re: Back to school: do you have enough teachers?

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It cant be like that all over the country, unless this is something new. I had friends who could not get teaching positions for years after school.

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The states mentioned aren’t really confined to one region.

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Why are America’s schools so short-staffed? Experts point to a confluence of factors including pandemic-induced teacher exhaustion, low pay and some educators’ sense that politicians and parents — and sometimes their own school board members — have little respect for their profession amid an escalating educational culture war that has seen many districts and states pass policies and laws restricting what teachers can say about U.S. history, race, racism, gender and sexual orientation, as well as LGBTQ issues.

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This is all well and good, but the real reason is that in 90% of schools, the kids are little bastards, and the teachers get sick of dealing with little bastards.

The problem for both grade school teacher and higher ed staff is that administrations don't pay these workers enough, take them for granted, and it constantly feels like we're getting hit from all sides (where we have to worry about student complaints, parent complaints, not doing everything to perfectly appease the administration).

It's not an ideal job, although I will say that it's nice for teachers that they get the summers. Given how much of the summer in other areas of education is spent staring at the walls and wondering why we don't get at least part of the summer off, I hope teachers don't take that for granted.

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This is all well and good, but the real reason is that in 90% of schools, the kids are little bastards, and the teachers get sick of dealing with little bastards.

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Even working in higher ed, it's amazing how much less patience I have in my every day life now compared to before I started.

You get tired of the students ignoring emails, missing appointments, clearly showing that they don't care, asking questions that could be found in 30 seconds on the internet, etc..

It's hard to just "switch off" after work when you're dealing with that all day. And it can definitely bleed into people who work in education's personal lives. Multiple people have commented I've become more irritable, lower patience since starting to work full time in education.

And at a certain point, you just wonder if there's not anything else out there better than this, especially because the pay in education sucks.

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It’s not politically correct to say but I believe these kids need to be put onto educational tracks around seventh grade. Trade jobs make as much, if not more, money than jobs requiring college degrees.

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It's what they do in Europe especially Germany and many other European Counties. It what they did in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well. I have friends who grew up in the USSR and if you didn't have the smarts by 7th grade you had no chance of studying anything else. You were forced to go into a trades track. Europe is not as strict but given our lead in science and technology I think our current system of letting kids choose what they want to do works pretty well.

The issue with trades is that there is a vested corporate interest in flooding the market with trades to force down the cost of labor. More electricians means electricians get paid less. My guess is that the trade unions will resist flooding the market to protect their own economic interests.

Who could’ve seen this coming? For years now, school districts have removed actual teaching from education and prevented the good teachers from doing their jobs. Teachers were handcuffed from teaching yet held directly responsible when test scores fell.

I’ve several friends and family members who left teaching long ago and moved into other professions because they couldn’t take it.

As a result of the good ones leaving, you were left with the garbage ones who had no problems doing the least possible just to “pass” kids on. And with Covid, they were given an opportunity to not even do that and teachers unions agreed.

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Most parents today don't parent. I feel for teachers in today's America.

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There have been constant times where I have been working with students where I have thought to myself "These grades/effort level would have never cut it with my parents when I was in school."

And it does make me wonder, behind the scenes, when the parents and their kids are talking about their grades, what do those conversations look like?

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The good teachers get out of education after five years max. They can’t stand the lack of accountability put on students and parents, they can’t stand being thought of as unprofessional, they can’t stand working hard and getting paid the same as the drone teachers that give the profession a bad name, they can’t stand the administrative level that have never taught telling them how to teach. So they come into teaching with high hopes, dreams, and ideas of making an impact. Then reality hits them in the face and they get out. And all we’re left with in the education system are the drones.

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Who could have guessed the government run schools wouldn't be a success

It really isn't that hard to understand. It was generational frickup... This started 30 years ago. Teachers pay wasn't keeping up with the costs of everyday living. Housing costs, higher education costs, and higher medical costs. All those expenses increased at a much more rapid pace than teacher's salaries. There are a couple of things that we as a nation should have priorities for. shite you could argue education falls under national security. If we aren't investing in education then society will inevitably fall apart. You see it in the corporate world sometimes too. It is called business continuity and long term planning. The education departments across the country seemed to just forget that hey if we aren't paying enough no one is gonna wanna work here. Think of it as shitty customer service. When you outsource customer service to India it goes to shite. Instead of paying more for teachers standards and pay have been lowered (inflation). So the service (education) goes to shite. That is what we have here. We have a capital problem across the country. There is too much idle capital. It's gonna be the next bubble to burst.