some new national news coverage of the teacher workforce:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-we-have-failed-our-teachers/

Certainly, lagging compensation is a major issue. Teacher wages have plummeted over time with respect to similarly educated (weekly) non-teacher wages.

The share of economic capacity spent on K12 schooling over time has dropped:

And NO! spending hasn’t increased dramatically, nor have staffing ratios:

At least not for nearly 20 years! This, despite increased demands on schools!

Further, states that put up the least effort, tend to have the crappiest wages:

Then there’s this other issue of the rhetoric about “bad teachers,” and their evil “unions.” That’s actually softened in recent years. But this rhetoric has likely also had some influence on young people’s desire to enter the teaching profession. I mean seriously, you’ve got popular international outlets like The Economist calling teachers and their unions the greatest impediment to closing income gaps ever and anywhere (more than any Wall Street financier) and Wall Street financiers taking that ball and running with it, comparing teachers and their unions to the KKK and Governor George Wallace.

Then, you have more subtly manipulative efforts to pit young, incoming teachers against their elders, to distract teachers and the general public from the problems so evident in the graphs above. Below is a short section I removed from my book due largely to space constraints:

Who is to Blame?

If our schools really are so bad and if we really spend so much to achieve such deplorable CONTINUE READING: On Teachers & Teacher Bashing – School Finance 101