11 ms·

My mother is an elementary school teacher, and I don't want her to go back to school this year. The federal government is worse than useless, and the state gove

by Kapura 6y ago

My mother is an elementary school teacher, and I don't want her to go back to school this year. The federal government is worse than useless, and the state government is feckless and unwilling to make the tough calls to protect people's lives. She's been a teacher for ~15 years and still makes less than $30k a year teaching. She loves helping the kids, but her life isn't worth it.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Check out Outteach for your mother: https://outschool.com/teach https://outschool.com/teach No relation, saw one of their engineering jobs on HN and your comment made me think of a solution for your mother's situation (it's teaching over Zoom).
cheerlessbog 6y ago
Where does she work that pays $30k for an experienced teacher? Teacher pay sucks
- leetrout 6y ago
  My wife has worked in rural TN and NC and my mom was a speech language pathologist for 30+ years in KY. Pretty much everywhere rural starts under $40k (or under $30k in some cases) and stays under $40k for 5-10 years of experience.
  - tathougies 6y ago
    Rural areas are significantly cheaper. For example tennessee's median home price is $164k, which means $40k is 1/4 the price of a new home. Meanwhile, California's median home price is $533k and the average teacher's salary is 49k - 84k, making it 1/10 - 1/6 the price of a new home
- Kapura 6y ago
  She's in Colorado. The teachers' union agreed to a pay cut & freeze during the Bush financial crisis; pay had had only started to rise again a few years ago. This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; either their spouse has a higher-paying professional job or they are the beneficiary of some other form of generational wealth. But we tend to lose the teachers who must make ends meet their own selves on a teacher's pay. There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
  - leetrout 6y ago
    > There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher. AMEN. I would NEVER recommend ANYONE become a teacher based on my wife's experiences. You used to be able to write off expenses as "non-reimbursed employee expenses" but they cut that out so teachers get the token $200 writeoff. We spend almost 10x that annually supporting her in the classroom. It really is glorified day care in most peoples minds which is a real shame.
    - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
      Background: https://time.com/5017111/gop-tax-plan-teacher-tax-credit/ https://time.com/5017111/gop-tax-plan-teacher-tax-credit/
    - wcchandler 6y ago
      My wife hung up her hat after busting her butt for 5 years. Pay was garbage. Expectations too high — mostly from the students and parents. I often jokingly ask if she’d go back if they offered twice her pay. She doesn’t even hesitate - no.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - yonaguska 6y ago
      My mother briefly taught middle schoolers as a side job to her cleaning business she was running. One year in, she decided the money and the admin politics and low-key racism was not worth the stress. She is black and was working in a very rural white area. She made a lot more money pushing a mop than teaching.
      - xnyan 6y ago
        You can't say "you should clean for the future of these kids, not money" or similar with as much support from society for cleaning as easily as one can for teaching.
- xnyan 6y ago
  While there certainty are places that pay starting teachers more, unless you work for the upper crust of K-12 the pay is quite bad compared to basically any other other job that requires a four-year degree plus certification and/or (usually and) a license.
- malandrew 6y ago
  The sad part is that it isn't like there isn't a budget to pay teachers more. We spend more per kid than we ever have, but now any budget increases get absorbed by growth in the administration. Administration in education and healthcare is a cancer.
  - jyounker 6y ago
    > We spend more per kid than we ever have. While true in absolute dollars, it doesn't really seem to be true in inflation adjusted dollars. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZbUD16t4aaM6rCOmFogjxkVhRpJzBMLS/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZbUD16t4aaM6rCOmFogjxkVhRpJ...
    - malandrew 6y ago
      Time scale on that is too short. There is one on this page that goes back to 1970 in 2016 inflation adjusted dollars: https://edsource.org/2015/states-in-motion-school-finance-naep-child-poverty/83303 https://edsource.org/2015/states-in-motion-school-finance-na... Even if it stayed constant per your graph, teachers are competing with growth in administrators for education dollars.
koop123 6y ago
My parents are both nurses and they went to work and they were fine.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I've never died of cancer, therefore it doesn't exist.
  - koop123 6y ago
    I actually know someone that died from cancer. I don't know anyone that died from covid-19. I'm just talking from personal experience, and am not regurgitating statistics you hear from the news.
- grugagag 6y ago
  One, it depends where. And two, nurses get paid quite well maybe 3x as a teacher as teachers. Why would teachers risk their lives for barely nothing?
