La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for September 27, 2010

Lewreader, for your info, teachers spend their ‘summers off’ having to keep their license current by attending workshops or taking college courses at their own expense. They work much more than 8 hours a day by staying after school to help kids and then grading papers at night. A lot skip lunches because students come in for help. I don’t know where you get your info that their ‘advanced degrees’ are paid for, but in some very affluent districts they might offer that, but the vast majority get no help at all. Their pay is well below what most other professionals get until they have been on the job for over 20 years. If the teacher works in a low income area or teaches special needs students, they may get portions of their student loans forgiven. As to the good getting the same pay as the bad, how do you determine that? By student scores? What about the students who don’t care about school, whose parents don’t care about their kids succeeding and who offer no help to the kids? How are teachers responsible for those kids? Since you seem to know so much, I’d love to see you go to an inner city school where you have to walk through metal detectors to get to class and see how effective you are in reaching and helping those kids. I’m sure you would be a TOP teacher! Before you criticize, maybe try actually getting correct info about the subject you profess to be an expert in!