re: Voters rejected a 1-cent sales tax in 2023 to give Livingston Parish teachers a raise

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What is a viable path for teachers to get a raise? Louisiana public school teachers rank 48th nationally in pay.

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Give St George a school district and maybe I'd sympathize and have some skin in the game. But otherwise - if you're holding up EBR schools as a standard for teacher payraises, no thanks. My kids are all in private schools because they have to be. So what am I getting for my tax money? They can be 50th for all I care.

A first year teacher in Katy ISD (Houston burb) starts at $66,100 with zero years of experience. After five years, $71k with a 5k annual retention bonus.

Stop thinking Louisiana is ever going to change.

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Let's put all this to bed with a simple question: If being a school teacher is an easy, overpaid job with no performance standards where you're constantly on paid vacation... why can't districts find enough people willing to do the job?

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Edit: thank you teachers for educating me with the plethora of comments and not just empty downvotes

Two quick answers:
1. As you see in this thread, there are constantly teacher apologists who act like it's an incredibly hard job, underpaid etc. because they've been told that & never did their own research. Many of these people never consider a teaching career at all.

2. "Overpaid" is a relative term - it's overpaid when you consider the poor & regularly declining results produced, as well as both the internet & recorded video making learning so much more accessible. We simply don't have the same demand, compared to a few decades ago, for teachers to manually give a lecture & grade papers. As time goes on, public schools' value has become more of a daycare for working parents than a place to actually learn.

Also, in addition to the PTOs, there's generous pension & health benefits, widespread teacher's discounts, and the soft networking benefit from interacting with hundreds of kids & their parents. Schools are a HUGE community hub & teachers can meet just about anyone, something rarely mentioned in these debates.

It's not overpaid in the sense of being able to have a house, family etc. - you will have a hard time doing that on a teacher's salary alone. I think this is a big reason that there are so few male teachers - men have a lot more pressure to earn the big bucks

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How is that measured? Standardized test scores? Graded observations? Parental and student feedback?

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I don’t work in education but we’ve managed to figure it out for every other career out there

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What is a viable path for teachers to get a raise? Louisiana public school teachers rank 48th nationally in pay.

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The government has enough tax money to do this without pushing the burden to property owners or increasing sales tax. They just don’t want to make cuts to free up the money.

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Find the money elsewhere

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That's what Louisiana just tried to do, and it still failed. They tried to redirect money already collected to give teachers a permanent pay raise.

IMO, the legislature should have been able to redirect those funds without a public vote. The failed Amendment did not increase any taxes.

Louisiana desperately needs a constitutional convention.

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I didn’t say student performance

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Then what performance would you be basing pay off of? How good they look?

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IMO, the legislature should have been able to redirect those funds without a public vote. The failed Amendment did not increase any taxes. Louisiana desperately needs a constitutional convention.

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Agreed. We have too many amendments anyway.

Legislatures need to do their fricking jobs and quit passing the buck to constitutional amendments