- devalgo 6y ago
  Are you kidding? There are hundreds of nurses and doctors who have gotten sick and that's when wearing full PPE. Do you think teachers and kids are going to be wearing PPE in class?? This is a troll comment.
  - collegecamp293 6y ago
    What are the odds of a nurse and doctor with full PPE dying from COVID?
    - gremlinsinc 6y ago
      Over 800 healthcare workers have died since this began. https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worker-death-toll-covid19-coronavirus/ https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worke... It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term. Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, teaching, and food-working staff MANY of which skew older. If a school system in a rural town doesn't have enough workers to bus kids, clean up the school, serve lunch, or teach (there's already a teaching shortage because it's a shit job that doesn't pay what it's worth), then schools will be defunkt before long anyways. What do we do then? It'll be decades before we can replace all those teachers, so we'll have to speedily move to online teaching... what then do we do about parents who need school as daycare so they can provide? We're beginning to see how intertwined everything in society is, and it's all seemingly crashing down and most people don't even see it happening... it's just a a flu... it'll be over soon.... someone said on FB yesterday that it'll go away as soon as the election is over the only reason it's so big is because of the election.... No. December the election will be behind us, flu season will be upon us, and the 3rd wave will decimate us worse than this one is. Because it'll be cold, we'll be inside, Christmas will come and families will get tired of quarantine again and it's the perfect storm for another explosion of cases.
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> The federal government is worse than useless It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  No, the federal government we have is the result of our outdated, quirky and flawed electoral system, where the votes of certain states are much more valuable than others.
  - Florin_Andrei 6y ago
    I agree that's a major part of the problem.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    The system you describe only applies to Presidential elections. The federal government is a lot more than just the President, and so are its problems.
    - not2b 6y ago
      The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).
      - pdonis 6y ago
        > The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people). That's because States are political units, not just arbitrary boundaries. So they also have a voice in the federal government as States. To me, Wyoming being able to not be run roughshod over by California just because California has a lot more people is a feature, not a bug.
        dllthomas 6y ago
kenned3 6y ago
Move to Canada, our teachers are paid 86K (CAD) or around 63K USD. "Teachers in the province earn an average salary of around $86,000, according to data provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education. Only in Alberta are average teacher salaries higher, around $89,000"
DenisM 6y ago
> The federal government is worse than useless, The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope. The presidential talk about it is just that - talk. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-education-federal-government-charge-um-what https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-educ...
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  >The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".
  - DenisM 6y ago
    It's the same deal tho - the federal government has no jurisdiction over the healthcare system either. The Obamacare, if you recall, in large part hinged on a "tax" created just for this purpose because taxation is the purview of the fed, which was a hack. And even if Trump issued a "mask mandate" on the first day, for example, who is to enforce it? The FBI?
    - ciarannolan 6y ago
      Yes, it's not written into law that the federal government has the specific power to drag kids back into classrooms and arrest people not wearing masks. Do you think they have no levers to pull to affect policy from a federal level other than physically forcing people to do things? I'm not really sure what your point is.
- cheschire 6y ago
  It has no jurisdiction, but certainly has influence using strongarm financial tactics.
sfteus 6y ago
My mom works as an administrator in a public school. She is one year away from being eligible for medicaid, which is when she planned on retiring. She said as of right now, she plans to go back, because getting private insurance with her pre-existing conditions for the next year isn't feasible. I'm seriously considering seeing if my siblings and I can fund it for her for a year so she can just retire now and not have to worry about her as much. A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.
- sagarm 6y ago
  The ACA (aka Obamacare) made it so insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Check the exchange in her state for options.
markkanof 6y ago
How does your mother feel about going back?

