S. 897: BANK ON STUDENTS LOAN FAIRNESS ACT

author=bulmabriefs144

author=Novalux
Teacher pay is also notoriously mistaken as far too low, as the average teacher salary for 2007-2008 was about $53,000. That's not including their giant health and retirement benefits, and the fact that they get the entire summer off. That's higher than the average household salary for those two years, which was only $52,000.

That is a doctored load of crap. Trust me on this, my mom's a teacher. Should any teacher get anything approaching this, much of it goes into the NEA (a glorified protection racket), the teacher's union.

Second, teachers do not get the entire summer off. There isn't a year that goes by that they don't have stupid meetings to discuss SOLs or some equally meaningless tripe. The admins at the school schedule these stupid meetings to rob teachers of their time off. Workshops and other bull, accounts for roughly 1/3 of their vacation time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/10/i-have-had-enough-veteran-teacher-tells-school-board/

I agree with a lot of the things in that article, and have always been someone who has supported school reform. The reason why a lot of these problems exist in the first place is because mismanagement and waste goes unpunished if there is no competition. This is why we have a bunch of stupid rules in our schools and can't seem to allocate money correctly, because there is virtually no penalty for screwing up. Private schools and the like have to compete for their students, so if your school is bad it will go out of business. This profit-motivation is one of the key principles that keeps markets running, and it applies to schools as well. A simple voucher program would guarantee that parents don't have to pay more for their children's education, and competition would improve the quality of education our students get.

And yes, I've definitely heard stories of unions taking far too much in union dues, that they hardly ever use to benefit the union workers.

bahleted