In 2022, 31-year-old Maggie Perkins quit her eight-year teaching job and got a job at Costco. She doesn’t regret the decision, and she’s never been happier. Here’s a look at a day in the life working at Costco.
School teachers often get physically and verbally abused by both parents and students, with the abusers getting little to no reprocussions. In a corporate environment that would get you fired or arrested.
Except that we have education requirements for teachers, and retail will hire just about anyone.
The reason teachers aren’t paid well is because we have a culture of funding public services like absolute shit. So despite low supply and high demand for teachers, we just keep adding more and more kids to each teacher, and giving them less and less supplies to work with. While letting wages stagnate.
People need to stop applying free-market thinking to our public services.
My school district is one of the few that pays a competitive wage to be private industry to their teachers in the U.S. The local teacher unions are extremely strong and have had numerous strikes over the years.
They unionized the non-certificated staff and they have gone on strike as well.
This past summer they were getting 100+ applicants for every open teacher position. Every open position is filled easily.
Exactly. Just to hammer home your point about free-market thinking on public services, corporate education explicitly tries to be competitive to acquire the best talent. Even if we match the corpo wages for public education, they would just increase it again to be more competitive. It’s a fools errand to play the market with our public services. Education is a fundamental institution in our society. We know they are lacking resources, so we should increase their allocation. It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
School teachers often get physically and verbally abused by both parents and students, with the abusers getting little to no reprocussions. In a corporate environment that would get you fired or arrested.
Yes. But that’s not how salaries are determined. Based on that teachers and front-facing retail workers would be the highest paid jobs
Except that we have education requirements for teachers, and retail will hire just about anyone.
The reason teachers aren’t paid well is because we have a culture of funding public services like absolute shit. So despite low supply and high demand for teachers, we just keep adding more and more kids to each teacher, and giving them less and less supplies to work with. While letting wages stagnate.
People need to stop applying free-market thinking to our public services.
My school district is one of the few that pays a competitive wage to be private industry to their teachers in the U.S. The local teacher unions are extremely strong and have had numerous strikes over the years.
They unionized the non-certificated staff and they have gone on strike as well.
This past summer they were getting 100+ applicants for every open teacher position. Every open position is filled easily.
I assume not a conservative state, and in an area with affluent people?
West coast with a mixed demographic. About 50% of the district qualifies for reduced or free lunches. About 1/3 of the schools are title 1.
Exactly. Just to hammer home your point about free-market thinking on public services, corporate education explicitly tries to be competitive to acquire the best talent. Even if we match the corpo wages for public education, they would just increase it again to be more competitive. It’s a fools errand to play the market with our public services. Education is a fundamental institution in our society. We know they are lacking resources, so we should increase their allocation. It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.