by Kapura 6y ago

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Check out Outteach for your mother: https://outschool.com/teach https://outschool.com/teach No relation, saw one of their engineering jobs on HN and your comment made me think of a solution for your mother's situation (it's teaching over Zoom).

cheerlessbog 6y ago

Where does she work that pays $30k for an experienced teacher? Teacher pay sucks

leetrout 6y ago
My wife has worked in rural TN and NC and my mom was a speech language pathologist for 30+ years in KY. Pretty much everywhere rural starts under $40k (or under $30k in some cases) and stays under $40k for 5-10 years of experience.
- tathougies 6y ago
  Rural areas are significantly cheaper. For example tennessee's median home price is $164k, which means $40k is 1/4 the price of a new home. Meanwhile, California's median home price is $533k and the average teacher's salary is 49k - 84k, making it 1/10 - 1/6 the price of a new home
Kapura 6y ago
She's in Colorado. The teachers' union agreed to a pay cut & freeze during the Bush financial crisis; pay had had only started to rise again a few years ago. This is somewhat of a digression, but the extremely low rate of teacher pay (for a job that requires a Master's degree) limits the pool of available teachers greatly. The people taking these jobs typically must have some other way of supporting their family; either their spouse has a higher-paying professional job or they are the beneficiary of some other form of generational wealth. But we tend to lose the teachers who must make ends meet their own selves on a teacher's pay. There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher.
- leetrout 6y ago
  > There is no good economic argument made to become an elementary school teacher. AMEN. I would NEVER recommend ANYONE become a teacher based on my wife's experiences. You used to be able to write off expenses as "non-reimbursed employee expenses" but they cut that out so teachers get the token $200 writeoff. We spend almost 10x that annually supporting her in the classroom. It really is glorified day care in most peoples minds which is a real shame.
  - aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    Background: https://time.com/5017111/gop-tax-plan-teacher-tax-credit/ https://time.com/5017111/gop-tax-plan-teacher-tax-credit/
  - wcchandler 6y ago
    My wife hung up her hat after busting her butt for 5 years. Pay was garbage. Expectations too high — mostly from the students and parents. I often jokingly ask if she’d go back if they offered twice her pay. She doesn’t even hesitate - no.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - yonaguska 6y ago
    My mother briefly taught middle schoolers as a side job to her cleaning business she was running. One year in, she decided the money and the admin politics and low-key racism was not worth the stress. She is black and was working in a very rural white area. She made a lot more money pushing a mop than teaching.
    - xnyan 6y ago
      You can't say "you should clean for the future of these kids, not money" or similar with as much support from society for cleaning as easily as one can for teaching.
xnyan 6y ago
While there certainty are places that pay starting teachers more, unless you work for the upper crust of K-12 the pay is quite bad compared to basically any other other job that requires a four-year degree plus certification and/or (usually and) a license.
malandrew 6y ago
The sad part is that it isn't like there isn't a budget to pay teachers more. We spend more per kid than we ever have, but now any budget increases get absorbed by growth in the administration. Administration in education and healthcare is a cancer.
- jyounker 6y ago
  > We spend more per kid than we ever have. While true in absolute dollars, it doesn't really seem to be true in inflation adjusted dollars. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZbUD16t4aaM6rCOmFogjxkVhRpJzBMLS/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZbUD16t4aaM6rCOmFogjxkVhRpJ...
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Time scale on that is too short. There is one on this page that goes back to 1970 in 2016 inflation adjusted dollars: https://edsource.org/2015/states-in-motion-school-finance-naep-child-poverty/83303 https://edsource.org/2015/states-in-motion-school-finance-na... Even if it stayed constant per your graph, teachers are competing with growth in administrators for education dollars.

koop123 6y ago

My parents are both nurses and they went to work and they were fine.

