re: Question on teacher pay raise

The problem with teacher quality and pay quality is chronic. They have been underpaid for so long, that highly qualified individuals choose not to be teachers. In their absence, people who belong nowhere near a classroom have flocked to the profession and have ruined it.

This is not to say that there are not good teachers.

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Is there a more entitled spoiled group of people than teachers?

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someone struggled in school

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Teaching is basically missionary work

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Spending time in the missionary position doesn’t necessarily make them missionaries.

Katy ISD pays new hires with zero experience $66,180. At year 5, they're at $71k and get a $5k annual retention bonus.

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that highly qualified individuals choose not to be teachers

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Have you looked into licensing requirements? I went back to finish my degree (adult ed) after quitting a job that paid me $30/hr. Louisiana would not permit me to teach K-12 until after undergoing a year of unpaid classroom time.

A friend's dad was a chemical engineer for Dow for 25 years, he was not permitted by Texas to teach high school chemistry. He was hired, though, to teach it at a community college with the exact same qualifications.

Private teachers make less than public teachers. Private schools do better than public schools in terms of standardized testing.

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Ask any principal or school president

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The most clueless group of people you can imagine? I'd rather save my breath.

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My wife is in the system and even she's voting against this. I don't remember the exact reason, but it has something to do with Jeff Landry trying to mask other intentions with where he's pulling the money from in order to do it. Something about the place the money is shouldn't be touched or something like that, and if they pull from it for teacher salaries, then they can pull from it for anything. I don't remember exactly, but I know if she's voting against giving herself a pay raise, then it must be pretty fricked so I'm probably going to vote against it too.

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Same here. Wife is a teacher and she’s against it. Said something similar about where the money would come from.

But like you, I wasn’t really listening when my wife spoke

Discussions about teacher pay spend way too much time and energy on whether or not teachers "deserve it." The problem is that salaries don't work like that. None of us are paid based on what we "deserve," we're paid based on how expensive it would be to replace us with someone of similar value.

Teachers are quitting and retiring, and often they aren't being replaced. The days when schools could post an English or History teaching job and have twenty people begging for it at the principal's door the next week are long gone. Schools are increasingly hiring people who are uncertified and largely untrained, or recruiting former teachers out of retirement by paying them a salary on top of their pension.

Essentially, the cost of replacing a teacher, especially a trained, experienced teacher, has gone up because the labor supply of them has gone down. Teacher pay isn't the only thing that will have to change in order to make it an attractive profession again, and it may not even be the most important thing, but the fact of the matter is that schools need a certain number of teachers, and the demand for them is outpacicing supply.

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Katy ISD pays new hires with zero experience $66,180. At year 5, they're at $71k and get a $5k annual retention bonus.

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Try living in Katy making $71K. Not gonna happen.

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They should get a pay raise based on merit

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How do you determine merit in education?