Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 24, 2015

I’ll bet Frazz is being snider than most people will realize. Muttley Laugh

If you don’t pay for good teachers, you end up with…

I am in India – so I won’t start a US flame war, completing my comment!!!

In Maryland the public employee’s union is strong enough to effect the outcome of elections. They take this power into collective bargaining for pensions and pay. In one county the politicians donate to the union.

Because of the shabby way the Republican-controlled state of Wisconsin is treating it’s teachers, they are bailing as soon as they reach retirement age. The way teachers with decades of experience are retiring, the pool of mentors for new teachers is draining fast! “Time to go, bonobo,” they might be saying.

And in Cleveland, the public school teachers are literally expected to act as bomb squads. When you’ve got a system that messed up, it becomes clear that the unions are absolutely essential, and not nearly powerful enough yet.

I’ve got a new respect for Mrs. Olsen.

Who will be the first to compare teachers’ salaries with professional athletes?

I just retired from education after 35 years. I would have retired two year ago, but our governor screwed up our pension system and I had to work longer. It is not fair to change the rules for folks like me at the END of our careers.

In private enterprise the union represents the employees, and management represents the owners. The problem with governmental employees being unionized is simply that the union represents the employees, but the person negotiating with them represents no one, and in fact is a fellow governmental employee, and might even be in the union, and the taxpayers aren’t represented at all, so things can get out of hand. As a result, in the early days of unionization it was generally accepted that unions representing governmental employees weren’t appropriate.

Average pay for elementary school teacher is $43k.Average pay for high school teacher is $46.7kAccording to the American Association of University Professors, the average for assistant college professor is $66,5k, and $113,1 for full professors, with average $82,556 per year made by all higher education teaching ranks.

It’s up to the individual to decide if this is low, high, or reasonable pay.

My sister teaches in New York State and she says a lot of teachers are bailing because the school’s management and the department of education are so clueless that they are sucking the joy out of education. The problem isn’t so much a question of Democrat or Republican (NY is stuck with Andrew Cuomo) its that the school system is run like a major corporation, with clueless management that has no understanding of what goes on inside a classroom.

Ewal Doh: Please note above: comicsssfan only has a triple s, not quintuple – but nice satire on it anyway.

This was one of the best “Frazz” comics in a long time!!!! It is so true that a) a whole helluva lot of bad governors (including Mallet’s own governor, Rick Snyder) are trying to demolish teacher pensions, and b) a lot of teachers buy their own supplies because schools and districts are sorely underfunded.Just like always, there are members of the “Foolish Crew” (a euphemism I use instead of a more common, coarser phrase) who will complain up and down about teachers and their horrendous bamboozling of the system with all their vacation and other nonsense… but the reality is teachers are deserving of a whole helluva lot more respect than we as a society give them. They deserve tremendous accolades, they deserve higher pay, they deserve better funding for the costs of their work, and they deserve a decent pension in retirement.

why do people hate unions so much?

Adrianne, being from Michigan, I think I “got” your post! :)

Do you have a mortgage? Does your bank still expect you to pay it, even 20 and 30 years after the initial agreement? Of course – you signed a contract. Sports (random example of many): Red Sox unloaded Manny Ramirez in 2008 and will still be paying him until 2026, because they signed a contract. Disney fired its president and had to pay him $150 million, because they signed a contract. SO WHY are public employee contracts OK to ignore? And if those contracts can be ignored, then maybe it’s OK for people to ignore the contracts that say they are supposed to pay YOU, like all of YOUR pensions, and all of YOUR deferred compensation (oh, you thought you were getting your commission check for the quarter, we decided not to print them, too bad).

Yes Sports has always trumped ‘real education] 3R’s, music,art, social studies etc. However sports does have a value when included as part of education.

I’ve had golden retrievers with better academic skills than most public school teachers. Without their unions most would be serving burgers.

What do you mean “ours” is next?

I remember when the idea of “No student left behind,” was introduced. Everyone thought it was a good idea, they thought it meant that borderline students would get the extra push they needed from lazy teachers to get them ahead. I looked at it and thought it was a really bad idea because I knew that the good teachers were already doing everything they could to advance their students, and the lazy teachers would just lower their standards to let the borderline students pass, which in turn would make the good teachers look bad if they failed a student who wasn’t ready to move on to the next grade.

In today’s comic strip you spoke the truth. I applaud your understanding of what many teachers do to support education. As a school librarian and teacher, I spent hundreds of dollars of my own money on parties and rewards for the youngsters who worked during recess, lunch and after school to keep the library operating.

Damn. This is really a great idea.

I have friends who are teachers and I regularly hear about the supplies they have to buy for students who can’t afford them. As far as I’m concerned — with the way schools are run today — they are doggone lucky anybody shows up for the job.

Night-Gaunt49 and bigpuma – I’m afraid that comment could come across wrong, and perhaps I shouldn’t have made it. I meant that Frazz was probably more disparaging of Michigan’s Gov. Snyder than he was letting on.

@ rwillpatbar This is where my reports at work go. We knock ourselves out and 3 months later nobody even remembers them. Sigh. (Odd, it wouldn’t let me click submit.)