ceejayoz 6y ago
I've never died of cancer, therefore it doesn't exist.
- koop123 6y ago
  I actually know someone that died from cancer. I don't know anyone that died from covid-19. I'm just talking from personal experience, and am not regurgitating statistics you hear from the news.
grugagag 6y ago
One, it depends where. And two, nurses get paid quite well maybe 3x as a teacher as teachers. Why would teachers risk their lives for barely nothing?
devalgo 6y ago
Are you kidding? There are hundreds of nurses and doctors who have gotten sick and that's when wearing full PPE. Do you think teachers and kids are going to be wearing PPE in class?? This is a troll comment.
- collegecamp293 6y ago
  What are the odds of a nurse and doctor with full PPE dying from COVID?
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    Over 800 healthcare workers have died since this began. https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worker-death-toll-covid19-coronavirus/ https://khn.org/news/lost-on-the-frontline-health-care-worke... It takes time and effort to create new ventilators, masks, ppe's, etc... but it takes like 20-30 years to create a new doctor or nurse, they're in limited supply - the more we lose the harder this virus will be to defeat long-term. Likewise the hit to public schools if we lose janitorial, bussing, teaching, and food-working staff MANY of which skew older. If a school system in a rural town doesn't have enough workers to bus kids, clean up the school, serve lunch, or teach (there's already a teaching shortage because it's a shit job that doesn't pay what it's worth), then schools will be defunkt before long anyways. What do we do then? It'll be decades before we can replace all those teachers, so we'll have to speedily move to online teaching... what then do we do about parents who need school as daycare so they can provide? We're beginning to see how intertwined everything in society is, and it's all seemingly crashing down and most people don't even see it happening... it's just a a flu... it'll be over soon.... someone said on FB yesterday that it'll go away as soon as the election is over the only reason it's so big is because of the election.... No. December the election will be behind us, flu season will be upon us, and the 3rd wave will decimate us worse than this one is. Because it'll be cold, we'll be inside, Christmas will come and families will get tired of quarantine again and it's the perfect storm for another explosion of cases.

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

> The federal government is worse than useless It's the government that the collective beliefs and cultural assumptions of this country have built. Maybe there's a cause-effect link in there, somewhere, you would think?

enraged_camel 6y ago
No, the federal government we have is the result of our outdated, quirky and flawed electoral system, where the votes of certain states are much more valuable than others.
- Florin_Andrei 6y ago
  I agree that's a major part of the problem.
- pdonis 6y ago
  The system you describe only applies to Presidential elections. The federal government is a lot more than just the President, and so are its problems.
  - not2b 6y ago
    The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people).
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > The Senate is also broken (Wyoming with 500k == California with 39M people). That's because States are political units, not just arbitrary boundaries. So they also have a voice in the federal government as States. To me, Wyoming being able to not be run roughshod over by California just because California has a lot more people is a feature, not a bug.
      - dllthomas 6y ago

kenned3 6y ago

Move to Canada, our teachers are paid 86K (CAD) or around 63K USD. "Teachers in the province earn an average salary of around $86,000, according to data provided by Ontario's Ministry of Education. Only in Alberta are average teacher salaries higher, around $89,000"

DenisM 6y ago

> The federal government is worse than useless, The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. The only exception to that is the civil rights (Brown v. Board of Education) and it's quite limited in scope. COVID is certainly out of scope. The presidential talk about it is just that - talk. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-education-federal-government-charge-um-what https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ed/17/08/when-it-comes-educ...

ciarannolan 6y ago
>The federal government has no jurisdiction over education. It's possible that GP was referring to the current federal government in general re: Covid-19, not specifically their jurisdiction over education. And in that sense they're correct: the current leadership in the US is a disaster and "worse than useless".
- DenisM 6y ago
  It's the same deal tho - the federal government has no jurisdiction over the healthcare system either. The Obamacare, if you recall, in large part hinged on a "tax" created just for this purpose because taxation is the purview of the fed, which was a hack. And even if Trump issued a "mask mandate" on the first day, for example, who is to enforce it? The FBI?
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    Yes, it's not written into law that the federal government has the specific power to drag kids back into classrooms and arrest people not wearing masks. Do you think they have no levers to pull to affect policy from a federal level other than physically forcing people to do things? I'm not really sure what your point is.
cheschire 6y ago
It has no jurisdiction, but certainly has influence using strongarm financial tactics.

sfteus 6y ago

My mom works as an administrator in a public school. She is one year away from being eligible for medicaid, which is when she planned on retiring. She said as of right now, she plans to go back, because getting private insurance with her pre-existing conditions for the next year isn't feasible. I'm seriously considering seeing if my siblings and I can fund it for her for a year so she can just retire now and not have to worry about her as much. A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.

sagarm 6y ago
The ACA (aka Obamacare) made it so insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions. Check the exchange in her state for options.

markkanof 6y ago

How does your mother feel about going back?