True.

Same deal with a lot of science jobs too – I know a bunch of people who did masters and PhDs in niche scientific fields due to their passions – then left the field entirely because they were disillusioned, burnt out and criminally (in some cases, literally – the university was sued for it) underpaid.

People who spent 6 years cumulatively (masters>phd) studying some rare cancer only to have to fight for the smallest dregs of funding, being told their findings will never be financially viable to move onto clinical studies, told that the cancer is too rare to justify the expenditure for developing better diagnostic or treatment tools for. Broke them.

Hundreds of thousands in university debt, pursuing passion, knowing they’d be underpaid for years – but still doing it cos they cared – and then eventually defeated once they got familiar with the system. Once “saving lives isnt profitable” sinks in.

For some reason, I’ll always remember a podcast where CGP Grey talked about his becoming a teacher.

He made the point that people who had a passion for teaching students were the ones to drop out of the profession, and cynical, “I’m just here to get a paycheck” teachers like him stay around. That school is just a glorified daycare.

I mean, he had a point, but I think it’s stuck in my brain because I’ve heard him and others make this point like it’s a fundamental part of society.

That school and teaching can’t be anything better, and anyone who goes into the profession with anything other that bored cynicism is delusional.

I know some former teachers, and the overwhelming response for why they left the profession is the administration (and sometimes the parents, though I think the latter is often seen as a symptom of the former). From what I can gather, a lot of school admins have unreasonable expectations for how quickly they want kids to learn things and how they should learn them. Our current system does not prioritize teaching methods that are actually useful to the average kid, rather they prioritize methods that are more easily testable for ratings purposes but which make the actual process of teaching kids cumbersome and often ineffective.

And then of course there’s lack of support when dealing with kids who are being disruptive, which is its own potential can of worms.

Sweet, I’m part of the last generation to get an education, surely nothing bad will happen in the future

I really think schools ought to be funded on the federal level, or at least the state level. This also means private schools should be closed and everybody should go to public schools. Course, that won’t happen

If you go to r/teachers you’d see their biggest issue is student behavior and being the punching bag for students, admin, and parents. Literally and figuratively.

As a former public librarian, people can really make the job miserable. The pay does not want to keep up because elected officials don’t want to raise taxes or spend money on the service. It’s super frustrating when people want all these public services but don’t want the people who run them to have a life where they can afford to raise a family, save for retirement, or otherwise thrive.

I’m a teacher and I love teaching – *love* it. But the money isn’t there, so I went private, and now I teach *and* make bank. Problem is, that doesn’t help our schools at all. If public schools offered the kind of money I can make as a private tutor, I’d be interested. It’s really just that simple – I love to teach, but I have to pay the bills.

The other side of this, that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough: When you make teaching completely unappealing to normal people all you’re left with is cranks.

You may get one or two genuine angels, people whose partners can pick up most of the bills, or older people who are settled enough that they can afford the shitty wages, but you are overwhelmingly left with cranks.

When you relax the qualification standards and pay the equivalent of minimum wage your kids end up learning US history from a homesteader who thinks the Roman empire fell 250 years ago.

Part of the issue with teaching is that modern children are absolute nightmares. A lot of people enter with passion and quickly change careers after experiencing the new generation. And that’s honestly on parents.

One of my best friends is a full time 4th grade teacher. She’s also an instacart driver because her job doesn’t pay enough to cover rent and groceries.

I was going into teaching and let me tell you EVERY SINGLE teacher who I met in the process before I switched my major outright warned me that it was not worth it. Even teachers who had been doing it for decades would tell me they’d come to hate it in the last decade or so for a multitude of reasons. I did one semester where I student taught and then firmly knew it’s not worth it. Kids treat you with no respect, the pay is garbage, and the active threat of shootings and drills for what they pay is insulting.

Why don’t blue states pay teachers more/ fix this? What factors are in play other than politics? Who is the teachers union arguing against?

There’s been a 60 year war on education that started as a counter to the progress of the civil rights movement. The goal was to make people dumb enough buy into their own oppression/exploitation. If you wondered how people could be dumb enough to vote for someone like Trump, they did it by ruining education.

You can only “not care about the money” until the compensation is so abysmal that you can’t even work to live.